Some early details about Crytek's Crysis Warhead game have been revealed today by the PC Gamer magazine. Here are all the new key points at a glance:

• Begins when the original game's Nomad character parts ways with Warhead's new hero, Psycho, and follows him all the way until the two are to reunite again on board the aircraft carrier.
• Mostly located on the other side of the island.
• Less linear approach and more sandbox type of gameplay, as opposed to the original.
• Same nanosuit and the same functions, with more likely to be revealed later (definitely a "surprise" in that matter is promised).
• Singleplayer campaign to last 8-10 hours.
• At least two new weapons, the granade launcher and double SMG.
• Improved enemy AI, betterily able to organize itself and follow tactics.
• New vehicles incl. Armored Scout Recon (about the size of a jeep with a mounted gun) and a hovercraft, both playable in multiplayer as well.
• New team-based MP mode and less complex than the original two.
• Betterily optimized to run faster than the original game on the same hardware.
• Won't require DX10 for maximum details and full effects.
• Dialogues done by Bioshock's Susanna O'Connor.
• Completely stand-alone and as noted by developers, not an add-on but a full title.
• The possibility of Crysis 2 to rely heavily on Warhead's sales.

Two days ago, Crytek published information that it will no longer patch Crysis for "a good reason". Apparantly the good reason is now believed to be called Crysis Warhead, the second game in the Crysis trilogy. If you try to visit Crytek's home page, a teaser image of Crysis Warhead will appear before the actual page, dropping a hint at what's imminent. No other details, such as platforms or a release date, have been unveiled. It's only an image at the moment, but more information will follow sooner or later.

I'm afraid I have some bad news to report today. It appears that Crytek has no plans releasing future Crysis updates, at least for now. The current patch version 1.2+1.21 hotfix will remain also the last one to be released for Crysis.

So, What About Patch 1.3?
At this time, there almost certainly will not be a patch 1.3 delivered for Crysis. We are aware that this news will disappoint many of you, and we would like to apologize profusely. There is a good reason for this and we hope you understand when you hear more about the reasons why in the very, very near future. Please realize this was an extremely difficult decision, but please do know that we are listening to your comments and are making more consistent community support a high priority.

The Crymod Modding Portal updated its blog today to inform all Crysis players that new Patch 1.3 is in the works.

Crysis - New Patch in Development
In an earlier weekly update we already confirmed that Crytek will continue working on patches for Crysis and supporting the community with new updates. Currently our Multiplayer dev team is fully concentrating on the upcoming Patch 1.3. It has been in development for quite a few weeks already, but we do not have a release date available just yet.

As for the content we can already say a bit, but not that much. The patch will not only include bug fixes and further gameplay balancing, we will also introduce new features to it. Unfortunately we cannot tell you too much about the content at this point, but be sure to not miss out the upcoming weekly update next Wednesday since it will include more news and details on the content itself.

A hotfix update for Crysis has been released, updating Crytek's action game to version 1.21. The 37MB sized patch for Crysis fixes the known security hole in the game code which causes client and server crashes when playing online. Be sure to have patch 1.2 installed before, installing patch 1.21.

DOWNLOAD: Crysis Hotfix 1.21

The second patch for Crytek's highly-acclaimed Crysis is now available. The 361MB download includes:

• Added mod loader to main menu
• Increased damage of most player-fired weapons and decreased damage of most AI-fired weapons
• Added auto team balance
• Added grenade indicator for enemy and friendly team
• Added additional audio feedback (headshot/body) on bullet impact
• Fully implementing Crytek's internal anti-cheat-solution
• Added numbers to energy bar in PowerStruggle for quicker reference
• Added team colors to kill/death messages
• Team killed players no longer drop their weapon
• Improved vehicle handling under braking and boosting
• Greatly increased AAA damage vs. VTOL and Helicopter
• Reduced collision damage for players hit by vehicles at lower speeds
• And more

Patch 1.2 can be applied to both vanilla Crysis (v1.0) and Crysis v1.1.

DOWNLOAD

The Crysis SDK, or a compilation of Crysis mods, user created content, and other goodies, was recently punted out the door of Crytek studios. If you click "read full story", there's a big letter from the president of Crytek as to why this SDK came so late. If you'd like to nab yourself a copy, head on over here.

Crytek's first person shooter game, Crysis, has been reported for selling over 1 million copies in less than three month during the Electronic Arts third quarter earnings conference call yesterday. Even though the game has gone platinum, CEO John Riccitiello said that EA is "not satisfied" with the overall third quarter financial results. The company was disappointed that none of the big successes were developed internally. "We did not have any internally developed breakaway titles," said Riccitiello. "The closest thing we had to breakaway titles in 2007 were Skate and FIFA," he continued. Riccitiello expects Burnout Paradise to be another big hit, but he didn't give any more indications than that at this early stage in the game's shelf life.

