Clear your schedule and make room on your hard drive: there are over 9000 mods up for consideration as ModDB's 2012 Mod of the Year award nominees, and only a little over five days to nominate them. A big green button on each mod's page makes it hard to miss the opportunity to give your favorites a bump.

There isn't much time, so we'll get straight to it after this obligatory acknowledgement that we said "over 9000" on the internet: tee hee, references. Moving on, DayZ and Black Mesa are tough to ignore, and The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod was a valiant community effort. Those might be the most talked about and praised mods this year, and we expect they'll secure nominations, but there are so many more that deserve recognition. Which are you voting for?

If you need a refresher, you might want to browse our recent mod coverage to see if you've missed any driving elephants or My Little Pony conversions.

Following reveal of Crysis 3's system requirements over the weekend, I’ve received confirmation from EA and Crytek of which precious secondary settings we'll be able to tweak in the game. If you remember, Crysis 2 launched with an anemic four tweakable options: v-sync, game resolution, HUD bobbing, and a general quality setting. A patch after release expanded these, and fan-made utilities helped out, but the good news is that EA and Crytek aren't shipping Crysis 3 in the same state.

Here's what you'll see if you click on "Advanced Graphics Options" in Crysis 3.

Game Effects
Object
Particles
Post Processing
Shading
Shadows
Water
Anisotropic Filtering
Texture Resolution
Motion Blur Amount
Lens Flares

Crysis 3's "Advanced Graphics Options" menu.

Noteworthy among these is the inclusion of high-resolution textures at release. Also different from Crysis 2's current advanced settings menu are discrete settings for lens flares and anisotropic filtering. Below, a quick chat on the topic with Marco Corbetta, Technical Director on Crysis 3.

PCG: Why did you launch Crysis 2 on PC with only a handful of graphics settings?

Marco Corbetta: On Crysis 2, a decision was made to focus on console, launching the title on all platforms simultaneously and bringing the same console UI menu experience to PC, but with a plan to release a dedicated DX11 PC version right after launch of the multiplatform version. Although most PC settings were already available at launch, just not directly exposed through the menu, the DX11 PC-focused version had all settings available directly in the menu and additional features like hi-res textures, tessellation etc. However, getting out the DX11 version with all the features included that we didn’t have time to develop while working on the console versions, took much longer than expected.

Is there any specific technical area of the game that’s been enhanced since C2?

Corbetta: As I mentioned, Crysis 3 will already ship with hi-res textures, advanced graphics settings, tessellation and DX11 support. Additional tech areas that have been enhanced since Crysis 2 are: AI navigation system, animation system, water, fog volumes, cloud shadows, POM, AA, cloths, vegetation, particles, lens flares and grass.

For Crysis 3, the past year has involved a lot of performance and memory optimization work on many areas and for all platforms, as well as work on the rendering side. One of our big goals was to improve image quality, and a lot of work went into developing several DX11 based anti-aliasing techniques for PC, which means gamers will now be able to pick their favorite—this is relatively involved on a deferred-based engine, since it involves selecting every technique and accessing multi-sampled buffers, versus the usual "flip the switch" approach. On top of an improved tessellation system we've also introduced character/vegetation tessellation—and since tessellation performance was still not optimal for the level of detail we wanted to achieve, we also did research into different areas and introduced what we called “Pixel Accurate Displacement Mapping” for macro details with nice real-time self-shadowing.

Can you describe the technology driving the grass system in C3? What distinguishes your tech from other games’ grass rendering?

Corbetta: This tech allows us to visualize thousands of individual blades of grass, and is very cost and memory efficient as we can even achieve good results on older console hardware like 360 and PS3. One of the most important things is that this technology is improving gameplay. For example, you can see AI aliens running through the fields and bending individual blades of grass, and things such as projectiles, explosions and wind affect grass movement too. This gives a “predator-style” gameplay experience in the Fields level, which is very in line with the experience C3 wants to offer. There are not many other games that can offer this kind of realistic grass simulation and rendering on a multiplatform basis.

Psycho has put on a little weight, hasn't he? Then again, he's lost his Nanosuit, and along with it its maximum slimming effect. Anyway, here's 6:19 of fresh gameplay footage from Crysis 3's domed jungles of New York, a setting that has the game resembling the genetic output of Crysis's East Asia and Crysis 2's urbanity.

One change in Crysis 3 worth noting, and noticeable in the footage: Crytek has decoupled sprinting from energy consumption. It still has a separate, invisible cooldown associated with it (and while you're cloaked, your energy meter will tick down faster if you run), but running won't take sips from your magic power juicebox. A related counter to this are the new EMP grenades carried by CELL soldiers, which drain your battery.

Crysis 3 is due in February.

http://youtu.be/dG7rnHrgxWU

The Crysis saga will endure beyond Crysis 3's culminating events, but not under the name Crysis 4, CryTek has revealed. Speaking to Eurogamer, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli discussed the future of the visually voluptuous franchise beyond Crysis 3 and mentioned a future free-to-play version of Crysis.

“I wouldn't name it Crysis 4 at this stage because it would be misleading," he said. "We want to finalize Prophet's story, and Crysis 4 would imply the story just moves on. But we are excited about the DNA of Crysis and of the franchise. There can be literally tons of titles out there within the franchise. Unlike Far Cry, this time around we feel very flexible about Crysis."

Normally Crytek would already be beginning pre-production on the next Crysis, but Yerli says the next iteration's "radical" direction could mean more of a lull between it and Crysis 3.

"Because we want to make this something much more radical and new, we're looking at it as a bit more of a long-term thing," Yerli explained. "It's too early to talk about it for these reasons."

Yerli equipped an equally strong silencer on any details surrounding the free-to-play Crysis project, as its infancy prevented any solid information from emerging.

"We do have a plan for a F2P version of Crysis, but how this looks and when this will be done, whether this is the next one or the next next one, is to be decided," he said. "I believe F2P is our inevitable future. I believe there are F2P titles out there that can be story-telling and cooperative with your friends and competitive with your friends. It's all possible. The business model is independent from the way you design games. It's a very important thing. People always make these things dependent, but it's actually completely independent."