Crytek, the development team behind Crysis and Far Cry have announced that they will be teaming with THQ for the next installment of the Far Cry series.

“We see Homefront as a really strong universe that has a lot of potential and that has been expertly created and marketed by THQ,” said Cevat Yerli, Founder, CEO and President of Crytek. “We believe that bringing our level of quality, creativity and production values to the next Homefront title creates an opportunity for both THQ and Crytek to deliver a truly blockbuster game. It’s really important to us that THQ has the faith in giving us a lot of creative freedom over one of its most important properties to allow us to bring the Homefront world to life in a new and innovative way.”

The original Crytek launched earlier this year and was developed by  Kaos Studios, which was shut down shortly after the game’s release. The as of yet unnamed sequel is due out within the next two years.

LOS ANGELES — EA remains the fan-pleasing factory of gaming titles to entice both new and hardcore gamers alike. At this year’s E3, there weren’t any huge surprises, other than Crysis2 not sucking. (because, admit it, we all thought C1 totally did.)

I had the chance to demo a few games, and was escorted to “family games” before I got a chance to get my hands on the beef.

Some of the family-oriented games, like Monopoly and Hasbro Family Game Night 3, are right on cue for ages 4-444, with bold graphics and customizable characters based on your Mii or XBLA avatar so any member of the family can own their pwnage. A newer version of the classic Risk was on show as well.

One rising star in the all-ages genre is a new game by EA Bright Lights, the team responsible for the newest title in the Harry Potter series, Spare Parts. Part WALL-E -meets-Spyro, it will be one that kids play and awaken the inner-gamer in mom and dad. (Yes, I do want to play it; no- it has nothing to do with me being a girl. Shut it!) It may become the secret guilty-pleasure for many gamers. Who doesn’t like Robots? EA dubs this a “cooperative action adventure”, trending toward the online co-op capabilities that is becoming the norm these days in the gaming scene.

The Need for Speed franchise made a comeback with a return to it’s roots- a classic cop-chasing-bad guy game, complete with Lamborghini cop cars in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. The cars are typically unrealistically hard to handle, but what do you expect from a memorizable game? In the realm of graphic quality I’ll hand it to them, however. The cars are rockin’, and the hot rod shown at E3 to catch our attention was one hot tamale.

When the boys finally let me come to the yard, I have to admit, I totally got schooled in the Medal of Honor demo. I was just too distracted by how fast and smoothly the game rendered, a sign of a great engine, and well thought out gameplay. I was happy to sit back and watch the diehards go at it, and contribute to the death of an insurgent or two. Electronic Arts los Angeles is handling the single-player action, but DICE stepped it up for the online co-op. You die fast and hard, thanks to what DICE calls “faster bullets.” Remind me to thank them for my lesson in humility.

Crysis 2 is a vast improvement on the original, but I have to shame the developers in picking NYC as it’s location of destruction. As much as I love the idea of NYC as the futuristic dystopian gamer’s paradise, it is, perhaps, too soon to see iconic New York City fall to the ground in a blaze of alien-gutted glory. The gameplay is rich, thrilling and maybe this will be the redeeming title for the still neophitic development team of Crytek who didn’t quite walk the walk with Crysis the first time around. The big news with Crysis 2 is the expectation of 3D capabilities. The gameplay is engaging and frenetic, adding to the overall atmosphere of doom and destruction; AI placement has been done well, and those aforementioned icons of NYC are easily recognizable with a nice depth quality.

All titles will be released between the fall and holiday seasons. Family titles will be available for about $39.99.

Other titles expected for release include sports giants like Madden NFL 2011, FIFA 2011, NCAA Football, and NHL/NHL Slapshot. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Pt 1 — which grew up with the apprentice sorcerer into something close to a third-person shooter — and the Sims3 round out the mid-range, with killer titles like Dead Space 2 and Bulletstorm rounding out the hardcore gamer genre, and are expected to be well received, leaving EA living up to its reputation as a powerhouse publisher.

German developer Crytek Frankfurt announced the sequel to the bea-utiful PC-only Crysis today dubbed the predictable Crysis 2.‚  But in a not so predictable manner revealed that the sequel will come to PS3, Xbox 360, and PC.‚  Whoa, awesome.

Publisher Electronic Arts is staying on-board for this multi-platform second title and is hoping that the console admittance garners even more popularity to help fuel excitement for the third and final installment in the trilogy.

“The development of Crysis 2 marks a major stepping stone for our studio,” said Cevat Yerli, CEO and President of Crytek. “This is not only the next game in the Crysis franchise, it’s the first title we are developing for consoles and the first title being built on CryENGINE 3.”

I’ve spent mere minutes with Crysis in my time, as my PC suffers from uber-suckage, but what I’ve seen I’ve loved, and cannot wait to fire up this bad-boy (in every sense of the phrase) on my Xbox 360 whenever EA decides to release the game.

Stay tuned for forthcoming details on the project, who know, maybe at E3 this week.

via Kotaku

Electronic Arts has released a large patch for the critically-acclaimed Crysis.

The patch contains performance compatibility tweaks plus changes to weapons balancing in multiplayer and several bug fixes.

Fixes

• Fixed: Potential crash in D3D10
• Fixed: Orange boxes apearing when hispec savegame loaded into lowspec game.
• Fixed: Inconsistent damage dealt to vehicles when shot by LAW.
• Fixed: Reflection resolution on D3D10, MultiGPU reflection update fix
• Fixed: Memory leak with FSAA modes
• Fixed: Infinite ammo hacks.
• Fixed: Memory leak in D3D10 when switching screen modes
• Fixed: Muti optimizations
• Fixed: When player melees during gun raise animation, their gun will be in a permanently raised position.
• Fixed: Crash when loading savegame with level exported recently by editor
• Fixed: Virtual keyboard does not function properly when a game pad is connected
• Fixed: Users can lose the ability to look around with the Right Stick
• Fixed: Setting screen resolution to “default” stops user from selecting last resolution
• Fixed: Bug when changing resolution in D3D10
• Fixed: Issues with Depth of field and water droplets in D3D10
• Fixed: Crash on NaN warning

Updates

• Added: Motion Blur UI and V.SYNC UI options
• Optimized: Motion blur
• Optimized: FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing)
• Optimized sound id implementation
• Enabled VSync functionality in D3D10
• New benchmarking files for ice CPU benchmark.
• http/xmlrpc password protected remote control session
• Marked debug cvars as cheat
• F12 (screenshot) now works in restricted mode as well

Tweaks

• Reduced LAW splash damage vs. infantry in PowerStruggle mode
• Slowed Rocket projectile speed down in MP slightly
• Disabled automatic turret bounding boxes on vehicles to prevent issues with LAW hit detection
• Reduced grenade explosion radius in multiplayer
• Clamped water tesselation to avoid cheating in MP
• MultiGPU improvements with depth map updates

Download the Crysis 1.1 patch FREE from Blast Magazine.