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…
(more…)

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…
(more…)

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.
(more…)

Having played Crysis 2, the latest from the former technical innovators at Crytek, I have to express that I’m not only horrified, but also shocked, at the paucity of graphical accomplishments in what should have been a groundbreaking game. It’s quite clear that massive compromises have been made in order to keep the console market happy, meaning the PC version of the game is crippled to the point where it’s literally impossible to look at without feeling physically sick. I have put together some detailed analysis of the differences between CryEngine 2 and CryEngine 3, to prove that the developers have let everyone down.

(more…)

He calls himself Master Le Cosplay. Going on this, he’s probably right. This gentleman has built himself a frighteningly detailed Crysis Nanosuit, complete with weapons. Super-strength, speed and invisibility TBC. Though frankly invisibility’s going to be nigh-on impossible looking like that. (more…)

In our excitement of posting Pat’s shaky-hand-footage of Crysis 2 we didn’t actually post the full thing when it popped up on the 9th. We’d normally rather be never than late, being obsessed by appearances and fearing being mocked by our cool blogger friends, but we’ll make an exception in this case. Basically, because it looks pretty lovely, doing the Gears-of-War-esque SAD SAD SONG OVER RUINED LANDSCAPE thing and featuring shit getting real. I love it when shit gets real. When shit remains fake it’s distinctly inferior. Er… trailer follows. (more…)

The internet is about to be ablaze with info from the recent Crysis 2 event in New York, which I totally didn’t get invited to. I’M NOT BITTER. Fortunately news-sleuth Pat from VG247 has a load of it, including an interview with Crytek superboss, Cervat Yerli. Not much concrete on the PC version, other than suggestions that it will be “best”. The impressions of the game sound impressive too, even if it is more aliens, and even if it did cause Pat to collapse into some kind of modernist experimental streamed free-association brain-burst:

Wall Street, through a tunnel and someone talking in ear, like fucking wow, epic scene of crumbling buildings and falling debris player drops out onto ledge and room gasps just fucking awesome zooms in Chrysler building and down onto street trees and burning cars marking enemies scanning MAXIMUM ARMOUR CLOAK ENABLED grab from behind, invisible sneaking round on rooftop shoots human enemy through something like solar cells distance marker on enemies…

Yeah. [There's also an interview with Mr Yerli, by the excellent Miss Alexander, just here.]