This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

With the big release of Metro: Last Light earlier this week, it’s easy to forget Borderlands 2 got a new DLC this week: the Psycho Pack. It features a new playable character “Krieg, the Psycho” and a new “Psycho Bandit” class. This DLC is not in the Season Pass, so you’ll have to pick it up separately. Fortunately there’s a 30% off coupon that makes the DLC only $7.

Tuesday marked the big Metro: Last Light release. Despite THQ’s bankruptcy earlier this year, 4A Games and Deep Silver were able to release the highly anticipated title with only a two month delay from the original March 2013 release. The Steam-activated version of Metro: Last Light can be bought for $40 after a 20% off coupon, making it the only known discount for the game thus far.

Today Amazon launched a “Digital Games Mayhem” sale. A total of 826 (!!) PC and Mac download games and DLC packs are up to 80% off their usual prices. Perhaps the best part about this sale is the plethora of PC download bundles available. For instance, the Deep Silver Power Pack Volume 2 includes Saints Row 3 The Full Package, Dead Island, Saints Row 2, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky for only $17.49; separately, these would cost $32 at best prices. Most recent releases are not to be found in the sale, but there’s an exception with the new Star Trek game for $24.99 (50% off).

Hot deals & recent releases

Last Tuesday’s release: Borderlands 2 Psycho Pack (PC DLC) — $7 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Elsewhere $10. Introduces the 6th playable character to Borderlands 2. The “Psycho Bandit” class is melee focused and can generate health when killing enemies.

Last Tuesday’s release: Metro: Last Light (PC Download) — $40 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Elsewhere $50. The latest Metro title survived the THQ bankruptcy with a respectable 82/100 Metascore.
 

Amazon “Digital Games Mayhem” Sale: PC and Mac downloads — up to 80% off at Amazon. A total of 826 PC/Mac download games and DLCs are on sale with big discounts. Highlights below:

• Star Trek — $24.99 (normally $50)
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Civilization IV: Complete Edition, Civilization V Gold Edition Bundle — $19.99 (normally $120)
• Deep Silver Power Pack Volume 2 — $17.49 (normally $95)
• Crusader Kings 2 — $9.99 (normally $40)
• Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition — $7.49 (normally $30)
• The Cave — $4.99 (normally $15)
• Magicka Collection — $4.99 (normally $20)
• Bioshock Dual Pack — $4.99 (normally $40)

Preorder Deals

June 25: Project X Zone (Nintendo 3DS) — $33.99 at NewEgg after coupon. Elsewhere $40. This tactical role-playing title was released on October 11, 2012 in Japan and finally washes up on North American shores next month.
 

Aug. 18: Disney Infinity Starter Pack (Xbox 360, PS3) — $64.99 at NewEgg after coupon. List is $75. Similar to the Skylanders figurine video game genre. Includes figures of Sully, Mr Incredible, and Jack Sparrow.
 

Nov. 5: Call of Duty: Ghosts (Xbox 360, PS3) — $52.99 at NewEgg after coupon. List is $60. First discount spotted on the 2013 Call of Duty title. The official release date announcement came earlier this month, but to no surprise. Another classic CoD first-Tuesday-in-November release date.
 

PC download deals

BioShock Infinite (PC Download) — $34.99 at Groupon. Best price yet on quite possibly the best game of 2013. You’ll need to jump through one hoop to redeem the Steam key from the actual vendor.
 

Jagged Alliance Weekend Sale: Games and DLCs (PC Download) — 50% – 75% off at GamersGate. The tactical role-playing PC game has a solid discount this weekend. Grab the base game and all DLC/expansions in the Collector’s Bundle for $13.98 (normally $30).
 

Men of War Weekend Sale (PC Download) — 75% off at GamersGate. Each individual Men of War game, expansion, and DLC is 75% off, including the Collector’s Pack which includes everything for $17.50 (normally $70).
 

Yesterday’s release: Sanctum 2 (PC Download) — $11.25 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List is $15. The game released yesterday, but the 25% off preorder coupon code still works. Think of the game as tower defense + first-person shooter.

360, PS3, and Nintendo 3DS

Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk (PS3) — $34.99 at Amazon. JRPG fans who haven’t already picked this up save $15 today. This makes the first significant discount we’ve seen since its stateside release two months ago.
 

Fire Emblem: Awakening (Nintendo 3DS) — $29.99 at Best Buy. In IGN’s words, “the best thing to hit the 3DS since Super Mario 3D Land.” Yippee! Next best is $35 at Amazon.
 

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow – Mirror of Fate (Nintendo 3DS) — $24.99 at Best Buy. With the exception of a 4.7/10 IGN review, this franchise reboot sequel is generally well-reviewed, if not remarkably so. Next best is $37 at JR.com.
 

Crysis 3 (Xbox 360, PS3) — $24.99 at Groupon. This makes the lowest price we’ve seen on the popular post-apocalyptic open-world shooter by $8. Next best is $39 at Amazon.
 

Hardware

Alienware X51 Gaming Desktop — $969 at Dell Home after coupon. Specs: Quad Core i7-3770, GeForce GTX 660, and Ubuntu Linux OS. List is $1,149.
 

PS3 Slim 320GB Console (Refurbished) — $199.99 at Groupon. New condition is $300 elsewhere. Just in case you don’t have a box and you’re itching to try some up the upcoming PS3 exclusives (Last of Us, etc.).
 

Turtle Beach Ear Force X31 Digital Wireless Gaming Headset (Refurbished) — $17.99 at Best Buy. Next best is $50 at Rakuten. New ones can go as much as $60+, and the newer model X32 goes for $87.
 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Advanced Micro Devices is launching a new high-end graphics card today with some serious horsepower. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker says it has retaken the crown for the world’s fastest graphics card.

The AMD Radeon HD 7990 card, with two chips, has more than 8.6 billion transistors, and it has 4,096 stream processors that can produce 8.2 teraflops of computing power. It can support 4K resolutions on the newest monitors and TVs, and can run six displays at once.

AMD is going to package the graphics card with dual Tahiti-based chips for $999, and it will throw in eight high-end PC games for free: BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs, and Deus Ex Human Revolution.

The number of transistors is impressive, considering the original microprocessor, the Intel 4004, had just 2,300 transistors. Nvidia’s most recent Kepler graphics processing unit (GPU) has about 7 billion transistors. That is an example of the progress of Moore’s Law, the observation by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore, who said in 1965 that chip transistor counts would double every couple of years.

Devon Nekechuk, AMD graphics product manager, said in a press briefing that the new cards are faster than Nvidia’s high-end GeForce GTX 690 chips and they can run games like Crysis 3 at 3840-by-2160 resolution. It can support 6GBs of GDDR5 memory, and it has 48 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 input-output for a total bandwidth of 96 gigabytes a second between graphics processors.

“We wanted to support the highest memory possible because the high-end games are memory starved,” Nekechuk said.

AMD also has its graphics chips in the upcoming Sony PlayStation 4. Nekechuk said that AMD’s 7990 cards were in PCs that Electronic Arts used to demo its upcoming Battlefield 4 video game. In scenes from games like the top-selling BioShock Infinite (pictured), AMD showed how the lighting was more crisp and details more fleshed out using the 7990.

Noise has been typically the curse of high-end graphics cards, as they run so hot that they need fans. But this chip and its graphics card produce about 37.8 dBAs of environmental sound, compared to 47.5 dBAs for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 690. The chip can put itself to sleep to save on power when necessary.

“When you’re playing a game with the AMD 7990, noise is no longer a factor,” Nekechuk said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

For those that have been eagerly awaiting the release of next week’s BioShock Infinite, you’re in luck (if you’re a PC gamer) because the retailers are in a full blown preorder bonus slug fest. 2K has given additional incentives for the digital preorder, offering additional freebie games such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown across all retailers. The best offer is currently at Green Man Gaming (best value with credit and three free games). Check the table below to compare and contrast all the pre-order bonus offers.

BioShock Infinite Preorder Bonus Comparison

All digital preorder from retailers below will get:

• Copy of the original Bioshock and XCOM: Enemy Unknown
• Industrial Revolution DLC pack (3 gear items, 500 bonus in-game currency, 5 lock picks, and the Industrial Revolution puzzle game)

Upcoming Releases

March 26: BioShock Infinite + Preorder Bonuses (PC Download) — $59.99 at Green Man Gaming. Choose between $15 Credit or $14 Cash Back and three free games. This is probably one of the better BioShock Infinite offers on the market. Compare bonus here.
 

March 26: Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel (Xbox 360, PS3) — $59.99 at Amazon. Another next week Tuesday release. Like Bioshock Infiniteeverywhere seems to be charging full price but Amazon is offering the game with a $20 credit. Credit is good towards nearly everything on Amazon.
 

Recent Releases

God of War: Ascension + God of War Saga (PS3) — $59.99 at GameStop. This is a pretty stellar deal considering you’re getting GoW: Saga, which contains all previous God of War titles.
 

Dead Space 3 (PC Download, Xbox 360, PS3) — $29.99 at Origin. Thanks to EA’s “player appreciation sale” the recently released Dead Space 3 is now at lowest ever price.
 

Crysis 3 (PC Download, Xbox 360, PS3) — $29.99 at Origin. Along with Dead Space 3, Crysis 3 joins the rank of heavily discounted games. Some may say the IPs are being diluted in pricing, but we say, more discounts please.
 

Console game deals

The Amazing Spider-Man Ultimate Edition (Wii U) — $29.99 at GameStop. A pretty recent March 5th Wii U release just dropped $10 at Gamestop. Amazon decided to price match but elsewhere the game is the full $39.99 list price.
 

PC download deals

Sid Meier’s Civilization V: Gods and Kings (PC Download) — $7.49 at GameFly. Next best is $30 at Green Man Gaming. Thursday-only GameFly has a great price for Civ V’s Gods and Kings expansion pack. Ratings are consistently good with a 4/5 on Amazon and 80/100 on Metacritic.
 

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition (PC Download) — $6 at Origin. Next best is $20 at GamersGate. The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition is one of the more notable “Player Appreciation” sale games out there. At only six bucks it’s actually cheapest ever by $4.
 

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition (PC Download) — $5.99 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Next best is $28 at Amazon. Another six dollar gem is Borderlands GOTY at GMG. It ties the previous low price only seen a month ago in a weekend sale. Otherwise the game has been around the $10-$30 mark. The current next best price online is $28 on Amazon. Game activates on Steam.
 

General sales

EA Player Appreciation Sale — More than 200 titles up to 70% off for one week only.
 

Gamefly Spring Break PC Sale — New round of deals each week, click-through to see today’s list.
 

