News broke last week that Crytek was undergoing significant layoffs – and the next edition of the Crysis franchise faces an uncertain future. This downbeat topic got second billing on this week’s DF Direct, after the team’s exhaustive breakdown of Sony’s State of Play showcase the day before, and it’s an important story that I wanted to discuss in a little more detail here as the Direct goes live.
After all, Crysis is something of a tentpole game series for us at Digital Foundry, with a reputation for being an early adopter of graphics technologies that would later define entire generations of PC and console video games. That includes the likes of screen-space ambient occlusion, sub-surface scattering and ray-marched volumetric lighting, but you could write volumes about just how ground-breaking that first game was – and Alex did.
Crysis 3 and its Remastered counterpart have also long formed part of the DF test suite for CPU and GPU reviews – I think the “Highly Explosive Materials” train ride and the argument between Prophet and Psycho earlier on in Welcome to the Jungle are burned into my brain after so many benchmark runs. With that in mind, Crysis 4 was hotly anticipated by the whole team since the game was announced back in 2022, especially in an industry where self-made game engines are coming under threat from the ubiquity of Unreal Engine.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:11 News 1: State of Play: Tides of Annihilation0:09:37 MindsEye0:16:38 Days Gone Remastered0:22:28 Saros0:29:12 Dreams of Another0:36:59 Lost Soul Aside0:41:39 Other games: Borderlands 4, Sonic Racing Crossworlds, Onimusha, Midnight Walk0:59:34 State of Play – The Verdict1:06:43 News 2: Crysis 4 put “on hold” as Crytek lays off employees1:16:24 News 3: Assassin’s Creed Shadows PC specs revealed1:36:32 News 4: Astro Bot gets PS5 Pro upgrade1:42:59 Supporter Q1: After three months, what do you think of the PS5 Pro and PSSR?1:52:53 Supporter Q2: Why don’t more developers use CryEngine?1:59:40 Supporter Q3: Will Nvidia “gate” new AI features to their most recent hardware?2:09:17 Supporter Q4: Does RTX Mega Geometry eliminate the need for proxy geometry for RT?2:15:17 Supporter Q5: Could Oliver address some of the recent state of the art AI tech?2:26:52 Supporter Q6: How much do you need to spend on a GPU to have a good experience?
Now the prospect of a new mainline Crysis entry seems further away than ever. The Crytek layoffs are significant, corresponding to around 60 people or 15 percent of the company’s workforce, and come after Crysis 4 director Mattias Engström left in November last year, returning to Hitman developer IO Interactive. As well as the immediate effect to the livelihoods of the affected developers, it’s difficult to imagine that the current Crysis 4 project will be restarted in the near future given the circumstances. The focus of the studio’s remaining developers has shifted to live service extraction shooter Hunt: Showdown 1896, as the studio aims to become “financially sustainable”.