The Crymod web site has posted up their first "Crysis Weekly Update", which is an official Crysis patch status report from Crytek to the world-wide community. The first update concentrates on details of the "nearly finished from a content point of view" 1.2 patch for Crysis. Some of the changes will include new grenade indicator icon, added team colors to kill/death messages in multiplayer, and more.

Crytek GmbH will be demonstrating a cross-platform version of its CryENGINE 2 middleware at this year's Game Developer Conference on February 18 - 22 in San Francisco. First publicly shown at last year's conference, and recently released as the technology underlying their critically acclaimed PC game, Crysis, this year's engine will be shown for the first time running on multiple hardware platforms such as the PS3 and Xbox 360, to a select audience. In addition, there will be a public demonstration showing how well the fully optimized engine can perform on a budget PC which can be put together for around 600 dollars complete, including keyboard and mouse. During the GDC session Crytek will also be hosting a series of live presentations of the Sandbox 2 editor.

Soon enough and most likely fake enough, the first Crysis 2 screenshots are here. Nobody knows how these have made their way out of the Crytek HQ, but Czech website InCrysis.cz reports them as Crysis 2 screens.

The first patch for Crysis has been released, which you can download from here. The changes are as follows:

Fixes:

• Damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW has been made consistent
• F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well
• When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will not be in a permanently raised position anymore
• Memory leaks and potential crashes

Crytek has released a free, festive multiplayer map pack for Crysis today. The five-level "Crysis Tournament Mappack" includes three power struggle maps (Desolation, Crossroads, Training) and two instant action levels (Excavation, Terminal). Both the two instant action and three power struggle maps have been tested over several weeks and are optimized for competitive gamelay, but also provide a valid size for public gaming. Quite a few of the trusted server providers of Crysis have already set up multiple servers that are running the map pack.

Crysis fans will have to wait a little longer for the patch #1 to be released. Yesterday an official statement in the Crysis forums, revealed that Crytek's and EA's QA departments are making good progress on the patch, but depending on the feedback it will be released sometime in January 2008. The reason given for the delay is "due to heavy technical issues that appeared right before the patch was declared final". Some of the major changes that will be fixed with Patch #1 are: memory leaks and potential crashes, improved SLI / Crossfire support and performance and improved overall rendering performance (DX9 and DX10). Crytek also said that it is working on Patch #2 for Crysis simultaneously.

Some of the most anticipated titles of the year, Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis, have failed to sell very well. In contrast to the overly hyped Halo 3, which boosted actual Xbox 360 sales, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 sales were, in short, abysmal. Since last month, neither game has managed to sell even 100,000 units. To be precise, EA sold 86,633 copies of Crysis, and Epic Games sold 33,995 copies of UT3. The Inquirer claims that Crysis, despite having a beautiful graphics engine that will have benchmarkers twiddling their thumbs for years, failed to impress anyone without a very expensive gaming machine. And Unreal Tournament, despite being absolutely breathtaking, had gameplay that was uncannily similar to the previous two versions of Unreal Tournament. Hopefully, as systems get better and gamers get more money to spend on games, these sales figures will increase.

Since the X800 series of cards, ATI has been ensuring that just about every new game can get a performance boost from CrossFire technology, which allows people to use more than one video card in the same computer. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for the EA shooter Crysis. A Korean modding team, which goes by the name "ParkOZ", accidentally stumbled upon a method which brought a CrossFire performance boost of between 8 and 60% in Crysis, mainly dependent on the resolution you are gaming at (the lower the resolution, the faster the performance, and the higher the gains). Since the majority of you don't read Korean, I took the liberty of running the website through Google translator and detailing the procedure below. If you can read Korean, want the exact benchmark graphs, or are just a sucker for awesome Crysis screenshots, please follow the source link. The exact modding procedure is here. If you can read Korean, it is here.

Crytek recently announced that it is launching a collaboration with Hochschule Darmstadt. The Frankfurt-based studio will license the CryEngine 2 to the school and also provide lectures on computer animation, engine technology and game concepts and design. This should allow students to work with a state-of-the-art game development package and help them realize their own development ideas. Hochschule Darmstadt's goal is to be a training and research facility in the field of interactive entertainment for the Rhein-Main-District. Students will also be able to use the CryEngine to learn lessons about cinematography. All of this will complement the fields of "Digital Media" and "Games and Animation" in addition to the related fields of "Video Production," "Sound Technology" and "Interactive Media."