Hardware deals

Wii U Console 32GB Deluxe Set with Nintendo Land — $349.99 at Target. Includes a $50 target gift card bnous.
 

PlayStation Vita 3G / WiFi with 8GB Memory Card — $249.99 at Sony. Next best is $280 at Walmart. Decent price for the 3G model with “proprietary” memory stick.
 

Samsung Series 7 Gamer Laptop — $1,399 at Microsoft. Model NP700G7C-S02US. Specs: Core i7-3630QM, 16GB RAM, 1.5 TB 7200RPM HDD + 8GB SSD, GeForce GTX 675M, and Blu-ray. Next best is $1,600 at NewEgg.
 

Lenovo IdeaPad Y400 952325U Laptop — $799 at Lenovo after coupon. Specs: Ivy Bridge Core i7-3630QM, 8GB RAM, GeForce GT 650M 2GB, Blu-ray, and Windows 8.
 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

It’s official. You really shouldn’t bother buying a Triple-A game on release date because the publisher is just going to slash prices by 50% the following month. Amidst all the SimCity drama and CEO resignation, EA launched a new deal this week, funnily enough calling it a “Player Appreciation Sale.” There are some decent titles in the mix for EA’s sale, but two titles that immediately stand out are Crysis 3 and Dead Space 3, both now at $30 with free shipping across all platforms.

Fans of action RPGs should really check out this week’s just-introduced “Humble Bundle Weekly Sale,” where individual titles are up for grabs at the $1 minimum price. For this week, the popular indie game Bastion is on sale. Pay more than the current average and you’ll receive additional goodies such as the soundtrack, art pack, sheet music, and cell phone ringtones.

Since last Thursday, Gamefly rolled out a “Spring Break PC Sale,” which will have new titles on sale each day until Friday. Titles of choice for the day are Deus Ex Human Revolution for $5 and Hitman Absolution at $12.50.

Note: We update our GamesBeat weekly deal post every Tuesday with the latest deals. For last week’s deals, check below the “Last Thursday” headline.

Tuesday New Deals

Crysis 3 (PC, 360, PS3) — $29.99 at Origin. For the price, the console versions are decidedly good deals, considering physical copies of the game are rarely on sale.
 

Dead Space 3 (PC, 360, PS3) — $29.99 at Origin. While we prefer the first and second Dead Space installments over the latest, this is a solid price for a recent release.
 

Bastion: Humble Bundle Weekly Sale — Pay What You Want. Pay more than the current average of $2.65 to receive additional digital goodies such as the soundtrack, or pay the $25 flat rate to get the game along with physical merchandise.
 

GameFly Spring Break PC Sale. Titles of choice: Deus Ex: Human Revolution for $5 and Hitman: Absolution for $12.50.
 

Last Thursday

If you think you’re done playing Assassin’s Creed 3, you’re not thinking like a game publishing executive. (Fact: DLCs will never end.) Happily for those looking for more content on AC3, the Season Pass is on sale this week at Gamefly for $24 after coupon. Five DLCs are planned with two released thus far: “The Hidden Secrets Pack” and “The Battle Hardened Pack.” Next week we’ll see the release of some actual gaming add-ons (in our opinion) with the first installment of the episodic The Tyranny of King Washington. If you plan to play through the entire 3 episodes and didn’t pre-order AC3, the Season Pass is worth considering.

On the console front, PS3 exclusive God of War: Ascension was released earlier this week. The only “deal” we’ve seen thus far is strangely at Gamestop for $5 off. While the $5 discount isn’t much to write home about, you’ll find that PS3 exclusives are rarely on sale so soon after release, with Newegg previous-year pre-orders being the only real savings we’ve seen. So if you didn’t pre-order 6 months ago at Newegg and you’re thinking about getting Ascension, Gamestop is the place to go (did we seriously just recommended buying something at Gamestop?!).

Recent Releases

This Tuesday’s release: God of War: Ascension (PS3) — $54.99 at GameStop after coupon. Yes we know $55 is just $5 off MSRP but everywhere else legitimate is selling this PS3 exclusive at full price. So it goes for console gaming deals.
 

This Tuesday’s release: Dead Space 3: Awakened (PC DLC) — $8 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Reviews so far are a mixed bag. List is $10 so at least you’re not paying full price here.
 

Upcoming Releases

Assassin’s Creed 3 Season Pass (PC Download) — $23.99 at GameFly after coupon. The season pass will give you access to all 5 DLCs (3 already released), the latest being the upcoming Tyranny of King Washington.
 

March 19th: Gears of War: Judgment (Xbox 360) — $59.99 at Microsoft. Yes that’s full price but it comes with pre-order bonuses: free Xbox LIVE 1600 points ($20 value), the Alex Brand playable character, and the Hammerburst weapon.
 

March 19th: The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Xbox 360, PS3) — $37.49 at Amazon. The comic-based game is excellent. We’re slightly iffy about this TV-based one. Everyone loves Daryl, but Merle? Meh.
 

PC Download Deals

Battlefield 3 Premium Edition (PC Download) — $24 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Activates on Origin. Usually around $40 to $50 at most places. Comes with base game, Premium Service, and Head Start Kit.
 

Crusader Kings 2 (PC Download) — $7.99 at GameFly after coupon. Steam activated. Fans of grand strategy titles will want to check this one out.
 

Saints Row The Third (PC Download) — $7.49 at GamersGate. Next best is $32 at Green Man Gaming. Steam activated. The industry is wack when you have studios that can produce solid titles like these and still have the publisher go kaput.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (PC Download) — $6 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. Activates on Origin. Usually around $20. Another decent title from a now defunct studio. Sorry for your loss, Rhode Island.
 

Combo Buying Deals

Best Buy:Buy 2 Pre-Owned Video Games, Get a 3rd FREE. Your average buy two get 1 free. All those pre-owned titles people trade in to Best Buy? They gotta offload them somehow.
 

GOG.com: Pick 5 Games, Save 80%. 20 games to choose from for this Good Old Game deals. Some decent titles including Alan Wake and King’s Bounty: Crossworlds.
 

If you enjoyed this week’s GamesBeat gaming deals, check back next Thursday, same bat-time, same bat-channel for more gaming deals.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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It’s time to add another issue to the list of what’s ailing publisher Electronic Arts. The company’s chief executive officer announced yesterday that he is stepping down, and it is still reeling from a public-relations snafu with the recently launched city-builder SimCity. Now, a security research firm revealed that members of EA’s digital-download service are vulnerable to attack from hackers.

A fatal flaw in EA’s Origin service may enable hackers to remotely execute software on a target’s Mac or PC, according to Malta-based security researchers ReVuln (via Time’s Techland blog). ReVuln published a paper earlier this month that explains the vulnerability in detail.

“Our team is constantly investigating hypotheticals like this one as we continually update our security infrastructure,” Origin spokesperson John Reseburg told GamesBeat.

The hack only takes seconds. It works by exploiting an “Origin://link” uniform resource identifier (URI), which publishers utilize to enable browsers to open and control actions on the Origin platform. Origin’s links follow a particular pattern. Hackers can mess around with that pattern to make the URI execute different commands. One of those commands could be bringing up a box that asks a user to download an application. They might trust that application because they’re on their trusted Origin site and click yes. The malware will then install, and the hacker will effectively “own” the system.

“Using games as an attack vector is pretty difficult to spot,” ReVuln security researcher Donato Ferrante told GamesBeat. “One of the reasons is that most people underestimate games as a possible way for attackers to compromise their systems.”

ReVuln released a proof of concept of the hack, which you can see in the video embedded into ReVuln’s Tweet:

EA Origin Insecurity paper: revuln.com/files/ReVuln_E… and video: vimeo.com/61361586 #BlackHatEU #0day—
ReVuln (@revuln) March 15, 2013

In October, ReVuln discovered a similar insecurity in Valve’s Steam digital service — EA’s primary competitor in the PC space. Ferrante claims Valve still hasn’t addressed the issue.

The security firm suggests that users set their browsers to pop up with a prompt when attempting to open a game in Origin or in Steam. More security-conscious users can install a tool like URIprotocolview to disable the “Origin://” URI.

VentureBeat security reporter Meghan Kelly contributed to this report

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This sponsored post is produced by Dealzon.

Welcome to the first installment of GamesBeat weekly top gaming deals, where we trot around the web and find you the best gaming deals out there. Deals are curated from a giant list of 100+ game deals that includes everything from the latest AAA titles to small-time indie games.

This week we see the release of two big titles: SimCity (in all its glorious server-connection error issues), and the well-received Tomb Raider. If you haven’t bought SimCity and you’re still planning to play after the server snafu, happily there’s a 20% promo code at GameFly, making the game $48 vs. the full retail price of $60. On the Square Enix front, Tomb Raider is available for $40 at Green Man Gaming for the Steam activated version. This isn’t the lowest price we’ve seen for Tomb Raider, but it is the cheapest since release date.

Recent Releases

March 5th release: SimCity (PC Download) — $48 at GameFly after coupon. List price is $60. Interestingly enough, Amazon even halted sales on SimCity temporarily, given all the server issues the game has been experiencing.
 

March 5th release: Tomb Raider (PC Download) — $40 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List price is $50. Steam activated version. GameFly also has it for $40 after coupon, in case that’s your preferred retailer.
 

March 5th release: The Sims 3: University Life (PC Download) — $32 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List price is $40. Yep, another expansion to The Sims 3. Activates on Origin.
 

Upcoming Releases

March 12 release: Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 (PC Download) — $24 at Green Man Gaming after coupon. List price for is $30. If you didn’t like the first installment of Sniper: Ghost Warrior, you probably should pass on this one.
 

March 26 release: Battlefield 3: End Game (PC DLC) — $12 at Green Man Gaming. List price is $15. The DLC includes four new maps, along with a Capture the Flag gameplay mode. Activates on Origin.
 

June 25 release: Company of Heroes 2 (PC Download) — $47.99 at GameFly. List price is $60. After THQ folded, Sega picked up Company of Heroes 2 developer Relic. Release date was recently announced, with a closed beta in the near future (yay).
 

Multiple Platforms

Crysis 3 (PC Download, Xbox 360, PS3) — $39.99 at GameStop. Amazon is price matching the console versions. Next best is $42 at Origin. A little bit wild that a triple-A game is discounted so much only a month after release.
 

Red Faction Armageddon (Xbox 360, PS3) — $5.99 plus $3.49 shipping at GameStop. Next best is $14 at Amazon. Released back in 2011, with a Metacritic score of about 75/100. Published by now defunct THQ (sniff).
 

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Xbox 360 Download Card) — $23.99 at Amazon. Skyrim is one of those titles that rarely gets discounted, especially for the 360 and PS3 versions. If you have slow net connection, you may want to skip on this deal.
 

