Crysis 3 may be graced with some new multiplayer DLC in the coming months, if hints nestled within a leaked list of achievements for the game are to be believed.

According to Xbox 360 Achievements, the forthcoming DLC will include ten new achievements for a total of 250 Gamerscore, which covers a number of multiplayer modes. Four new maps were detailed, named Coastline, Creek, Crossing and Ascent.

Given the naming nomenclature of current Crysis 3 multiplayer maps, this leak isn’t far off-base in its plausibility. The listing also hints at two new modes for multiplayer: Frenzy and Team Possession. Frenzy indicates the inclusion of some form of score limit, and Team Possession mentions the use of a flag, indicating a Crysis-style iteration on Capture the Flag.

Finally, the achievement “Totally Oarsome” can be unlocked by getting killed by a boat oar – indicating that boat oars might be a new attainable weapon.

Oars huh? Ok.

When we hear more from EA/Crytek, we’ll be sure to let you know. For now, just daydream about smacking your friends around with boat oars. And in the case that this rumor turns up false, you can at least hustle down to your nearby sports and recreation store, buy a couple of oars, and knock the crap out of your friends in real life.

Just… wear a cup first.

[Source: Xbox 360 Achievements via Polygon/Joystiq]

For as much as Crysis 2 differed from Crysis in foregoing open world level design, the sequel managed to carve its own identity with the help of a dramatic context of a near future New York under siege. Crysis 3 is also based in New York and not only retains the previous installment’s “wide linear” level design but also reunites us with Prophet, who awakens to a Manhattan overrun by the antagonistic faction known as C.E.L.L..

Waking Prophet after 24 years is his old squadmate Psycho who has shed his formerly infused nanosuit, but not out of choice. Psycho struggles with being human again but does his best to ignore this perceived impotence. He does this by helping Prophet and a band of rebels take down C.E.L.L..

As the game’s thematic marketing imagery conveyed time and time again, one of Crysis 3‘s messages is the hunted becoming the hunter. Often seen with a bow, it’s convenient that Prophet gets to ride the recent pop culture fascination of archery. It takes little time to get used to this weapon and makes for a welcome addition the arsenal, especially for those who prefer playing stealthily. By giving a bow to the already powerful Prophet, you might think this would make Crysis 3 too easy, and in some respects, it is. But that’s why harder difficulties exist. If anything prevents this game from being a cakewalk, it’s that Crytek has improved the enemy AI over the last game, specifically in fixing pathing issues and enhancing their fields of vision.

Making you that much more of a silent killer does favor the stealth approach overall, but folks who like it loud and out in the open <ahem> will still find the same appealing playground style level design that worked immensely well for Crysis 2. Since the levels aren’t corridors, there’s a lot more to assess. Like a secret agent mentality noting all the exits and alternate routes even before firing a single round, Crysis 3 feels most gratifying when you do manage to clear an expansive area without dying and having used the environment to your full advantage. You realize that the Crysis series is your kind of shooter when dying doesn’t feel like a negative; that just means you have a new opportunity to address the situation with a different approach.

It’s a blessing that these levels have a significant level of replay value, especially when this is unquestionably one of shortest worthwhile shooters in recent memory. If you’re the type of player who doesn’t need to clear an entire map of enemies, just the direct threats, expect to beat the game at its Veteran setting in less than five hours. If you’ve been griping that action game campaigns are typically too long during this console generation, Crysis 3 is definitely for you. But if you expect a narrative and playthrough at the same grand scale of Crysis 2, prepare to be disappointed.

The one casualty to this short playthrough is the flow of the screenplay. Heavy-handed drama and character development is nothing new, but when compressed in a five hour end-of-the-world context, some characters come off as bi-polar when reacting to the rapid change of events. For instance, rebel leader Claire goes from having all-business assertiveness to fits of despair to being positively reinvigorated in the span of thirty minutes. As one of the game’s few new characters, this kind of emotional rollercoaster makes her feel out of place in the larger scope of the series.

Whatever your opinion of short playthroughs, Crytek makes each of the seven chapters count when it comes to presentation. New York in Crysis 3 is consistently saturated in beauty within decay. And even with all the gutted buildings and the rampant vegetation, there are subtle touches to the level design that help steer you to objectives without having to rely on hallways; of course, waypoint indicators help.

The series’ expansive arsenal and the depth of the weapon modulation has made competitive multiplayer a natural complement to the campaign. Along with the bow and the unique features of the nanosuit, Crysis 3′s multiplayer manages to stand out while relying on familiar modes like Capture The Flag (retitled Capture The Relay) and Deathmatch. Many of these modes were already in place in the previous game, with Spears and Hunter being the new additions.

