Tagged with: Crytek

There was hope that Timesplitters 4 may have been in the works and coming to the Wii U. The speculation reached a dead-end though, and Cervat Yerli of Crytek has confirmed that he doesn’t think the interest in the series is high enough at the moment. He explained:

I tested through my official blog to see how big the Timesplitters community is, and while the volume of responses was quite high, we feel it’s not high enough yet.

…and:

That being said, it did indeed trigger a deeper evaluation of what we do with Timesplitters, and I can only say this for now; we might have some surprises coming soon.

So maybe one of these days it’ll happen. Just not right now.

When asked if Crysis 3 could come to the Wii U, Mike Read of Crytek said that he “wouldn’t say there’s no chance”, and:

…the Wii U still doesn’t have any kind of release [date] attached to it at this point. Who knows what the future will bring with it. I can definitely say that we are working with Nintendo, and that’s about all I can say on that front. I wouldn’t rule it out, but there has really been no official releases associated with the Wii U yet, and given that we’re releasing Crysis in an eight month time period in February of 2013, we can’t play off of what their schedules are. I wouldn’t rule it out, but you know, it is a possibility.

Soon after this interview, however, Crytek stated that they’re not currently working on a version for the Wii U, so don’t get your knees stuck too deep into speculation.

Cevat Yerli of Crytek has said that his opinion of the Wii U is “very high”, but for the time being they don’t have a business case that “justifies us making a game for it”. Even so, he shared that:

…there actually is a game in development from a respected developer that we will be announcing.

This game is built with CryEngine 3 (which apparently runs “beautifully” on the system), and Yerli said that he has “seen the game running and it looks great”. What do you think it could be?

A beta tester who has supposedly started working with Crytek has revealed that the company is not working on a game for the Wii U. But, “they created a Crysis 3 level just to fully understand the console capabilities”, and the results are promising. The game managed to run at thirty frames per second with these settings:

• DirectX 9
• Native 720p resolution
• FXAA filter (it is impossible to use txaa)
• High-quality texture (no pop up as in the Ps3/x360 game version due to the higher RAM amount)
• Not fully implemented water shaders
• “Great” particles effects (ambient occlusion on par with PC version)
• Lighting effect on par with PC version (ultra setting)

One of the limitations is that the developers weren’t able to turn off the display on the tablet controller though, so the staff thinks if that was possible, they would be able to run the game at a native 1080p resolution.

As is always almost the case though, this is a rumour, so take it with a grain of salt.

I expected Crysis 3 to find its way to the Wii U. But it seems like that won’t be happening, since Crytek has said “fat chance” to that possibility. The callousness of their response has expectedly brought a small thread of hatred toward the franchise, but it’s still a bummer we won’t be seeing the game arrive on the platform. It would have been a fantastic way to demonstrate the power of the system.

Crytek has revealed that they will announce a new project in April. There’s no details about what the game may be, and all Crytek says is that it’s “spectacular” and that, “the team are doing really, really well and it’s just really nice to see the team really enthusiastic about what they’re doing. They’re really happy.” And I’m happy to hear that the team is happy. That’s always good. But I’m wondering:

Are they working on something that will come to the Wii U?

We won’t know until April, of course, but as long as this project is a multi-platform title (and I have a strong hunch that it will be), there’s no reason to not bring it to the Wii U. We already know that Crytek has the dev kit and their engine is running on the hardware, so there are no technical limitations. It’s more of a matter of, do they want to?

But let’s assume they do. We can’t know their intentions before the announcement, so let’s pretend Crytek will release this project on the Wii U. Then the question becomes: what is the project?

And it seems like it’ll be one of two possibilities, the first of which is a job ad from last month that confirmed Electronic Arts and Crytek are working together again This was the collaboration that brought Crysis into the world, so it’d make sense that Crysis 3 is in development. Nick Button-Brown of Crytek did mention that the new project is the “best of that kind of project we’ve ever done”, and that suggests they’re working on a first-person shooter, as that’s what they have experience with, and that makes Crysis a likely fit.

It could be something else though. It could be TimeSplitters 4. This theory begins with a quote from Karl Hilton of Crytek UK. In November of 2010, he shared that:

We’re talking to publishers at the moment about whether [TimeSplitters is] a viable route or not.

And then it was in July of last year that the game was meant to be announced “soon”, although that never happened. But maybe the announcement is real, and it was simply delayed? We’ll have to wait until April, I guess. To me though, Crysis is the more-likely candidate, and also the better bet as to what would come to the Wii U, but something is coming, and hopefully it’s something I can write about on this blog.

(via mynintendonews.com)