Crysis Remastered coming to PC on September 18th

In a strange series of events, we saw the first planned trailer get leaked, and then in response to criticism that it didn’t really seem all that improved compared to the original release, Crytek delayed its full unveiling and release. They added two months to the schedule, and it looks like they’re now ready to start showing it to the world, as well as announced that it will now be releasing on September 18th.

In other news, much like we heard about Hitman 3 yesterday, this is another game that’s taken a Faustian pact with Epic, and is going to be foregoing a Steam release, in favor of launching exclusively on Epic Game Store, at least initially. It’s not clear if it’s going to launch for free like A Total War Saga: Troy did, or if they’re going to have any way of offering a discount to owners of the original version, but at least we have a release date.

This is perhaps particularly amusing, given how for the longest time, Crytek and Epic were direct competitors in a heated battle to develop the best game engine to license out to other game studios. The Unreal Engine and CryEngine have both at various different times been arguably the most technologically impressive game engine, but Crytek never really managed to generate that mass adoption that Unreal has, and it’s not a significant part of their business. Former CryEngine Brand Manager Marcel Hatam saw the irony in this news too:

Seeing a Crytek (and even Crysis) game being exclusive to the Epic games Store is about the funniest thing anyone could have told me 5 years ago when I was Brand Manager for Cryengine.

Looks great as always though <3 https://t.co/q90LNGLYGs

— Marcel Hatam (@Com_Raven) August 21, 2020

There’s a new trailer which functions more as a demo of new tech that they’ve added to the engine, and new assets they’ve created for the Remaster, but doesn’t showcase any actual typical gameplay scenarios. Sabre Interactive who did an impressive job of the Nintendo Switch version of Crysis Remastered has again been enlisted to work on the Remaster for PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Generally, they are a studio who do solid work, so I think they’re a safe pair of hands for handling a project like this, but it would be a little more reassuring if they showed us a more representative slice of gameplay footage, and if they detailed what hardware it was running on.

New features included in this remake are:

• New Lighting and Updated Assets
• Ray-traced water reflections
• New 8k textures
• Ray-traced reflections

Will you be wanting to check out this game? There’s never quite been a game infamous for testing the limits of your gaming PC quite like the original Crysis, so it’s going to be interesting to see how this Remaster performs on systems of today.