This week, a few mods that I’ve been monitoring but haven’t had a chance to have a proper go at yet. In some cases, that’s because they haven’t been released yet, in others it’s because the hours in every day are sadly limited, and as well as playing games and writing about them, I very occasionally sleep. I even venture outside from time to time, although admittedly not in the current political and meteorological climate. Too chilly. Too bitter. All too real. Onward to fantasy. Preferably with decent central heating.

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I use the word potential> all the time. To the extent that it becomes annoying to the people around me. But it is an important word, especially in this still youthful industry. It’s locked in the bizarre ideas forming in the mind and on the hard drive of the smallest indie developer, and it’s evident in the expanding technical prowess of the largest blockbusters. It’s not just in the future though. I also love the potential of what already exists, the engines that have been built and the histories they have produced. And that’s why I love mods. They can make the old new in so many ways: balancing, tweaking, expanding, subverting, or being something self-contained and entirely new. Take The Worry of Newport. It’s a self-contained, Lovecraftian mystery that’s pretending to be a mod for Crysis. (more…)

Speaking with Gamasutra, Crytek bossman Cervat Yerli had this to say about the Crysis games: “Crysis 1′s intention was, if I were to play it three years later, it looks great. And it does, actually, it fulfilled that. But it made it difficult for entry-level players. So with Crysis 2, we took a different direction, and it backfired a little bit.” Yerli explained that the forthcoming high-end 1.9 patch for Crysis 2, which will introduce clevers such as tessellation, realistic shadows with variable penumbra, parallax occlusion mapping, and “Sprite Based Bokeh Depth of Field”, is a “gift” to the PC high-end community. “It lifts up Crysis 2 and gives a sneak peak of how PC gaming will evolve in the future,” says Yerli, “If you support a high-end preference.” I totally support a high-end preference>. That sounds like some kind of innuendo, right? Eh? Guys? Mm.

The high-end patch is out next Monday, June 27th.

THINGS ARE GETTING REALLY STRANGE NOW. Now being outside of UK office hours mean we’re yet to get our own EA response to why Crysis 2 vanished from Steam yesterday, but across-the-ponders have now received one. The upshot? Despite all this ‘only on Origin’ stuff, EA didn’t do it. So: who did?
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“Where were you when the war began, Daddy?”
“Well, little Ignatius H. Meer III, I was at my PC, staring vacantly at Twitter. Probably eating some crisps as I did. I’ll never forget that dark, terrible day. The day that EA decided they could fight Steam.”
“Daddy? Why are you crying, Daddy?”>

Crysis 2 has disappeared from Steam, and is now described as being “Origin only.” Origin is, you may recall, EA’s newly-relaunched download store. Uh-oh.
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Quite a lot of mod news this week, apparently, even though there’s very little for you to actually play. There’s a long-awaited update from Jurrassic Life, as well as plenty of other gubbins related to Half-Life 2, Crysis, Stalker: Clear Sky, Portal 2 and Dirt 3. That’s a lot of games! Read on to find out what’s what.
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Where were you all last week? I turned up and no one was here, honest! What’s that? No, I’m not crossing my fingers behind my back, and you definitely didn’t see him heading off on holiday. What nonsense. Anyway, to make up for it, here’s an extra-long edition of Mod News to cover the past two weeks. This time: Crash Bandicoot, a Warcraft III art mod, a surprising number of trailers and a bizarre remake of Deus Ex…
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A new splashpage at CryMod, which is currently being overhauled, reveals that this summer will see the apperance of both a Crysis 2 editor and a CryEngine SDK. What does this mean? Well, it means people will be able able to make levels for Crysis 2, but also that they’ll be able to make non-commercial stuff for free using the CryEngine tech. Crytek’s Mr Yerli says: “In August 2011 we will be launching a free CryENGINE SDK. If you want to use it for fun, like all our previous MOD SDKs it will be completely free of charge, to anyone who wants to play with it! You just register, download the SDK with a personalized license key and you’re good to go! If you want to use it to make a game to launch commercially, we’d like to help you with that. If you want to take your product down a traditional commercial route, we will offer an innovative low cost licensing model if you want to release your game digitally.”

More details here.

In the week of Portal 2′s release, it seems apt that Valve’s games should dominate the mod scene’s output. While the range of titles you can mod these days is impressive, and so many of the tools are easy to learn, I’ve still yet to come across a moddable engine that’s quite as intuitive and flexible as Source. I can’t wait to see what people can do with Portal 2 when we’re able to mod that. It’s going to be very interesting to see the results. Onwards, then…
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After a couple of weeks of web-wide worrying and shouting and bickering and excellently satirical editorials, you may be glad to hear that Crysis 2 is to receive its in-doubt DirectX 11 patch after all. This comes via the official forums, wherein it was officially said on an official forum, despite being officially said on other official forums that it mightn’t happen. That seals it: all is well in PC gaming tech land. For now.
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