Spears makes up for the lack of a Conquest or Domination mode in Crysis 2. The twist is that the team that captures a spear doesn’t have to stay close to the spear to earn points. As you might expect, this creates an unusually fast-paced version of Conquest, which works great for Crysis 3.

Hunter is this game’s version of Infection mode. Normally the predators in this game type do not have ranged weapons, but the nanosuited troops in Crysis 3 do. The challenge lies in trying to survive as C.E.L.L. prey and without stealth. Get killed and you become a bow-equipped hunter. This mode is surprisingly well-balanced; while the hunters have stealth, the prey only need to survive for 90 seconds.

While there is a satisfying sense of resolution to Prophet’s story, the short play time makes Crysis 3 feel more like an extended epilogue than a complete final act in a trilogy. Still, the openness of the levels and the variety of skills at Prophet’s disposal makes each chapter a joy to play and replay. The literal urban jungle provides a sense of continuity with the final events in the last game, yet what’s more important is the believability of this decaying metropolis, however otherworldly it might be. The gameplay foundation laid by the previous installments helps add considerable replay value to the campaign, and especially the expanded multiplayer. These are enough to recommend Crysis 3 to any shooter fan as long as they don’t put a dollar amount on campaign length.

+Visually arresting environments
+Playground style level design
- Shortest campaign in the series

8.5 / 10

EA published a press release today announcing that more than three million gamers downloaded and participated in the Crysis 3 mutliplayer beta, which is a pretty impressive figure for-reals. Not only that, but the people who played it must’ve liked what they saw, because pre-orders for the new game are up 35 percent over that of its predecessor, Crysis 2.

The game launches this coming Tuesday on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC, and I expect it’ll perform a whole lot better than the other big releases from the year so far. DmC’s sales turned out to be pretty disappointing, and the drama surrounding the botched development Aliens: Colonial Marines continues to unfold. Will Crysis 3 snap the streak of lackluster heavy hitters in 2013? I say, yeah, it probably will.

Choo choo! The Crysis 3 beta train has arrived, ladies and gentlemen. That’s right, the third iteration in Crytek’s graphics card-melting, processor-destroying, happy-tear-inducing FPS franchise, Crysis, has landed on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in open beta form.

And gee willickers does it look b-e-a-utiful.

The multiplayer-only beta (not demo, don’t mix the two up) went live for Xbox Live Gold members and Origin users (PC) this morning, and is slated for an on-time arrival on the PSN later this afternoon (if not already, so flip on your consoles, people). It’ll run until February 12, with the game releasing in full a week later on February 19.

More information is issued in the video above, and is certainly a better alternative to listening to me ramble on for another two minutes. But if that’s what you’re hear for, press on, gents.

If you’re having issues with the beta, be sure to tell your local Inside Gaming host Adam Kovic all about it, that way he doesn’t feel so alone.

Anyone having Crysis 3 MP beta issues on PC? The game won’t even boot up for my computer. Drivers and stuff all up to date. Halp?

— Adam Kovic (@adamkovic) January 29, 2013

Update — Here’s How to Find it on Xbox Live Marketplace

1. Go to the ‘Games’ tab.
2. Select ‘Browse Games’ from the left-hand side.
3. Go to the ‘Demos’ tab.
4. Boom. It’s basically in your eye sockets.

Starting January 29, gamers will have the opportunity to hunt the most dangerous game (man, for those who didn’t pay attention in English class) in an open multiplayer beta for Crysis 3. The beta will be available for PC, PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360, so it doesn’t matter what your preferred platform is—you can play in the beta.

The beta will have two of the eight multiplayer modes that the final version of Crysis 3will offer: “Crash Site” and “Hunter Mode.” Crash Site makes players “secure and defend specific locations, earning points along the way for kills and their ability to hold those locations.” Hunter Mode is an “asymmetrical, time based mode” that pits teams of two “cloaked hunters stalking 10 opposing CELL troopers.” That actually sounds amazingly bad-ass and cool. The cloaked hunters will be armed with enhanced Nanosuits and Predator bows, and can only win when all ten CELL operatives are neutralized. The CELL operative team can win by surviving. And that’s not all:

“The twist is that once a CELL trooper is killed, that player will then respawn as a hunter, joining the others in their attempt to eliminate the remaining CELL operatives before the clock strikes zero.”

Man. How cool is that?

Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli offered this statement on the forthcoming beta:

“With Crysis 3 we are delivering the deepest, most robust Crysis multiplayer experience yet. We have listened closely to our fans and have evolved the multiplayer in Crysis 3 by adding a host of new gameplay features including the unique Hunter mode, deadly new weapons like the Predator bow, deeper loadout and unlock options, enhanced upgrade systems and more social features like the New York Feed. Top it all off with the ultimate weapon in the Nanosuit and you have a multiplayer experience that is unlike anything else out there.”