Mobile and Classic Games

The Humble Bundle with Android 5 — Pay What you Want! The 5th installment to Humble Bundle for Android is out! If you pay at least $1, you’ll get Beat Hazard Ultra, Solar 2 and NightSky HD. Pay above the average of $6.65 (at time of writing) and you’ll also get Dungeon Defenders with DLCs and Legend of Super Hexagon.
 

Super Strategy Weekend — 50% Off at GOG. Eleven strategy titles on sale from GOG (aka Good Old Games) for $3 or $5. All DRM-free. Our picks would be the Heroes of Might and Magic series along with Age of Wonders.

Want a bigger list? Smaller list? Ditch the box art images? Feel free to leave feedback in the comments, and we’ll incorporate your suggestions as best as we can in future weekly gaming deal roundups.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli

SAN FRANCISCO — Cevat Yerli has become a regular on the press tour circuit. But that’s because his company, Germany’s Crytek, is having a big year. Electronic Arts just published Crytek’s flagship game, Crysis 3, the latest in a long-running sci-fi shooter game franchise. Now he’s promoting Warface, a free-to-play shooter that has more than 7.5 million players in Russia and will debut soon around the world. Trion Worlds plans to publish the game in the U.S., and the companies recently showed the game off to the press.

The first-person shooter online game is part of a move to reinvent  high-quality triple-A games as low-barrier, free-to-play titles that you can play with minimal hassle on a wide variety of hardware. Warface uses Crytek’s CryEngine and GFACE social platform. Crytek worked on Warface in some form for the past five years. It debuted in Russia last year, and it has become the No. 3 online game in that country.

We caught up with Yerli at the recent event where he showed off Warface multiplayer combat and GFACE. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: You have a tough comparison here in this market, where you’ve got Crysis 3 just coming out now. It’s outstanding in terms of graphics. Warface looks very good until you put it next to Crysis 3. How do you tell people, “Warface is still worth a try?”

Cevat Yerli: First and foremost, we’re trying a lot of new things with Warface. We went outside our comfort zone when we started making Warface. Warface had to be a game where you and your friends could join together. We wanted this to be a showcase for a new kind of platform, for GFACE. So the first thing we said is, “If you and your friends play each other in Warface, you should be able to let go of all that traditional single-player-focused historical luggage.”

If you think about the last 10 years, people started out making single-player games. Then they added multiplayer. Then they added co-op, or some of them did. But it was always first and foremost a single-player game. That was true of 99 percent of games in the retail space. With today’s technologies, if you forget the industry’s history and reset your mind, you get what Warface is doing. Then you don’t think about ever playing alone. You always play with somebody, with your friends.

Warface takes the benefit of online technologies, that connectivity. We built an entire new home for it to be able to do that so you can play with your friends in a transparent way. Because your friends may not have the latest PCs — they may have a laptop only, they might be playing from anywhere in the world — they need to be able to access the game. Accessibility means zero cost — 100 percent free. It also means it should be easy to get started and you should be able to run it from anywhere.

The mission was to prove out a very high-quality entry in free-to-play games — not the same as all Crytek games, but the best in the segment worldwide — and to be accessible to 95 percent of PCs globally. This includes Chinese PCs, Russian PCs, and the western world. Now, this is just at launch. Going forward, the first step now in the western world is to launch Warface within GFACE as a shooter that lives for the next five to 10 years. Rest assured, as soon as the business starts rolling, we are going to make sure that Warface will be the finest free-to-play shooter out there.

GamesBeat: So as a service, you can change it.

Yerli: We can update the hell out of it. [Laughs] We can update it in a fragmented way, too. Whether it’s a tiny pixel’s difference somewhere on the screen or changing the font on the menu or uploading whole map packs and new mods. DX11, DX12, whatever comes along. We can do so many things, and we will do so many things.

GamesBeat: Does anything hold back the graphical quality when it’s a multiplayer game?

Yerli: Multiplayer games are always traditionally slightly lower-quality. Even in Crysis 3, if you play multiplayer, it’s lower-quality than single-player. There are always more people running around and you have many more characters to handle on-screen. All of our games have been like that, back to Far Cry, as well as other games like Call of Duty. An online game can look pretty spectacular, but if you see it in contrast, the single-player game will always outshine it.

Single-player games can sometimes run at a lower framerate. A multiplayer game always has to make 60 frames per second. We’re running constantly at 60+ frames here, with a very broad spec. On a single-player game, we can sometimes drop to 30 frames and it’s fine, 25 and it’s fine. But in a multiplayer game, it has to have an absolutely robust framerate. People have to sacrificing some quality here and there. It’s a technical reality.

GamesBeat: In Russia you’ve got 7.5 million users. Are they playing on high-end PCs?

Yerli: It’s mixed. Some of them are playing low spec. Some of them are playing what we’d call somewhere between medium and high spec. A percentage of users are playing on super-high-end PCs now, but it’s only a percentage of users. The biggest bloc is the medium to high range. They can run the game at 60 to 100 frames per second, which is a super-fluid experience. But at the same time, when you compare to other games that are out there, none of them look as good or run as fast as this game. The CryEngine’s benefit is visible, it’s just at a different level. It’s less about pushing the quality and more about pushing the framerate of an online game.

GamesBeat: What are some observations that you guys have made about the activity in Russia? It’s a very popular market for World of Tanks, too. That game has monetized very well — 10 percent of the users are paying for something. It’s a very high monetization rate for that kind of hardcore game.

Yerli: The numbers are really good in Russia. I can’t talk about specifics right now, but we are the number three online game in Russia right now. There’s World of Tanks, then another game called Allods, then Warface. That’s in less than a year, since last April.

We’re growing substantially every month, with 20 percent sustained growth. There’s no slowdown whatsoever. We grew to our first million and then to five million much faster than World of Tanks. Just to give you an indication, we had 7.5 million users as of the end of January. In China, after one month, we have 3.5 million users. We’re now at 11 million users, effectively.

What’s interesting is that the crowd dynamics, what we’re learning from our data, show that the balance of classes and the balance of items are actually quite well spread. People are playing 50-50 between co-op and versus modes. The classes they’re choosing are falling into a regular 25-25-25-25 distribution. Maybe 24 here and 23 there, but it’s quite balanced. I’m happy that we have massaged the data enough, from a balance perspective, that people are choosing in a much more even way. That helped to prepare the game for the rest of the world. It allowed us to focus on the social nature of things, making sure that it’s a very high-quality social experience for the western world.

GamesBeat: Where else could you get this to run? Could this run on the next-gen consoles like PS4?

Yerli: From a pure technical perspective, yeah. Can it be a quality social free-to-play FPS? The social component is what I would be worried about. With GFACE we have built this realtime social network backend that rivals an MMO server on steroids. It can handle 50 or 100 million users effectively. We designed it for that, with this very horizontal, scalable architecture. It’s designed around realtime transactions in the background. It does what Facebook does, but in real time like Twitter. At the same time, it’s designed around entertainment, around content, and being together in this experience. The core game is the first phase of our launch. We want to broaden out into high-quality casual games and entertainment.

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We all know that Nintendo’s Wii U is in trouble. It sold more than 3 million units during the holidays and was in short supply. But with a dearth of new titles after that launch, sales have slowed down. Nintendo shaved its sales target for the period ending March 31 to 4 million, down from its previous estimate of 5.5 million hardware units.

And now the Game Developers Conference has published a survey showing that U.S. developers are making few titles for the Wii U. The GDC’s survey of 2,500 attendees showed that only 4.6 percent of developers are creating a Wii U game, and 6.4 percent plan to make their next game on the console.

This is a critical problem because the developers are the canaries in the coal mine. When they start dropping, there’s a bigger problem.

The Wii U is a brand-new console, but its developer support is significantly below the level for the Xbox 360. About 13.2 percent of companies are making games for Microsoft’s current machine, and 14 percent plan to make their next title for the Xbox 360. About 13 percent are making current games for the Sony PlayStation 3, and 12.4 percent will do so again. Sony’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 could put a big dent in developer support just as Sony’s early announcement of the PlayStation 2 helped kill off support for the Sega Dreamcast.

By comparison, developers are moving en masse to mobile. About 55 percent are making games for smartphones and tablets, and 58 percent plan to do so for their next title. And 48 percent are making games on the Mac and PCs. The only weaker platforms than the Wii U are the Nintendo 3DS and the Sony PlayStation Vita. Despite the grim picture, Nintendo chief executive Satoru Iwata said that no price cut is coming for the Wii U, whose basic version is selling for $300 in the U.S.

It’s not a happy state of affairs for Nintendo, which launched the Wii console in 2006 and sold more than 100 million units worldwide. It has sold more consoles than Microsoft and Sony in this generation, but for the last couple of years, the Wii has been weak. That’s why Nintendo introduced the Wii U, which has a tablet controller, last fall. But the naysayers were out early, saying the Wii U’s processing power was feeble and that its support for only one tablet controller was a major problem.

Cevat Yerli, the chief executive of game studio Crytek, said that his company made a Wii U version of Crysis 3, its flagship game that just debuted. But Crytek didn’t have a license to publish games on Nintendo, and his publisher, Electronic Arts, hit its own impasse over deciding to publish on the Wii U. And with that, Yerli said in an interview with GamesBeat, “Crysis 3 on Wii U had to die.”

Now a lot of people are tossing rocks at Nintendo. EA has offered very little support for the system, and EA chief executive John Riccitiello said that the “true next generation” consoles will begin with the launch of machines from Sony and Microsoft. Cliff Bleszinski, the former design director at Epic Games, said that Nintendo may need to get out of hardware.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said that Nintendo “misfired on the Wii U.” Sales were weak in January, and Microsoft’s old Xbox 360 outsold the new Nintendo machine that month. Another marquee developer, who asked not to be identified, said, “The Wii U is already a non-event. I couldn’t be more disappointed with the launch titles.” Mario Wynands of gamemaker Sidhe said that he had multiple conversations with developers who are dialing back their support of the Wii U because of the weak sales.

“While I believe they need to build a very strong digital marketplace for both developers and consumers longterm, their current business model demands they continue to respond to the needs of retailers and hardcore consumer,” Wynands said. “Fundamentally, they just need to start selling a lot more hardware in order to create a viable marketplace and survive long enough in order to be able to transition their business.”

David Cole, a longtime analyst at DFC Intelligence, said, “The Wii U is in big trouble. Nintendo didn’t get out in front with [games on the Wii U], and that means third parties are cautious. We are lowering our Wii U forecasts quite a bit, and it can become an ugly cycle. It is really on Nintendo’s shoulders to turn it around. They can’t rely on third parties.”

