Crytek has this morning released a new video trailer and a load of new screens of this year’s most important PC title, its EA-published FPS Crysis.

Crysis cover art adorns the latest (April 2006) issue of Edge magazine, which, whilst you may think ‘Yeah, and?’, well, bear in mind that the last PC title to score the illustrious Edge cover was Half-Life 2, which puts into perspective how important this PC title is shaping up to be.

Just check out the trailers, linked below, and look at these screens and weep a few tears of anticipatory joy. The video shows off some of Crytek’s proprietary CryEngine 2’s awesome technology, including Volumetric cloud formations that are illuminated in real-time and allow soft fly-throughs; real-time Ambient Maps with implementation of indirect lighting that approximates ambient light intensity; a leak and bleeding-free implementation of Depth of Field supporting focus changes; high quality “Video Realism” Motion Blur of the camera, as well as any object on screen; and Soft Shadows that are pixel accurate and soft according to the sunlight diffusion.

High res 1280x720
Quicktime (50MB)
Windows Media (62MB)

Medium res 640x360
Quicktime (16MB)
Windows Media (10MB)

More simply put, as the Edge piece points out: “Every object in Crysis will cast a shadow… everything will interact, and everything will exist and adapt in realtime, from weather and light cycles to vegetation.” So, with much, much more to come, just watch the trailer and see for yourself what all PC Gamers will be playing this winter (we hope, should they get it out on schedule).

The storyline in Crysis is as follows:



All of this is why Crysis is most probably the most important PC title of the year. We won’t give away too much more of the game’s plot right now, suffice to say that the development philosophy at Crytek is refreshingly open to something quite unique – life outside of gaming! As Crytek’s founder Cevat Yerli outlines in Edge: “There’s a need to understand the life outside – that of movies, books, current affairs and television. If you look at people who are only experienced at playing games – games which are iterations of iterations – they will only ever bring further iterations.” Wise words, mate!

EA will be picking up the publishing duties on Crysis, as it seems Crytek have had enough of their dalliance with Ubisoft (publishers of Far Cry), as Yerli makes clear to Edge: “…certain things happened during the development of Far Cry…which made us think they [Ubisoft] weren’t the partner for us… There are certain things like being out of stock for a prolonged period that simply shouldn’t happen. For the first month, Far Cry was constantly out of stock.”

Ah well, bad luck Ubi. It seems EA may well have snagged the next Half-Life 2.