Far Cry, a first-person shooter released for the PC in 2004, was one of Ubi-Soft’s (the game’s publisher) biggest games, and was hailed by critics garnering many awards. Knowing when they had hit on something good, Ubi went on to release a version of the game on the Xbox, and it’s soon coming to the Xbox 360 as well. Within months however, Ubi’s main rival, US-based behemoth Electronics Arts (which has a very large share in Ubi-Soft, one in which the French government actually stepped in to ward off a potential hostile takeover of the company) used it’s power of the force to lure Far Cry’s German developer, Crytek, into signing a development deal with EA, wherein Crytek would create a brand new franchise for the PC based on an original intellectual property.
And yesterday the game was finally announced. It’s called Crysis, and it’s a first-person shooter for the PC.
According to a joint statement from Crytek and EA, the title will sport “a new kind of gameplay challenge requiring adaptive tactics and customization of weapons and armor in dynamic, hostile environments as mankind struggles to survive in the face of a horrific alien invasion.” Far Cry won much praise for its enemies’ crafty artificial intelligence and its detailed levels, which sported far-reaching draw distances, so this new game is likely to make use and hopefully improve on those already good features.
However not much is yet known about the new game outside of it using Crytek’s proprietary “CryENGINE 2” game engine. One thing is for sure though, EA’s world dominance is forever increasing, and this sounds like another Halo 2-sized game to add to EA’s reportiour of first-person shooters (PS2 uber-shooter Black also being on that list). But hey, as long as they are of this kind of quality, can we really complain?