Ben Sawyer, a leader of the games for health movement, said that Nintendo’s ecosystem isn’t open enough compared to smartphones and tablets.

Nintendo isn’t giving up yet. In a statement to GamesBeat, the company said, “[We are] proud of the relationships we have built with all our third-party partners, from the large publishers and their well-known franchises to our independent developer partners making incredible downloadable games for the Nintendo eShop.”

Indeed, while the Wii whiffed at coming up with a rival to Microsoft’s Xbox Live, some developers say they like the eShop, where gamers can download new titles.

Nintendo also said it “has robust third-party support on both Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The biggest publishers in the world — Ubisoft, Activision, EA, 2K, SEGA, Disney, Warner Bros. and Namco Bandai, to name a few — have brought their best franchises to Wii U with games like Call of Duty: Black Ops II, ZombiU, Scribblenauts Unlimited, Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition, Assassin’s Creed III, Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, Just Dance 4, and Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. On Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo has a great lineup of third-party games, including the upcoming Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate from Konami and Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate from Capcom.”

Nintendo has also done a good job of recruiting smaller developers. Nicalis, WayForward, Gaijin Games, Tomorrow Corporation, and Renegade Kid are all in the midst of working on downloadable titles for the Wii U.

Alex Neuse and Mike Roush, co-founders of Gaijin Games, said they enjoy developing on the Wii U and it is a step up from the Wii. They just released Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien for the Wii U eShop.

“We see great business potential in the Wii U eShop. It’s a particularly indie-friendly distribution channel, and if you’re an independent developer and want to get your game on a console, the eShop looks like it might be the next big thing,” the Gaijin founders said in an email. “But above and beyond the eShop, the Miiverse has been an integral part of growing our community of fans. Being able to interact with fans in real time, on the console, while the game is running is an incredible feature that only Nintendo has. If Nintendo can manage to continue their efforts towards wooing indies, as they have been doing so far, they could probably corner the console indie market without much trouble.”

Of course, Nintendo has always been its own savior. First-party games on the Wii U are spread out and slow in coming. But if its own gamemakers create bigger hits, then console sales could pick up, the third-party developers could return, and the ecosystem will look better.

Even if this griping about the Wii U’s prospects continues, don’t expect Nintendo to waver. The company has been in tough spots before, and it has pulled off turnarounds. It can still point to Sega and say that getting out of hardware is not always a good solution. Nintendo is working on some big games. And it still has a hold on young audiences and families, which are different from the audiences for the other consoles, said Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research.

Whatever happens with Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony shouldn’t gloat about the slow acceptance of the Wii U.

Alex St. John, the co-creator of Microsoft’s DirectX technology, who has been predicting the death of consoles for years, said, “I think Apple is the next-generation console and that all of the next-generation consoles will fade. If your next-generation ‘console’ isn’t a cell phone that can deliver a console experience to a TV, you’re already obsolete.”

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The nanosuit is a technical masterpiece. It bonds with the user on a genetic level, giving you the power to augment your strength, protect yourself with extra armor, or turn you invisible with its cloaking capabilities.

But the most effective piece of equipment in Crysis 3 (out today for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) has nothing to do with the suit, the fancy guns, or the explosives — that honor belongs to the hunting bow. It’s all you’ll ever need to take out your human and extraterrestrial foes with extreme precision.

The bow is just one example of developer Crytek’s refined focus on combat in Crysis 3. The first-person shooter (reviewed on the Xbox 360) arguably has the best implementation of the do-whatever-it-takes style set by its predecessors. You’re given complete freedom to dispose your enemies in any way you see fit, a process streamlined with improved nanosuit abilities and upgrades.

The story picks up 23 years after the events of Crysis 2, where the threat of the alien species known as the Ceph continues to grow stronger. But no one except the lone hero Laurence “Prophet” Barnes is aware of this danger, so he must convince everyone else (and stop the conniving Cell corporation) to help him save the world from destruction.

Crysis is typically known more for its taxing PC requirements — and the gorgeous results — than for the actual content on the disc. But Crysis 3 should change that as Crytek delivers a great-looking game with a riveting narrative and the intoxicating gameplay to back it up.

What you’ll like 

The Predator Bow

Crytek had a good reason to prominently feature the Predator Bow on the cover of Crysis 3. It’s a permanent fixture in your arsenal — even if you wanted to, you can’t swap it out with something else. And with so many ways to customize it, the bow is the most versatile weapon you’ll wield.

You can adjust its draw weight, which affects the speed of pulling an arrow taut before you release it and alters how much damage it deals. The “medium” draw weight is good for all-around situations, “low” has a fast draw speed meant for weaker targets, and “strong” is best for tougher enemies with its slow draw speed and high damage (it can pin humans and aliens to a wall). In addition to your normal hunting arrows, you can use special types that deliver an electric shock, a timed explosive, or an “air burst” that’s useful for killing groups of weaker enemies.

When you combine the bow with your cloaking ability, you’re unstoppable. Shooting arrows doesn’t disrupt the cloak and leave you vulnerable in the same way that using your firearms does. Cell operatives will cower in fear as you pick them off one by one, with the last survivor making one last desperate attempt to call for reinforcements. What he doesn’t know is that you’re already standing some distance behind him, with your bow aimed squarely at the back of his head.

Stalking your prey

Though we’ve seen the Ceph tear through New York City before in Crysis 2, Crysis 3′s version shows a city dressed in its best postapocalyptic Sunday clothes. Nature’s reclamation of the famous urban jungle — liberally spreading tall leaves of grass, flowers, trees, and swamps between dismantled skyscrapers — makes it nearly unrecognizable.

This makes it the perfect playground for you to use your weapons. While not an open-world game, you have a lot of room to explore and adapt to the many Cell soldiers and Ceph roaming the area. This is where your nanosuit’s tactical visor becomes your best friend: enemy targets and weapon caches clearly appear onscreen (marked by light blue arrows) after you “tag” them with your visor. It’ll also give you detailed information, such as the type of soldier you’re facing, the weapons they carry, and whether they notice you (via a color-coded system).

So you can plan your attacks even before you enter a hostile area. You can kill enemies off quietly with silenced weapons, approach them directly with your armor ability turned on, or find some happy medium between the two. A variety of nanosuit upgrades can further influence which of these paths you take. Think of them as like the multiplayer “perks” you find in Call of Duty (and in Crysis 3), but in a single-player campaign. These upgrades can give you a longer cloaking time, increased health, and over a dozen other nanosuit benefits.

With all these tools at my disposal, I challenged myself to come up with some creative kills, such as shocking groups of enemies in a shallow pond with an electric-powered arrow or stomping them from the air and destroying the survivors with a large machine gun. Swapping between my upgrades on the fly made each combat encounter feel like a thrilling and dynamic puzzle. At the end of my eight-hour adventure, I was still craving more.

‘It was never just about the suit’

The narrative in the first Crysis was too flimsy for my tastes as it was barely more than window dressing for the sandbox-style combat on the fictional island of Lingshan. Crysis 2 fared a bit better but suffered from some last-minute and inexplicable twists. Surprisingly, Crysis 3 brings all those threads together in a coherent and, at times, poignant sort of way.

Much of this centers around Prophet and his struggle over being both man and machine. Covered head to toe with the nanosuit, you’d be forgiven for thinking Prophet is just another cybernetic warrior who came from the same supersoldier school as Halo’s Master Chief. But he’s much more than that. Shaped by the traumatic events of Crysis and the developments in Crysis 2, Prophet isn’t even sure he’s human anymore. Characters and collectible documents often refer to him as an “it” or a piece of “hardware.” Other reports you find have him callously calculating the veracity of people’s statements, and he uses hard numbers and statistics to explain situations rather than communicate with his feelings.

At the outset of Crysis 3, he’s no longer Laurence Barnes the man — he’s Prophet, the most exceptional posthuman soldier ever created. The Cell corporation and the Ceph are obviously more significant threats to the world, but Prophet’s personal narrative is compelling. Seeing how he changes and the way his allies react to those changes is fascinating.

Crysis 3 isn’t some grand philosophical treatise on the dangers of merging humans with technology, but the fact that Crytek attempts to add some meaningful discussion to this sci-fi trope is impressive and way more thought-provoking than I expected.

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Crytek is over retail games. In two to five years the Crysis developer plans to move entirely to the free-to-play model. This has some gamers worried about the studio’s future releases.

Crytek chief executive officer Cevat Yerli doesn’t want you to worry. It’s not gonna make Facebook games or anything.

“The free-to-play business model allows us to operate game services that evolve over time and thus it can deliver the content our community wants to see,” Yerli told GamesBeat. “It is a fair business model that enables us as a developer to keep on working on new content and fine tune our game experience. Isn’t that what you want from your favorite game?”

Some gamers definitely want that. Valve’s Team Fortress 2 is evidence that consumers are ready to support free-to-play multiplayer titles, but what about single-player campaigns?

Well, according to Yerli, single-player will have to evolve.

“I believe that single-player modes will have to transform to blockbuster quality co-op gameplay experiences that are on par with current single-player campaigns, but much more fun,” said Yerli. “This opens up new opportunities for creative storytelling, but there’s no doubt it will also become a challenge when it comes to production of such content.”

It also sounds less lucrative than adding some new hats to a multiplayer game that people are playing for hundreds of hours.

A barrier too high

“For some classical retail games, you have to pay up to $120 if you still want to be able to play together with your friends after the third or fourth DLC pack,” said Yerli. “We believe that any investment upfront is an entry barrier that should be removed. In our upcoming shooter Warface, you can play without spending any money at all. If you really like the game and you want to progress faster or you want any items to individualize your character you can spend money on it.”

In many free-to-play games, consumers can actually spend more than $120, but Yerli is right — spending that money in a free-to-play game won’t cordon players off from their friends that don’t pay. That introduces a different problem called “pay to win.” It’s the unofficial terminology gamers use to reference the concept that those who pay the most in some free-to-play games always win. Team Fortress 2 is an example of how that isn’t always the case. Crytek claims the same is true of Warface.

In the immediate future, Crytek still has shooter Homefront 2 and its motion-controlled Kinect game Ryse in the works. Those titles will both have full single-player campaigns. After that, it’s possible all Crytek games could feature co-op and multiplayer modes only.

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Check out more from this interview: Crytek going fully free-to-play in 2 to 5 years and Homefront is Cevat Yerli’s dream game.

On the Friday after the THQ auction, Vigil Games shut down for good. The Monday after that? The core members of that developer announced they were now Crytek USA.

I wanted to find out how this happened, so I ignored the boundaries of time zones and got Crytek chief executive officer Cevat Yerli in Germany on the phone along with Crytek USA’s newly appointed chief executive officer, David Adams in Austin. The pair explained what it was like to establish a new developer over just a one or two meetings.

