Crytek are moving heavily into the free-to-play market, and, naturally, one of their biggest competitors in that space is Team Fortress 2, which itself recently made the switch to F2P. Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli has revealed that he has concerns about the game requiring the purchase of items to compete.

“I kind of think it’s a 70% free to play title,” he said to PCGamesN. “It’s on the way to be there, it’s a good model and it works for them, but there is still pay to win there and I don’t like that.”

“There’s some great experiment there, with user-generated content, but you buy items. You have to buy items.”

Yerli also explained how he believes a free-to-play game should be entirely free, not have any spaces locked off. “A free to play game doesn’t allow you to sell items,” he said. “This is the issue I have with that. We would allow communities to create items for virtual currency, but you can’t really go with commercial items because that’s pay to win. So that’s why I’m saying I’m disapproving of the concept of Team Fortress 2, because that is effectively not quite free to play.”

“The only thing that’s free-to-play there is they I can just go into the game and play it. But there’s a piece of game I can’t access without spending money.”

Source: PCGamesN

We enjoyed Crysis 3, a lot, in fact. The storyline wasn’t very interesting but the graphics and gameplay more than made up for it, but it seems that the majority of critics don’t agree — and it’s frustrating Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli.

“It is better than Crysis 2. It is better than Crysis 1. Technical and creatively, and storytelling — all aspects,” he said to Gamasutra, describing it as “our masterpiece”.

Yerli apportions some of this blame to console fatigue. “there’s a certain fatigue level with the old generation currently. The markets are down, people’s expectations are much more radical than the current generation of games are doing.”

In the same interview, Yerli also mentioned that Crytek could have done a lot more with the PC version if they hadn’t had to develop for multiplatform, but they would have had a far, far smaller budget if that was the case. “The consoles are eight year old devices. Of course, in one way or another, they will limit you. It’s impossible not to be limited by a limited console. By definition it’s the case. So if it were PC only, could we have done more things? Certainly, yes. Could we have afforded a budget to make a game like Crysis 3 PC only? No. People have to understand that this is a journey of give and take.”

Source: Gamasutra

Crytek’s Cevat Yerli, who has personally glimpsed Microsoft and Sony’s next-generation console hardware in action, claims “without breaking NDA” that it’s “impossible” for next-generation consoles to even come close to how well current PCs are able to run Crysis 3.

“Without breaking NDAs that are in place, realistically, from purely a price point perspective, it is impossible,” claimed Yerli to Eurogamer. “It’s impossible to package $2000-3000 into a mainstream, let’s say $500 console. I’m not saying they are $500 consoles. They may launch a console at $2000, but the consumer pricing is usually much lower than that.”

“So, given consumer pricing, and given the cost of production of a gamer PC and the amount of watt of power it needs, which is like a fridge, it’s impossible.”

Yerli joked that his was the only company were people were angry that they could easily run their games, rather than the other way around.

“With Crysis 2 we tried to make the spec available to as many PC gamers as possible. Then we heard back from the loudest group, which was enthusiast PC gamers, ‘our PCs are running this game at 200 frames. What the hell? We should be running at 30 frames.’”

“Our graphics programmers said, ‘we’re going to give them a game they can’t run any more.”

Crysis 3 launches this Thursday, February 21.

Source: Eurogamer

Prominent PC developer Crytek is looking to transition to free-to-play within five years. Once considered a wasteland, the free-to-play scene has recently come into its own. Titles such as League of Legends, Team Fortress 2 and FarmVille (well, perhaps not FarmVille) have done a lot to convince players that these games aren’t solely there to nickel and dime them into bankruptcy.

Crytek has already dipped its toes into this emerging market with its ambitious (and bizarrely titled) Warface. While this online military shooter is still in open beta, the German developer is already expressing tremendous confidence in the future of free-to-play, with company president Cevat Yerli stating that “our primary goal is to make triple-A free-to-play games for the world market and transition entirely to that.” According to Yerli, this process will take two to five years.

A key component of Crytek’s strategy will be the launch of GFACE. Currently in closed beta, GFACE (what is it with these people and faces?) will be a distribution platform and social network for free-to-play titles from Crytek and interested third parties.

Source: GamesBeat

If you’ve got a spare 25 minutes you’re desperately looking to fill, worry no longer: Crytek have released an extensive video documentary showing off the technical capabilities of the CryEngine 3, delivered by senior field applications engineer Sean Tracy. In the video, Tracy demonstrates features such as liquid reflections, volume fog, lighting behaviour, pixel-accurate displacement mapping and others, all in real-time with the inbuilt level-editing software. Take a look below, or maybe take a look for yourself in the upcoming Crysis 3 open beta (starting some time tonight?)

Source: VG247

It’s business as usual for Homefront 2 following the IP’s purchase by Crytek.

“Nothing has changed with regards our development of the game, and we look forward to sharing the finished product with players,” Crytek games GM Nick Button-Brown said in a statement.

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said in a statement said Crytek has been a “firm believer” in the Homefront IP since it signed on to develop the sequel.

“Our cooperation with THQ was always positive and we would like to thank them for all their support over the last two years and express our sympathy to those affected by the recent events at the company,” he added.

The first, poorly-received Homefront was developed by Kaos Studios, which was later closed. New developer Crytek UK is the studio once known as Free Radical, which produced the Timesplitters series.

Source: CVG

While Crytek still anxiously await further signatures on a petition for a proper Timesplitters re-make, they’re apparently more than happy to hand out official to anybody keen to go ahead and make it for themselves.

“I have just had word from Crytek that they are going to permit and support a TimeSplitters CryEngine mod,” wrote Daniel Wesoly, founder of the Timesplitters 4 Facebook page, which boasts over 100,000 members.

“I am now looking for modders that can handle the CryEngine. If I manage to get a group together, then they may let us use assets from the original TimeSplitters game!”

Wesoly’s intends to build a “TimeSplitters all-in-one. All the levels, all the characters and all the weapons”. There’s no more news as yet, but Wesoly is asking for people experienced with CryEngine modding to hit him up — details at the Facebook link above.

Source: PCGamesN

Last month we saw footage of the Unreal Engine 4 being demonstrated for the first time, and the gaming world was pretty impressed. Well, for the most part. Those numbering among the unimpressed include Crytek, whose CEO Cevat Yerli told VG247 that there was simply nothing that surprising about the Unreal Engine 4.

“We have been presenting CryENGINE 3 as next-gen ready technology since GDC 2010. And we think that Unreal Engine 4 has done a good job to catch up, but nothing is there that surprised us and we still believe CryENGINE 3 remains the benchmark,” he told them in an interview. When asked about the possibility of the CryEngine 4, added, “We have not clearly defined when, or if, CryENGINE 4 will be released, because the architecture of CryENGINE 3 is so forward-looking that we think of it as having been next generation ready for some years now.”

Source: VG247

DLC and premium gaming services are “milking customers to death”, says Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli. And once their own contracts with publishers to produce traditional boxed products – like Crysis 3 - are finished, Crytek is going to move completely into producing only F2P titles. “As we were developing console games we knew, very clearly, that the future is online and free-to-play,” said Yerli. “As is evident in Warface, our approach is to ensure the best quality, console game quality. That implies budgets of between $10m to $30m – so no compromise there – but at the price-point of $0 entry.”

Source: Videogamer