EA and Crytek's Crysis 2 was available on Valve's Steam service until this week. Now it's available "only on Origin," Electronic Arts' new digital store (and a few others, actually). Despite the change and conjecture about the motivations behind it, EA says it was not behind the decision to pull Crysis 2 from Steam.

Instead, EA reps tell Kotaku that it was Steam's "business terms" that resulted in Crysis 2 being removed from Valve's platform.

"It's unfortunate that Steam has removed Crysis II from their service," reads a statement from the publisher. "This was not an EA decision or the result of any action by EA."

"Steam has imposed a set of business terms for developers hoping to sell content on that service – many of which are not imposed by other online game services. Unfortunately, Crytek has an agreement with another download service which violates the new rules from Steam and resulted in its expulsion of Crysis II from Steam. "

"Crysis II continues to be available on several other download services including Origin.com."

Kotaku has contacted Valve seeking clarification on Steam's business terms and the future availability of EA games through Steam.

You may have missed your chance to purchase shooter Crysis 2 on anything but EA's new Origin service, the re-branded EA Store that aims to go head-to-head with the likes of Valve's Steam platform. Crysis 2 has been yanked from Steam, with EA saying it's now available "only on Origin."

Well, sort of.

While Steam is no longer selling Crytek's futuristic first-person shooter, plenty of other digital distribution services—Amazon, Impluse, Direct2Drive, et al.—still carry the game, as spotted by NeoGAF user sflufan. Whether EA is targeting Steam only as a competitive reseller or the other means to get Crysis 2 haven't been informed of the change we don't yet know.

But many EA published games are still available through Steam, including this year's Bulletstorm, Dragon Age II and Shift 2 Unleashed. Alice: Madness Returns, released today on PC, is also "only on Origin"—and Amazon and Direct2Drive. We would anticipate seeing the same tactic for other EA PC releases, like this year's Battlefield 3.

We're asking EA what's up.

Crytek's CryEngine 3 technology, which we've seen most recently in the company's own Crysis 2, is the driving force behind a $57 million project from the US Army aimed at teaching its soldiers how to fight.

While virtual battlefields have long been a staple of military training, the new Dismounted Soldier Training System (DSTS) looks to blow previous efforts out of the water, using the latest in gaming tech to give soldiers one hell of a realistic video game experience training ground run.

The DSTS isn't a simple game played on a PC or console. It's a full virtual experience, with soldiers donning a vest and helmet (both lined with cameras, vibrators and sensors) and then standing on a 10x10 foot pad, which is also full of sensors.

This means the experience is almost fully motion-controlled, and instead of being projected on a screen, the program's visuals are displayed on a pair of virtual reality goggles attached to the soldier's helmet.

CryEngine 3 comes into it with its ability to model not just infantry combat but vehicle and aircraft controls as well, and also display wildly different terrain and weather conditions.

The DSTS is expected to go into service next year, with around 100 units available for training.

[via GamePro]

Crysis 2 for $34.99 heads up a day of video game bargains at Amazon.com today, with Madden, Sonic, and PC MMO Rift all on the receiving end of deep discounts. As seen on Cheap College Gamers!

Crysis 2 is about to get its first piece of downloadable content, in the form of four new multiplayer maps. It'll be out on May 17 on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 (PSN service dependent).

For about a year, Crytek has offered universities a free license to its CryEngine 3, the guts of this month's big release, Crysis 2. Since it made the offer more than 250 universities have asked for the code, the studio reports.

That's a pretty significant indicator of the mainstream utility of gaming code in a college classroom, if not of the mainstream presence of games design in their curricula.

"From its very first days, Crytek aimed to strongly support students and educators by sharing the CryEngine tools with universities," Avni Yerli, managing director at Crytek, said in a statement. "Thousands of students now have access to the same cutting-edge technology that the world's best developers are using for their ongoing projects. With our CryEngine 3 educational SDK we want to enable them to achieve their vision and create their very own innovation to become the next generation of developers."

You don't have to be a university department head or a bigtime developer to get your hands on Crysis' development tools. A modkit will release to all users sometime in early summer, Crytek has said.

Over 250 Universities Worldwide Signed Up For CryEngine 3 Educational License [Gamasutra]

A modding toolkit for Crysis 2 will release in early summer, Crytek said today in an announcement. If that's not enough freedom for you, the CryENGINE SDK releases to developers in August. The Crysis 2 modkit will be free, the company's CEO said.

CryENGINE 3 is "internally, the same engine we give to our licensees, the same engine that powers Crysis 2," Cevat Yerli said. The complete version includes "C++ code access, our content exporters (including our LiveCreate real-time pipeline), shader code, game sample code from Crysis 2, script samples, new improved Flowgraph and a whole host of great asset examples, which will allow teams to build complete games from scratch for PC."

For those not looking to develop on that scale, the Crysis 2 toolkit will arrive at an unspecified date before then, "in early summer," Yerli said. "This will allow you to build new maps, items and more custom content for Crysis 2."

CryENGINE SDK will likewise be free but, of course, for those looking to commercialize their work, Crytek will have a licensing agreement to keep everything square.

Be Free... Be Creative... Be the Developer [Crymod.com]

It's a shame that you miss it while you're too busy kicking cars and shooting things in the face, but Crysis 2 is a love letter to the city of New York, something that really shines through in the game's concept art.

These pieces were done by Crytek artists Dennis Chan and Viktor Jonsson, and show almost every level you travel through during the game, along with a few necessary "hero" shots of the game's star, "Alcatraz".

I've been meaning to go back and play the game a second time for a while now, take my time and really get a good look at the city Crytek built as a stage for the game. This is all I need to get me to do just that.

We reviewed Crysis 2 a few weeks ago. It's pretty great. What it lacks in the open-world combat of the first game it makes up for with better pacing and more enjoyable uses for that fancy suit of yours.

You can check out Chan's and Jonsson's personal sites here and here.

Crytek took it in the shorts from PC loyalists who felt Crysis 2 was handled in a way that catered more to console users than to PC gamers. In an interview, the studio's graphics engineer said Microsoft and Sony have way underweight RAM configurations, and whatever they build next needs 8 GB of RAM, minimum.

"My finger-pointing at Microsoft/Sony would really be on the memory side," Tiago Sousa told Eurogamer. "It's way too low, and the biggest crippling factor from a visual perspective.

Naturally, the outfit that gave us Crysis, a profoundly demanding game for PC architecture when it was released in 2007, wants 16 times the current generation's memory. That's right, remember, the PS3 and the 360 both have just 512 MB of RAM. While that is aptly described as "nowhere near enough," the things were built going on five years ago now. Still, I don't see Sony or Microsoft packing their next consoles with 8 GB of RAM unless we truly are talking about 10 year plans for the current hardware.

Tiago Sousa, Crytek's top man in graphics, did praise Sony and Microsoft for their developer support, saying Crysis 2 was only possible on those consoles thanks to toolkits that allowed Crytek to wring "as much performance as possible from the fixed architecture."

The Making of Crysis 2 [Eurogamer]

Details are basically non-existent, but Crytek has officially announced that there will be a DirectX 11 patch for Crysis 2 to take full advantage of modern PC gaming hardware. [MyCrysis.com] (Thanks, Kyle!)