If you aren’t aware of the specifics, on Jan. 23, the Bankruptcy Court of the District of Delaware held an auction to sell off pieces of publisher THQ to the highest bidders. Darksiders developer Vigil games received no bids and by Jan. 25, THQ shut down the studio and let everyone go. Then, on Jan. 28, Crytek announced that former Vigil lead David Adams would run Crytek USA Corp. as CEO and would bring on the core members of his team from that now-shuttered studio.

How did Crytek USA happen?

“We were surprised when nobody bid on Vigil,” Yerli told GamesBeat. “We would have liked to have bid, but there were too many unknowns.”

Through the THQ bidding process, Crytek was most concerned with nailing down the rights to the Homefront franchise, which it’s developing at its U.K. studio.

“But when nobody bid [on Vigil], I thought that maybe we could reconsider bidding,” said Yerli. “But eventually we decided not to because the projects [the developer was working on] weren’t strategically fit for us, but I really liked David [when I talked to him] on the phone. He made a very good impression on me as someone who really cared, someone who is really passionate about what he does, and someone who is passionate about the team he works with.”

Yerli decided to fly out to Austin to talk with Adams and possibly to visit the studio sometime during the week of Jan. 28 to have a closer look. Crytek had already begun planning to start a U.S. Crytek corporation, and the executive thought that maybe the Vigil team could work. But THQ laid off everyone at Vigil before Yerli left.

“We had chosen Austin as the destination for [our U.S. branch], and we needed a lean and core team of expert to run the studio,” said Yerli. “At the same time, we didn’t want to continue with Darksiders 3, since that doesn’t fit with our strategy. So when I heard that [THQ laid off everyone at Vigil], I decided on Saturday morning to fly out to meet with them to see if the team would be interested to join our mission, which is significantly different than what this team has done before.”

At this point, Yerli told me that he based his decision to act quickly on his conversations with Adams and his time with the Darksiders games. Yerli hasn’t finished Darksiders II, but he likes what he’s played so far. Yet at this point, Yerli still isn’t sure if the former Vigil team is right for Crytek USA. The CEO hasn’t seen a single résumé or held an interview with anyone.

Meanwhile, in Austin, the employees of Vigil were trying to figure what to do next. Adams had talked with Yerli on Thursday but wasn’t sure what would come of it. He was also preoccupied with a studio crumbling all around him.

“It was an interesting time,” Adams told GamesBeat. “I was telling everyone that [Friday] was their last day. I was pretty busy trying to help people find jobs. Sure, Crytek was gonna come out the following week, and that was cool. It sounded like a good opportunity, but my mind was really focused on finding people a place to land.”

Then at 8 p.m. Friday, the day Vigil shut down for good, Cevat Yerli’s brother Avni called Adams to tell him that Cevat was getting on a plane to Austin as soon as possible.

“He came out the next day,” said Adams. “We met, and the day after we were pulling a new studio together called Crytek USA.”

But how does something like this happen so fast?

“This is probably the fastest establishment ever [for a new studio],” Yerli told GamesBeat through a laugh. “I don’t think you could establish a studio faster than this. Only a few people within Crytek even knew this was happening because we didn’t have time to update people. So it was a surprise for a lot of people within Crytek.”

Yerli is right. On Jan. 25, Vigil dissolved. On Jan. 28, Crytek announced Crytek USA. That is a busy weekend. I’m lucky if I remember to do the laundry in a similar time frame.

“I was in Delaware for the auction,” Adams said. “I was front row for the entire preceding. I had to come in the next day and tell everybody, and then from there it was this whirlwind into Crytek USA.”

So I asked Yerli what gave him the confidence to move so boldly in this situation.

“I met with David and some of his former colleagues and his dear friends,” said Yerli. “I shared with them, before meeting the other team members, how I see the world. I told them what we want to do and where we want to go [with Crytek]. But I also wanted to get to know them. I wanted to know them as humans, as team members, and as friends. And within a short amount of time I got very comfortable with David and his friends.”

Yerli said he wasn’t worried about discovering the developers’ technical or creative abilities because he believes that the Darksiders games speak for themselves.

“My point is, I saw a history of games that spoke to the team’s capabilities,” said Yerli. “I saw, from a corporate-culture perspective, a very fit core team, and I saw a strong leader in front of me.”

But that was just a small get together with Adams and some lead developers from Vigil. Before meeting with the other dozen former Vigil employees that Adams was thinking of inviting to Crytek USA, Yerli knew how he would decide whether or not to go through with this initiative.

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Advanced Micro Devices is squarely targeting hardcore gamers with its AMD Never Settle Reloaded bundle, which gives a bunch of free games with a graphics card purchase.

AMD makes the Radeon series of graphics chips, which are housed in add-on cards for persona computers. For gamers who buy the graphics cards, AMD has a special offer. The whole point is to try to get an edge over rivals Nvidia and Intel and work AMD’s brands into the minds of hardcore gamers, who spend tons of money on both gaming hardware and games.

If you buy two AMD Radeon HD 7900 series cards (for use in a single gamer PC), you can get six games for free: Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs.

For the purchase of a single AMD Radeon HD 7900 series card, you can get Crysis 3 and BioShock Infinite for free. If you buy an AMD Radeon HD 7800 series card, you can get BioShock Infinite and Tomb Raider for free, said Devon Nekechuk, product manager at AMD, in a briefing call. If you prefer, you can get DmC and BioShock Infinite with an AMD Radeon HD 7800 series card.

Tomb Raider debuts on March 5, while BioShock Infinite is out on March 26. DmC: Devil May Cry is already out. And Crysis 3 debuts Feb. 19. For these games, AMD will give you a code once you register with them. You can use that code to download the games on Steam or your preferred platform once they become available.

Last fall, AMD launched its AMD Never Settle Bundle with four games: Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Medal of Honor: Warfighter. That amounted to $170 in free games with a graphics card purchase. And in the spring of 2012, AMD gave three games away with a card purchase.

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Electronic Arts reported earnings today that narrowly beat expectations for the third-fiscal quarter ended Dec. 31. Given the news in the game industry lately, it could have been a lot worse.

Redwood City, Calif.-based EA reported non-GAAP earnings per share of 57 cents a share, compared to 99 cents a year ago. Non-GAAP revenues were $1.18 billion, just shy of expectations. A year ago, revenues were $1.651 billion. Analysts expected 56 cents a share and $1.294 billion in revenues.

EA is one of the biggest independent makers of video games. Since its revenues are so large and it is diversified across so many platforms, the company is a bellwether for the health of the overall game industry. It is, however, still making the transition to digital revenues.

EA’s earnings indicated that the holiday quarter was weak for the whole industry, which is in transition as Nintendo ramps up Wii U sales and Microsoft and Sony prepare to launch new hardware.

“Despite a challenging quarter, we were able to deliver non-GAAP EPS at the high end of our guidance range,” said John Riccitiello, chief executive at EA. “We are investing for the future wave of growth that we foresee in digital and console.”

In after-hours trading, EA’s stock is down 1.19 percent to $14.90 a share, probably because EA guided lower for the full fiscal year. In a conference call, Riccitiello blamed the revenue shortfall on poor Medal of Honor: Warfighter sales and “industry head winds.”

EA grew by driving high-profit digital revenues and expense controls, said Blake Jorgensen, chief financial officer. Peter Moore, chief operating officer, said that EA was the No. 1 publisher on Apple’s iOS devices worldwide in 2012. He also said EA had six of the top 20 games in Western markets i n 2012, compared to four in 2011.

For the fourth fiscal quarter ending March 31, analysts had anticipated earnings of $1.22 billion in revenues and 72 cents a share in non-GAAP earnings. Analysts are expecting full-fiscal year earnings of $4.079 billion and non-GAAP earnings per share of $1.02.

EA lowered its own full-year non-GAAP sales outlook from $4.05 billion to $4.2 billion to $3.78 billion to $3.88 billion. Earnings per share for the full fiscal year are targeted at 86 cents to $1 a share. For the fourth fiscal quarter, EA expects non-GAAP revenue of $1.025 billion to $1.125 billion. Earnings per share are expected to be 57 cents to 72 cents.

Before the earnings came out, analyst Arvind Bhatia said he was cautious about the stock in the near term, but he believes EA will benefit from new console launches and its diversified model in the long term. GameStop, the industry’s largest game retailer, had already reported weaker-than-expected earnings.

Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush Securities, said in a note before the call that he expected EA’s results to be driven by international sales of the FIFA Soccer and Need for Speed franchises.  He had expected third-fiscal quarter results of $1.33 billion in revenue and earnings per share of 61 cents. EA’s big releases in the third fiscal quarter were Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and catalog sales of FIFA Soccer 13 and Madden NFL 13 (pictured).

FIFA 13 sold 12 million units in the third quarter, up 23 percent from a year ago. FIFA 13′s digital revenue was above $100 million, up 98 percent from a year earlier. Total FIFA digital net revenue in the first three quarters of the fiscal year were $230 million.

For the quarter ending March 31, EA has four major titles in the pipeline: Dead Space 3, Crysis 3, Army of Two: Devil’s Cartel and Sim City. EA said both Dead Space 3 and Crysis 3 preorders are ahead of the preorders for the previous games.

EA’s non-GAAP digital revenue was $407 million in the third fiscal quarter, compared to $377 million a year ago. EA said that Battlefield 3 Premium generated $108 million in the quarter in sales and it now has 2.9 million subscribers. EA said that The Simpsons: Tapped Out was a top-grossing game on iOS in the quarter, generating $23 million in digital revenue.

EA’s mobile games and services generated $100 million in the quarter, up 18 percent from a year ago. EA’s Origin game downloading service has over 39 million registered users, including 17 million mobile users. Trailing 12-month non-GAAP digital revenue was $1.5 billion, up 37 percent.

EA has $1.5 billion in cash, but 60 percent of it is held offshore. (There are tax consequences to bring it back).

Games don’t have to be based on movies or sports teams to feature real humans. As 3D rendering technology advances, more and more developers turn to flesh-and-bone actors, and models to give life to their protagonists and antagonists.

In the case of Far Cry 3′s Vaas Montenegro (top image), Ubisoft hired Canadian actor Michael Mando to portray, voice, and provide motion capture for the sadistic madman as well as star in promotional material. Vaas’s appearance (combined with Mando’s performance) give the title an extra layer of realism.