The game drops officially on February 19 in North America, and on February 21 in Europe. I think I’ll be checking out that beta for sure…

http://www.youtube.com/embed/2qFLtnSqS6Y

A post on Digital Spy today features some straight talk from Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli, who said that there will not be a Wii U version of the forthcoming Crysis 3. The post also notes the fact that Crytek said that a version of the game would, in fact, make its way to the Wii U, developed by another studio. That effort, it seems, has been halted, if it ever actually began.

Yerli explained that even though he’d like to see the game on Nintendo’s new console, the reason it won’t appear is down to a question of numbers:

“It’s a purely business decision. I’d love to see it on Wii U, but what I love to see and what gets done at the end of the day are two different things. Even so, I could initiate it but someone has to sell it, right?

It’s a business decision between EA and Nintendo. If that business decision doesn’t make sense, or seems to not make sense for them, it’s… not possible for us to make it. We can’t publish ourselves, and that’s the bottom line.”

Rough stuff for Nintendo’s console. Already, we’re finding more and more evidence that this console may be suffering from the Wii’s poor third-party support. Is this an isolated case? Or a sign of things to come?

Via Digital Spy

All other things being equal, whenever a game’s early concept art and its eventual, you-are-(playing) their implementation are close to being practically the same thing… well, prospects can genuinely be said to be looking up. Good thing too—since practically everything else about Crysis 3‘s post-alien-invasion apocalypse is looking pretty grim at the outset, at least for us humans. On the plus side of the conflict, we’ve of course got one-man avenging army, Prophet—and brother, the other guys are going to have Losses, that much I can guaran-damn-tee you.

So: In 2047, it turns out that the Ceph ‘defeat’ at the end of Crysis 2 actually wasn’t worth the expended ammo-packs it was littered with; not only are the Ceph alive and, uh, scuttling, but the Cell Corporation has slapped gargantuan, city-sealing ‘Nanodomes’ over some of our hitherto most happening metropolitan population centers. Welcome to The Liberty Dome, which has in effect turned the former, depopulated Big Apple into a sprawling urban rainforest… among other things.

Under the Dome, seven unique, unnaturally-accelerated sub-environs (dubbed ‘The Seven Wonders,’ see more on this below) allow the Crytek designers a chance to show off their Environmental Design-Porn virtuosity level-creation chops in the guise of showcasing post-invasion New York City as a study in natural urban reclamation.

CryENGINE3′s gorgeous attention to environmental detail jolly-chokes DirectX 11 pretty near to death, and almost qualifies as an active gameplay danger all on its own, really—because while you’re marveling at all the astounding shading and dynamic-water effects with your jaw all a-hinge, there is the highest likelihood that something really unfriendly is going to do its damnedest to fill you full of high-energy particles, exotic toxins, or good old-fashioned dumb-slugs.

While Crysis 3 ultimately still tends toward the linear structure of its immediate predecessor rather than a true open-world world approach, your options to badass it up as Prophet are legion and immensely promising—and they even take considerably longer strides in the direction of tactical subtlety: In this high-tech, low-population reclaimed wasteland, Prophet’s seemingly glaringly-anachronistic multi-function bow alone is an exercise in pure low-fi, high-tension death-dealing.

Its array of different and deadly types of ammunition—including basic ballistic/impact arrows, electronics jammers, antipersonnel scatter-charge explosive loads and special thermite-tipped bolts (for those heavy-armor turrets and/or hovering Ceph patrol-bots specifically engineered to sweep their vicinity with cloak-disrupting beams)— affords you myriad opportunities to exploit stealth-combat opportunities without burning through Prophet’s available nanosuit energy (which is huge all by itself).

Of course, when you finally do land yourself in a situation where stealth is no longer of immediate practical benefit—mark that, not if but when—no one will fault you for unceremoniously breaking out the noise-makers: One of Prophet’s particularly awesome high-ammo-consumption assault rifles, for example, is specced to fire 500 rounds a second (and makes a loud, particularly satisfying hum as it chews through ammo, nearby enemies, the immediate landscape, etc.). Even when you can’t quite manage something as spectacular as that, there are still the semi-auto shotgun and ‘Feline’ sub-machinegun options on which to fall back. Further, this time around, Prophet’s nanosuit can even interface (at varying rates of success) with new and purely extra-terrestrial weaponry, including a brand new type of Ceph mortar-launcher.