ASUS will also promote Crysis with its NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT video cards. Dubbed EN8800GT CRYSIS Edition, the card will come with a Crysis theme and of course a Special Edition copy of the game. The sad news for Crysis fans seeking out for a new card to handle the game is that ASUS are limiting supply of this card to Korea only.

Experience Crysis for free only while supplies last - first come first served. Read the
terms and conditions to see the details on this exclusively featured bundle! The following four graphics cards ship with a free copy of Crysis:

• 640-P2-N828-A3 e-GeForce 8800GTS KO 640MB
• 640-P2-N829-A3 e-GeForce 8800GTS SSC 640MB
• 768-P2-N831-A3 e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
• 768-P2-N835-A3 e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Superclocked

If you bought an 8800GTX with 768MB of graphics memory, superclocked or not, after November 15th and did not get a free copy of Crysis, you can get one via mail by checking out this page to see if you qualify.

In an interview with Crysis (PC) fansite inCrysis, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli revealed the first patch for its recently released visually intense shooter Crysis would be coming within 14 days. "We are collecting up all the user feedback now and planning patches that will address as much as possible as fast as possible," Yerli told inCrysis. "The first patch will be out in 7-14 days." NVIDIA VP Roy Taylor also added some promising information on the updates concerning performance issues due to the game's steep system requirements. "Performance will improve, almost with every single driver drop and patch of the game," Taylor wrote. "Literally every day and week we keep working on the drivers we can see improvements."

I received an email this morning from our reader who has created a thread in the official EA forums looking for an answer. He claims that a brand new Special Edition Crysis DVD makes all his 3 DVD drives to read the media hard and make clicking noises. Unfortunately he's not the only one to experience this problem, which suggests that there may be a bad batch of Crysis discs out there. Follow this link to the official EA forums for more information.

I bought the special edition at circuit city and my computer's dvd drive has trouble recognizing or takes a long time to see the dvd. i did exchange for another one that seems to work better. but problem still there, dvd drive makes clicking noises. i have 3 computers and all 3 do it. none of my other dvd games do this. buddy of mine ran into same issue.

ATI has released 737-30533 hotfix for Radeon HD 3800 and 2000 series of video cards. This update is intended for Crysis and Windows XP or Windows Vista 32/64-bit. It fixes:

• DirectX 10: Fixes texture flickering in bushes, clouds, trees
• DirectX 10: Performance improvements
• DirectX 9: Fixes Anti-Aliasing corruption seen on the ATI Radeon 2900 Series
• DirectX 9: Anti-Aliasing performance enhancements
• DirectX 9: Crossfire performance improvements
• DirectX 9: Fixes random graphics corruption during game play

DOWNLOAD

An interesting article over at Elite Bastards has revealed that NVIDIA's latest 169.04 driver for its GeForce series of graphics cards may in fact be sacrificing image quality in the new Crysis game in order to gain better performance. If you look at the first two images below, you will see quite clearly that the reflections in the water have been unrealistically stretched and look quite odd. The obvious explanation for this would be that NVIDIA's new driver is having issues rendering the shadows and you'd expect the company to fix it. However, this issue may run a little deeper than that. When the Crysis executable has its name changed from crysis.exe to driverbug.exe, these strange shadows mysteriously look normal all of a sudden, as shown in the second two images. Further tests revealed that the renamed executable was actually performing around 7% worse on a number of tests using both an 8800 GTS and an 8800 GT compared to the default name. So it seems that NVIDIA has tried to subtly increase the framerate when playing Crysis using its cards at the cost of image quality, without giving customers any choice in the matter. Some sites are claiming that NVIDIA is using driver tweaks to 'cheat' and gain better performance, and whilst that may be an extreme way of looking at it, this certainly seems like more than just an accidental driver issue.

It's hard to find a computer game with more hype than Crysis. And so, it should come as no surprise that Electronic Arts' Crysis recently went gold. "We are extremely proud of what we have been able to accomplish with Crysis," said Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli. "We wanted to push the boundaries both visually and with open-ended, non-linear gameplay and we believe the end result delivers that vision." At this point, Crytek and EA are planning to release their masterpiece on November 16th.

Crysis hasn't been out for more two days and a number of people have already found out that SLI technology doesn't yet work on the new DirectX10 game title. Granted, Crysis is only in beta, but it would still be nice to see SLI supported from the start. NVIDIA made a statement today that the final Crysis game will support SLI via a patch.

Although SLI is not supported in the demo, the final Crysis game with a patch will provide full SLI support.