I made a list of 20 celebrity sightings in modern video games with side-to-side images of their in-game models next to their real faces. Hover the cursor over the image below to launch the gallery.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Let the graphics wars begin. Cevat Yerli, chief executive of Crytek, argues that his company’s upcoming game, Crysis 3 (to be published Feb. 19 by Electronic Arts) will “set the benchmark” in 3D graphics for games for the next two years. He believes the PC is racing ahead of the consoles now in terms of the beauty of its graphics. Crysis 3 will feature wonders such as swaying elephant grass, piercing beams of sunlight, water with true reflections, and a host of other special effects that make the game more immersive.

So far, Yerli said he isn’t impressed with the competition from Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. After we got a good look at Crysis 3, we have to agree that seeing is believing. Yerli’s got a spectacular-looking game. We caught up with Yerli at a recent event where he showed off Crysis 3 multiplayer and a new level from the single-player campaign. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: So tell us, what’s the latest? We haven’t seen Crysis 3 since E3.

Cevat Yerli: Today we’re talking about two things in single-player. One of them is one of the single-player Wonders, what we call the Fields. It’s a level built around an old train yard that’s totally overgrown with tall grass fields.

What Crytek is about, as a studio, is technology inspiring gameplay in different ways. Technology opens up new ways of playing the game. With the Fields level, we wanted the effects of the grass to be part of decision-making. How do you traverse grass? How do you negotiate grass? How does the AI negotiate it? The interplay of all those factors gives us a new emergent gameplay experience. It’s not just beautiful. It’s part of the gameplay experience. We’ve done that for all of the Seven Wonders. The visual identity is not just visual. It’s actually a gameplay driver.

GamesBeat: It felt like the raptors in Jurassic Park or something like that.

Yerli: Yeah, there are some nice movie references we’ve looked at as well, like the raptors. The scariness of being in that tall grass has been depicted in horror movies before. We wanted to let you feel hunted, but you can hunt them down as well. We also apply that same Seven Wonders principle to multiplayer. Some of it you can see here, but we’ll be showing more at a later date and when you play the game.

What we’re showing here is a multiplayer mode called the Hunter mode. With Hunter mode, the production goal is to make a single-player-esque multiplayer experience. Crysis is known for being a single-player game first, as opposed to something like Call of Duty which is more of a multiplayer game first, right? We wanted stay true to the sandbox experience of Crysis and bring that back through the urban rainforest and make this really new kind of experience for Crysis 3. But we were also thinking, “What can we do in the multiplayer space?” Apart from the usual suspects like deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag, things like that.

Why do people play Crysis? It’s for the single-player. So we thought, “Can we do a multiplayer experience that’s like the single-player?” Single-player is asymmetric. You’re outnumbered, usually, in the single-player game. There are always more enemies than friends. You’re not just fighting one guy. You’re always fighting five or 10. So, can it be asymmetric? Also, can the asymmetric parts be played by humans? Sure, we can do that. We started experimenting with one versus five or two versus 10. When we did two on 10, that turned out to be pretty cool.

You and a friend play Nanosuit Hunters. You’re up against CELL Troopers. We give them the best weapons they’ve got, and the best weapons the Nanosuit has, the composite bow. We put everyone under time pressure, time-boxing it for three minutes or five minutes. Three minutes is the default setup. We make it a survival game, a hunt. The CELL team has to survive and get to their evacuation points. What happens is that it becomes a very personal, player-created story experience. “I was hiding there, and then I saw him come in on stealth mode. I saw the reflection as he passed by me.” They make up their own stories. It’s the closest thing to the feeling of a single-player game.

GamesBeat: So it’s asymmetric multiplayer?

Yerli: Yeah, with a synchronous setup. I’m very proud of this, because it’s a fresh, new take on the shooting experience. It’s one of the most innovative things I’ve seen in a genre where everything already seems to have been done. I’m very excited about it, because people will be able to migrate from the single-player hunting experience into a multiplayer hunting experience very easily.

GamesBeat: That’s the common theme, then? This is a hunter’s game?

Yerli: Yeah. The hunting theme is an integral part of the story. We want you to feel like a badass. The enemies are tough, but there are tools and equipment in nature that empower you. If you use nature to your advantage, and if you use the Nanosuit in the right way, and if you use the composite bow in the right way, you’re the ultimate hunter.

GamesBeat: The bow and arrow seems to fit pretty well into that theme.

Yerli: That’s why we created it. We wanted to make sure that you feel, when you… It’s not just pulling a trigger. You span the bow and release it. It’s a much more satisfying experience — taking out an alien with an arrow and watching him blow up.

GamesBeat: It feels like it’s technical quality has improved since E3. Have you been working on that?

Yerli: We finalized the engine, yeah. That’s what’s happened. We optimized the engine in the last few weeks. What you see here is very fresh code. The code is very optimized. We’re stretching more out of the Xbox and the PlayStation, but the PC is the one that really shines. I’m very happy with where we are on the console platforms, but our goal is to be a DX11-only game. We want to push the PC forward.

GamesBeat: And you have a February release date now?

Yerli: Yes, we’re launching in February. It’s the 19th in the U.S. and the 22nd in Europe.

GamesBeat: For how many years have you worked on this, then?

Yerli: About two and a half years. There was some overlap with Crysis 2. The majority of the team jumped from Crysis 2 to Crysis 3 after taking a break, but there was a small team already doing pre-production on Crysis 3 before Crysis 2 was quite finished.

GamesBeat: How large did your team get on this project? A couple of hundred people?

Yerli: Counting absolutely everybody, probably 250. It’s not any bigger than Crysis 2, though. Crysis 2 was actually a larger team, because we were building so much content for the console versions. We had no console experience at that point. A good 100 people or so were there to simply make up for that lack of experience. When I look forward, Crysis 3 has the kind of team size that I would expect for our next-gen games in the next five years or so. They’ll peak at 250 people, tops.

GamesBeat: How do you compare this kind of effort to something like Warface?

Yerli: On Warface, right now, we’re at a peak count of about 150 or so. Warface is a true triple-A investment for us. Our company’s intention is to make games that are accessible for everyone for free, as long as they want to play it for free. In this world, the way I see it is that nobody has to be a pirate anymore. Everybody can be legal. If somebody wants to play, let’s say, the next Crysis game, in my ideal world there will be a free-to-play component to that. If people don’t want to pay money for it, they can just play it. They can still be part of the community.

Warface is not going to be something where we release it and then we update it for a year. Warface is a five-year service, or maybe even 10 years. We’re investing in building the game up until launch, and then we still have five years to go. It’s a very different development and release strategy. With Crysis 3, you peak differently. Warface is a much more flat organization.

GamesBeat: How do you think Crysis 3 is going to look compared to Unreal Engine 4 games or next-gen console games?

Yerli: I honestly think that Unreal Engine 4 would not be able to do Crysis 3 on consoles right now. The PC version could do it, maybe, but it would call for a higher PC spec. CryEngine 3 is capable of doing anything Unreal Engine 4 can. We don’t need to tick up the number to CryEngine 4.

As far as next-gen console games, I think Crysis 3 on the PC will be very comparable. Because it’s a high-end PC title, implicitly it’s a next-gen game. It’s just a next-gen PC game.

GamesBeat: Is there anything else that will be your most direct competition, then, in terms of graphics quality?

Yerli: No game that I know of. Well, there’s another one that we’re doing. [laughs] Crysis 3 on PC is going to be a benchmark experience for at least two years. When I see what’s happening on the PC market, and even what we do. The PC market is not going to grow vastly more before a lot of games catch up. We had the same thing with the first Crysis on PC. When Crysis launched, it was the high-end benchmark for a good three years. I think Crysis 3 is going to do that again.

GamesBeat: What would you say is the kind of scene that pushes the graphics to the limit? Scenes like the grass there, or something else?

Yerli: Each of the environments are pushing the density, the production density, and the unique assets that we are putting through the pipeline. Loading it from the disc to memory and to graphics. That pipeline is very intense, unlike anything we’ve done.

Usually you have one asset that you re-use a lot. Crysis has a lot of unique assets, and we’re re-using a lot of those as well. We’re pulling a lot of tricks to make both the unique assets and the density happen. That’s a very big challenge.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Epic Games president Michael Capps retired, Call of Duty: Black Ops II earned $1 billion in 15 days, Irrational Games pushed BioShock Infinite’s release date again, and Zynga filed to make real-money gambling games in Nevada.

You’ll also find reviews for Far Cry 3,  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – Dragonborn, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Writer Rumble as well as previews for Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.

News:

• The DeanBeat: Expert advice on staying alive in Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer
• Army of TWO: The Devil’s Cartel makes the Mexican drug wars seem glitchy
• What do game investors think about Kickstarter?
• Irrational Games pushes back BioShock Infinite release date
• PMC and Machinima will tout this year’s DICE Summit video game awards show
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II beats Halo 4 in NPD’s dismal November game sales list
• These missing Tomb Raider games could be entombed for good
• Dishonored’s first downloadable add-on pack is all about challenging your skills
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Lego Lord of the Rings, Scribblenauts Unlimited, and New Super Mario Bros. 2
• Peanut Labs extends its self-serve platform for creating market surveys (exclusive)
• God of War: Ascension multiplayer finds a sweet spot between shooters and fighters
• With ex-Zynga developer carrying the flag, Kixeye invades Canada
• Zynga files for right to make real-money gambling games in Nevada
• Assassin’s Creed III’s first add-on pack is erasing player progress
• The Four Bikers of the Apocalypse usher in the second add-on pack for Trials Evolution
• Pikmin 3 slips out of Wii U ‘launch window,’ will debut in spring
• Fire Emblem Awakening out on 3DS in North America in early February
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II hits $1B in sales in 15 days
• Bunchball shows off the ‘rock stars’ of gamification
• ‘Toxic’ League of Legends player responds to his 1-year ban
• Zynga’s new theme park game CoasterVille goes live today
• Facebook announces top games of 2012: SongPop music trivia game comes out on top
• Social media surfaces layoffs at game companies NCSoft and Petroglyph
• A Wii U update is available now — it should improve system stability
• The Ins & Outs of PlayStation All Stars’ newest fighters: Kat and Emmett
• Epic Games president Michael Capps retires
• DICE slips in a Mirror’s Edge reference (tease?) into the latest Battlefield 3 expansion
• The Slingshot Content Pack for XCOM: Enemy Unknown available today
• First Assassin’s Creed III add-on pack available now for Season Pass holders
• Replay Games fetches a new game and a chief creative officer (exclusive)
• Guitar Hero co-creator’s Green Throttle Games raises $6M to reinvent TV games
• Adobe launches new cloud-based game development tools
• Dragonborn expansion definitely coming to PlayStation 3
• Try out wizard battles in Ni no Kuni’s magical world tomorrow (updated)
• Android game console maker Ouya shipping its developer prototypes this month

Mobile news:

• After closing OpenFeint, Gree cuts jobs in U.S. offices
• Ngmoco goes next-gen with high-end graphics in The Drowning tablet game
• Brazil’s biggest mobile content publisher unveils its first game for the U.S.
• Social casino app goes to the city with New York-New York slot machine
• Tylted welcomes several top social-game developers to its mobile platform
• PlayPhone adds 20 games to its mobile social gaming network
• German ‘startup factory’ HitFox expands globally with four new game distribution businesses
• Cut the Rope developer’s next game is Pudding Monsters
• Enterprise gamification goes big as Badgeville teams up with Capgemini
• Fingerprint Digital to launch 7 new mobile education apps for kids
• Rovio adds the ice world of Hoth to Angry Birds Star Wars
• Kabam acquires Balanced Worlds game studio in China
• Swarm hopes to swoop in and help out developers fed up with Gree (exclusive)
• The Walking Dead: Assault brings top-down black-and-white shooting action to iOS

Reviews:

• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Dragonborn is a pint-sized Morrowind (review)
• Threeview: Call of Duty: Black Ops II reviewed by a critic, an analyst, and an academic
• Far Cry 3 is a superior rumble in the jungle (review)
• Writer Rumble is a vicious but therapeutic exercise for former English majors (review)

Interviews:

• Ben Cousins wants to prove mobile first-person shooters aren’t a pipe dream (interview)
• With a new leader, Ngmoco shoots for mobile gaming empire (interview)
• ‘Reverse Tetris’ puzzler Dream of Pixels may be critically acclaimed, but how is it selling? (interview)

Previews:

• Fast monsters in the tall grass will scare you to death in Crysis 3 (preview)
• Flutter is a kinder, gentler Pokémon with real-world butterflies (preview)
• Pull off some ridiculous time traveling heists in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (hands-on preview)
• Tomb Raider is at its best when it’s not emulating Uncharted (hands-on preview)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Hands-down, the best-looking game I’ve seen is Crysis 3. Coming on Feb. 19, this gorgeous title from publisher Electronic Arts and developer Crytek feels like you’re walking into another world. And it’s scary, too.

Cevat Yerli (pictured left), the chief executive of Crytek, showed off the game in a preview yesterday that showed how far the PC version had come since we last saw it at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) video game trade show earlier this year. The single-player level revealed terrifying creatures running through tall grass in the overgrown jungle of a future New York City, which has been turned into an urban rainforest.

In the swaying grass, the monsters can hide and attack from any quarter. Your defense is heavy weaponry and an armored (and sometimes invisible) Nanosuit. It reminds me of the scenes from Jurassic Park 2 where Velociraptors hunt in packs in the tall grass and close in on their surprised victims.

Everything about the graphics show how much better the DirectX 11 graphics, rendered with Crytek’s CryEngine 3, look on a PC than anything that can be displayed on a current-generation console. It is almost routine for your character’s vision to warp as water runs down the face plate of your helmet. The visual effect is disorienting and amazing. But you shake it off because there are so many other cool things to see just wandering around the world.

Of course, when the bad guys start shooting at you, you snap out of the reverie and begin firing back. The combat options are plentiful, and they’re all based on the theme of “the hunted becomes the hunter.” Your character, Prophet, has badass sniper and machine guns, but he can pull out a deadly composite bow and shoot arrows silently into his enemies.

A brand new level

You start the new level as Prophet, fully armed in a Nanosuit in a stairwell. The lighting and shadows make everything look real. You’re inside an abandoned industrial building (pictured right), where the sunlight comes through all of the holes. You have to decide whether to use stealth in killing enemy guards with a knife or arrow. Or you can just start shooting.

I did a little of both, and I played very cautiously because it was so easy to get killed even with the powers of the Nanosuit. I picked off the enemies one by one and moved from cover to cover. Above me, guards fired, and bot guns pinned me down. I had to maneuver close to the robot guns and convert them by hacking them. Once hacked, the guns turned on my enemies. After I made it through that level, I wound up in the grass, where I had to deal with the monsters. And that was pretty scary even though I could disappear or armor up. The monsters jump out one after another. Hopefully, they won’t be smart enough to hunt in packs.

Yerli said his team has optimized the code for the CryEngine and the visuals are looking much better than before. The 150-person team has worked on the title for about 2.5 years. The quality of the work really shows.

In this story set in the year 2047, the hero Prophet has returned to New York, where he finds the city encased in a Nanodome created by the corrupt Cell Corp. New York is literally an urban jungle, overgrown with trees, swamps, and rivers. There are seven distinct environments known as the “Seven Wonders.”

“Crytek is a studio where technology inspires gameplay,” Cevat Yerli, the chief executive of the German game development studio Crytek, told GamesBeat. “With this level, we wanted the grass to affect your decision-making. How do you negotiate the grass? How does the enemy shape it? As you enter it, it becomes an emergent gameplay experience. It’s not just beautiful. It’s part of the gameplay experience.”

The grass is just one of the “Seven Wonders of Crysis 3″ that we’ll see in a video series made by famed director Albert Hughes, the creator of Dead Presidents. The videos set the stage for the launch of Crysis 3, introducing its enemies, weapons, and gameplay features.

“When EA and Crytek approached me about being involved in creating ‘The Seven Wonders of Crysis 3’ video series, I liked the idea of creating emotional stories using only computer-generated images,” said Hughes. “The challenge of producing something intensely human without ever seeing a human onscreen was incredibly compelling, and the technology of the CryEngine that Crytek developed enabled me to do that and venture into a completely unique medium of storytelling.”

The first video episode debuts on Dec. 12.

A new style of asynchronous multiplayer

Yerli’s team also showed off the new Hunter mode of multiplayer combat, where two players in Nanosuits (which give you superhuman armor or invisibility) square off against eight other players. In this mode, the weaker players have to communicate and gang up on the more powerful opponents as if they were bringing down an elephant. Since hunting plays such a big part of the single-player campaign, it should also be incorporated into multiplayer.

“We wanted to stay true to our sandbox experience of Crysis One,” said Yerli, “and create a single-player-esque multiplayer experience.”

I’m looking forward to playing this game. The only question is whether it will truly step up in terms of the drama of the story. That is traditionally where Crysis has been weak compared to titles like Halo or Uncharted. If it is moving, then Crysis 3 will deliver a big punch when it releases early next year.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For a long time, the best benchmark for PC gaming was the original Crysis. Gamers who wanted to see if their new rig could hang with the best would install Crysis, turn up the settings, and see what the performance was like. Crysis 3 may occupy a similar place for PC players.

Publisher EA and developer Crytek announced the minimum, recommended, and optimum specifications for the upcoming first-person shooter. For those hoping to get the most out of the cybernetically enhanced action, they’re going to need a substantial set of components. Here’s what it takes to run Crysis 3 on its highest settings:

• Latest DirectX 11 graphics card (either of the following or better)
  • Nvidia GTX 680
  • AMD Radeon HD7970
• Latest quad-core CPU (either of the following or better)
  • Intel Core i7-2600k
  • AMD Bulldozer FX4150
• 8GB RAM
• Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8

A juiced-up desktop like that generally starts at around $1,500, but that’s what it takes to make Crysis 3 run at 60 frames per second with all the magic running on the ultrahigh setting.

For reference, here’s the minimum specs:

• DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB video RAM (either of the following or better)
  • Nvidia GTS 450
  • AMD Radeon HD5770
• Dual-core CPU (either of the following or better)
  • Intel Core2 Duo 2.4GHz
  • AMD Athlon64 X2 2.7 GHz
• 2GB RAM

And here’s the recommended system requirements:

• DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB video RAM (either of the following or better)
  • Nvidia GTX 560
  • AMD Radeon HD5870
• Quad-core CPU (either of the following or better)
  • Intel Core i3-530
  • AMD Phenom II X2 565
• 4GB RAM

Source: Crysis.com

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This week, Valve claims the Linux operating system is more viable than Windows 8, Disney buys Star Wars studio Lucasfilm as well as LucasArts, and hurricane Sandy delays Take-Two Interactive’s earning call.

You’ll also find reviews for Halo 4, Pid, Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, Assassin’s Creed III,  WWE 13, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

News:

• Halo 4, Xbox, and American Express partnership: kill Covenant nasties to earn cold, hard cash
• The DeanBeat: Halo 4 is the romance of Master Chief and Cortana, disguised as a combat game
• Startup accelerator Tandem Capital rolls its new capital into mobile technology and games
• Twitch embeds livestreaming in Sony Online Entertainment’s Planetside 2
• Flurry’s knowledge is power as it raises a whopping $25M for mobile app analytics
• Wii U’s browser is better equipped for HTML5 than Internet Explorer 10 on PC
• Now streaming for Windows 8: 1,000 games from Agawi’s GameZen
• Preorder Crysis 3 and return to the beginning with a free download of Crysis
• Here come the brands: Wizard of Oz game launches on Facebook
• Mystery narrative and new features headline CityVille 2′s launch
• Minecraft-like first-person shooter heads to Steam in December
• Israel’s Plarium debuts graphically rich hardcore Stormfall game on Facebook (exclusive)
• Mountain Dew-branded Halo 4 game makes a weird sort of sense
• Valve prepping next batch of Greenlight-approved games in November
• Disney’s recent history suggests it might not be ‘business as usual’ at LucasArts for long
• Grand Theft Auto V delay blows a $600 million hole in Take-Two’s outlook for 2013
• Imbibe a Nos Energy Drink to unlock Assassin’s Creed III multiplayer character
• Disney buys LucasArts alongside Lucasfilm (updated)
• Gaming’s ‘Nite to Unite’ raises over $800,000 for children’s charities and scholarships
• Publisher Valve says Linux is more viable for games than Windows 8
• Browser-based steampunk: City of Steam enters closed beta in November
• Hawken publisher Meteor Entertainment raises $18M as big launch draws near
• Developers are mostly thrilled with the chance to make money with Windows 8 games

Mobile news:

• Boom! EA brings its Madden football franchise to iOS & Facebook
• Developer support builds for Ngmoco’s mobile social gaming network
• Amazon Game Studios launches its first mobile game: Air Patriots
• Joining the insane social sports-betting crowd, Bunker Mode debuts its High Limit Sports app (exclusive)
• Wooga expands into mobile with its Bubble Island arcade shooter game
• Leap Motion hires former Apple director to lead its marketing team
• Gameloft doesn’t hesitate to support Windows Phone 8 with 12 optimized games
• Activision preps two more Skylanders mobile games for this year
• Developers wary about investing in Windows Phone 8 games

Earnings:

• Sony’s game division revenues fall nearly 16 percent in Q2 2012
• Hurricane Sandy forces publisher Take-Two Interactive to postpone earnings report

Reviews:

• Halo 4 is the next chapter, not the next evolution (review)
• Pid turns childlike magic into planet-sized punishment (review)
• Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s bearded badasses can’t defeat mediocrity (review)
• Assassin’s Creed III: The revolution will be gripping but glitchy (review)
• Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation can’t match the quality of its console brethren (review)
• WWE ’13 gives fans plenty of nostalgic Attitude (review)

Previews:

• Nintendo Land will make you hate your friends and family (hands-on preview)

Interviews:

• 343 Industries’ Josh Holmes on Halo 4′s love story, weaponry, and new enemies (interview)
• Better graphics and physics gave designers more freedom for Halo 4 (interview)
• Treyarch’s Mark Lamia promises that Call of Duty: Black Ops II will push gaming’s boundaries (exclusive interview)
• How to find the secret website in Shadowgate’s Kickstarter video and more (interview)
• David Vonderhaar’s expert advice on how to get ahead in Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer (exclusive interview)

Pieces of flair:

• You don’t have to play horror games to pee your pants in fear
• You can play Tetris on this pumpkin
• From celluloid to pixels: Movie personalities crash video games

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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When Crysis first came out, only gamers lucky enough to own a powerful PC could play it. Today, it’s also available on consoles, but publisher Electronic Arts and developer Crytek want to give you a better reason to revisit the past.