Throughout the game, the ever-present environmental result of The Liberty Dome’s nature-reclaimed interior is Crytek’s collective vision of hundreds of years of urban ‘forestation’, crammed into roughly 20 years of the in-game timeline. Central Park? Yyyyyeah–it’s actually closer to ‘Central Veldt’, now. The skyscraper-cluttered Financial District is for all intents and purposes the equivalent of a rough-passage, mountainous region, these days; and Chinatown, along with the depths of the flooded subway system, is on the whole an overgrown swampland, choked with rioting vegetation and populated by croaking, hopping waves of tiny little frogs, doing their tiny little best to stay out of your way.

For the detail-oriented, one thing that’s important to keep in mind—and we know it’s important, because the Crytek folks made it a point to keep telling us—is that the each of the neighborhoods/environments bursting with new foliage under the Liberty Dome were painstakingly designed to demonstrate a projected course of realistic natural reclamation. In other words, these are not merely ‘plant-flavored’ organic-flora patterns painted onto stock models of buildings; if the overgrown landscape can be imagined to have a visual, textural or even functional role in the environment, it will function as such in the game-world. If you think it’s a long way to the nearest subway exit now, imagine doing it through ankle-deep muck, or over two decades’-worth of accumulated, encroaching, tangled (and for that matter quite likely poisonous) greenery—or across an inconveniently-raging river, for that matter!

Imagine blundering your way clear of head-high stalks of grass, only to come face to face with a whole pack of hitherto-unseen Ceph Stalkers; awkward. Maybe you can turn that mountainous Fi-Di district’s buildings to your advantage by using your nanosuit to take an ‘assisted jump’ up to a ledge and get a hunter’s-eye view of the surrounding tactical situation. Your many potential battlefields have a ‘sandbox’-style freedom to them, without blatantly calling excessive attention to themselves as The Stealth Route, The Death-Trap, The Choke-Point, and so forth.

Crysis 3 looks like it’ll do a fantastic job of making players feel unpredictable, unseen and dangerous, to a degree that would make even Solid Snake turn post-humanity-foliage green with envy.

And the Prophet sayeth: Amen to that.

The Crysis franchise has always been famous for its games and their ability to make you cry when you realize just how pathetically incapable your brand new gaming PC really is. Crysis 3 from Crytek and EA is no exception, and will require every last bit of juice your rig has to give.

Sorry kids, you simply won’t have enough memory or storage space anywhere to run the likes of Microsoft Word while running-and-gunning through Crytek’s latest. Also, Windows XP users have been given the boot. Get with the times, you silly billies. Anyway, here are the specs you’re after:

Minimum System Requirements

• Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
• DirectX 11 graphics card with 1Gb Video RAM
• Dual core CPU
• 2GB Memory (3GB on Vista)
• Nvidia/Intel example setup: Nvidia GTS 450, Intel Core2 Duo 2.4 Ghz (E6600)
• AMD example setup: AMD Radeon HD5770, AMD Athlon64 X2 2.7 Ghz (5200+)

Recommended System Requirements

• Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
• DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB Video RAM
• Quad core CPU
• 4GB Memory
• Nvidia/Intel example setup: Nvidia GTX 560, Intel Core i3-530
• AMD example setup: AMD Radeon HD5870, AMD Phenom II X2 565

Hi-Performance System Requirements

• Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8 •
• Latest DirectX 11 graphics card •
• Latest quad core CPU
• 8GB Memory
• Nvidia/Intel example setup: NVidia GTX 680, Intel Core i7-2600k
• AMD example setup: AMD Radeon HD7970, AMD Bulldozer FX4150

Sigh, looks like I’ll need more… well, everything.

[via Crytek]

Due in February 2013, the next Crysis game approaches closer each day. Get a look at some fresh new gameplay whilst Adam Kovic talks with the game’s producer Mike Read.

What do you folks think? Did you enjoy the fact that I didn’t sneak a “maximum-something” joke in there?

MAXIMUM RESTRAINT.

If you’ve been looking for a good reason to pre-order Crysis 3, look no more. Developer Crytek and publisher Electronic Arts announced today that gamers who pre-order Crysis 3 will not only reserve their game for launch day, but will also receive the first Crysis as a digital download for free.

The offer is available on all platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. I personally recommend PC if you have a killer enough gaming rig to play on, but given that Crysis 2 looked pretty darn stunning on Xbox 360 and PS3 last year, I’d be willing to bet you’ll be all set on any platform for picking up Crysis 3.

Though news regarding Crytek’s latest project has been noticeably absent over the past few months, we do have a pretty nifty preview of the game from earlier this year, not to mention a review of the original Crysis, should that strike your fancy. Crysis 3 is slated for launch early next year, and will most certainly be abundant in gritty realism, lens flares, and deep voices echoing from your helmet alerting you as to what armor setting you’re currently on.

CLOAK ENGAGED. MAXIMUM ARMOR. MAXIMUM POWER.