Preorder Crysis 3 and you’ll receive a free download for the original game on your choice of platform: PC, Xbox 360, or PlayStation 3, while supplies last. For anyone who’s had their eye on Crysis 3 but is hesitant to jump into a third entry in a series, this deal is hard to pass up.

The first Crysis plunges players into a conflict between the U.S. and North Korea, both sides fighting to claim a mysterious artifact of extraterrestrial origin.

“The release of Crysis in 2007 was truly a watershed moment for first-person shooters and raised the bar on cutting-edge visuals and gameplay, and we could not be more thrilled to include the original game as a preorder bonus,” said Cevat Yerli, the chief executive officer of Crytek, in a press release today. “Building upon the framework laid by the previous games, Crysis 3 offers unparalleled tactical freedom as players experience New York City’s Seven Wonders and adapt to the truly unique challenges they present. By blending the best elements of the series so far, we’ve created an action experience that we believe will blow fans away.”

The Seven Wonders represent the distinct environments of the New York City Liberty Dome, a collection of rainforests, swamps, and rivers in place of the city. As the “Prophet,” the player explores the treacherous Nanodome, which the Cell Corporation created in your absence.

Those who preorder Crysis 3 will also receive the Hunter Edition (a $59.99 value), which gives players immediate access to the Predator bow, its attachments and bonus skin, three exclusive dog tags, and the Hunter Nanosuit module enhancement for the super-suit. They’ll also enjoy a boost in experience points up to level 5 in multiplayer.

Crysis 3 releases in February 2013 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Developer Crytek 3 is hyping up its first-person shooter with a video reveal of its multiplayer … and it has a 15-foot-tall mech and a social network.

Crysis 3 debuts in February for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, and it’s the latest entry in publisher Electronic Arts’ supersoldier franchise. Crytek presented its single-player campaign during the industry trade show, Electronic Entertainment Expo, earlier this year but it kept its multiplayer magic hidden up its sleeve until the recent Gamescom event in Germany.

Today, Crytek released the following video which showed off two modes and an in-game social-information network called the New York Feed:

The pair of game types the developer demoed in the trailer are Hunter Mode and Crash Site.

In Hunter Mode, two players start as superpowered characters that are permanently cloaked. The two “hunters” must chase down and kill up to 14 troopers, who will join the hunters’ side when they respawn.

Crash Site is a King of the Hill-style mode in which a ship drops a container that players must fight over for points. The container has a pair of shields that players can use for defense or offense if they choose to throw them at their enemies. Players may use the powerful Pinger mech in multiplayer for the first time in this mode.

Crytek also gave a few details about its New York Feed, an in-game social network that provides information about what you and your friends have accomplished in the multiplayer. This information channel allows players to challenge one another and to see a multitude of leaderboards. The feed paints this information across a dynamic map of New York City.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Your Twitter profile just got a whole lot prettier with the addition of header images. Our vast selection of video game-themed pictures covers a wide range of genres and platforms.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme:

• Monday: The modern era
• Tuesday: Popular franchises
• Wednesday: PC
• Thursday: It came from Japan
• Friday: Mobile
• Saturday: Retro arcade
• Sunday: Consoles

Today’s batch of headers features 10 entries from new and classic PC games. Right-click (or Ctrl-click for Macs) the picture you want and hit “save image as” to save to your computer. To add the header to your Twitter profile, please follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Go to “settings” and click on the “design” tab.
3. Scroll down to the “customize your own” section.
4. Click on “change header” and select the image you want to upload. No need to scale.
5. Click “save.”

Diablo III

League of Legends

StarCraft

Guild Wars 2

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

Crysis 3

Dungeon Siege

Fallout 3

Half-Life 2

Doom

For gaming-themed Timeline covers for your Facebook profile, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The sensory smorgasbord of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) heaved itself upon the video game industry for three straight days, and GamesBeat’s intrepid crew enthusiastically hit showfloors, conference halls, and meeting rooms to offer our readers piles of previews, interviews, and news.

What follows below is our collected coverage during the show. You’ll find everything here sorted into categories for easy navigability.

Awards

Who needs stickers? We analyzed, judged, and sorted our top picks for the show’s offerings directly for you. Take a look — the results might surprise you.

GamesBeat’s E3 2012 Game of the Show…plus staff picks – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

The GamesBeat E3 non-award awards: The least prestigious awards in the industry – by GamesBeat staff

The coolest technologies we saw at E3 2012 – by Dean Takahashi

The best family games of E3 – by GamesBeat staff

The top 8 trends of E3, from bows to brutality – by Mike Minotti

The top 15 swag shirts of E3 2012 – by Rus McLaughlin

Previews

You’ve found the beating heart of E3′s overwhelming magic. Whether from observatory impressions or direct, hands-on experiences, GamesBeat discussed and dissected a sizable stable of upcoming games and hardware.

Hands-on

Hitman Absolution lets you perform hits in giant crowds – by Dean Takahashi

Metro Last Light fights shooter fatigue with deeper single player – by Dean Takahashi

Crysis 3 brings the jungle, gun hacking, and silent stealth kills to Manhattan – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Dead Space 3, coming with drop-in cooperative play – by Dean Takahashi

Sleeping Dogs turns Hong Kong crime movies into a video game – by Dean Takahashi

From the creator of Portal, Quantum Conundrum caters to physics-based puzzle gamers – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom remakes hack-slash-shoot-grapple formula with upcoming DmC: Devil May Cry – by Dean Takahashi

Capcom shows three playable characters for Resident Evil 6 – by Dean Takahashi

Finding similarities between Arma III and Carrier Command: Gaea Mission – by Omri Petitte

Neverwinter’s user-generated content could elevate it above the competition – by Stefanie Fogel

DmC: Devil May Cry is full of swagger…and F-bombs – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed leaves Mario Kart in its dust…and wake…and vapor trail – by Mike Minotti

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is an anime you can actually play – by Eduardo Moutinho

Sony Online Entertainment’s PlanetSide 2 – by Rob LeFebvre

Slice, dice, and julienne enemies in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Eduardo Moutinho

Medal of Honor: Warfighter deploys fire teams to the front lines – by Eduardo Moutinho

Hell Yeah! is like Metroid with a chainsaw jetpack-riding demon bunny – by Mike Minotti

Dead or Alive 5 wants to deliver a power blow to the competition – by Eduardo Moutinho

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s simplicity is just what consoles need – by Omri Petitte

Hands-off

Just what kind of game is Star Wars 1313? – by Dean Takahashi

Warner Bros. confirms LEGO: Lord of the Rings video game – by Dean Takahashi

EA’s cute The Act romance game exploits iPad’s touchscreen for unique gameplay – by Dean Takahashi

Turn the snow crimson with redcoat blood in Assassin’s Creed III – by Dean Takahashi

Far Cry 3 demo leads you deeper into drug-induced insanity – by Dean Takahashi

Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls is one of the best games of E3 – by Dean Takahashi

The 5 different games you’ll be playing in Dishonored – by Sebastian Haley

Final Fantasy XIV brings new gameplay and western sensibilities to venerable franchise – by Rob LeFebvre

Windows 8 works hard to meet the needs of all gamers – by Rob LeFebvre

A trio of Mario games strengthen Nintendo’s 3DS lineup – by Mike Minotti

OnLive’s MultiView spectating entices multiplayer and co-op gamers – by Omri Petitte

Player choice matters in The Walking Dead: Episode 2 – by Stefanie Fogel

The Last of Us is even smarter than you think – by Rus McLaughlin

Star Wars 1313 is a game of firsts for the sci-fi franchise – by Eduardo Moutinho

The adventure-game renaissance continues with The Cave – by Eduardo Moutinho

Heroes and villains join forces in Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion – by Mike Minotti

007 Legends proves personality makes or breaks a game – by Omri Petitte

Breaking down what’s exactly new in God of War: Ascension – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Turning technology against your friends in Watch Dogs – by Omri Petitte

Interviews

Chasing after the wayward developer or evasive executive amid a sea of journalists and industry luminaries didn’t slake our interview appetite, and we nabbed a slew of thoughtful talks with members across various gaming companies. Take a look.

Why Ubisoft is pouring a lot of resources into Wii U games – by Dean Takahashi

Harvest Moon creator wants to spread happiness with his new game – by Jacob Lopez

How Shenmue’s lead programmer rescued a bad game – by Jacob Lopez

The Last Story developer talks Operation Rainfall, reason for cover system, and Wii U – by Jacob Lopez

With 1.3B tanks obliterated and 30M players, Wargaming.net plans to conquer the online gaming world – by Dean Takahashi

Even Scribblenauts’ creator is surprised by the things people make in his new game – by Jacob Lopez

The Witcher developer CD Projekt RED wants to set new standards with Cyberpunk – by Stefanie Fogel

Japan’s Gree moves mobile gaming into the spotlight at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

THQ’s Brian Farrell talks about looking for a bottom and staging a comeback – by Dean Takahashi

Crytek says CryEngine 3 already does awesome graphics as good as Unreal Engine 4 – by Dean Takahashi

Our opinions

During the craze-filled days of E3, our minds typically busied themselves with ensuring our legs avoided snapping off our torsos and running away with yelping noises. But sometimes, a cohesive thought miraculously coalesced within our overloaded brainpans. Our hands shakily reached for the keyboard, keys started tapping, and well…these are the results.

The DeanBeat: What to expect at E3 – by Dean Takahashi

4 ways developers will use SmartGlass to enhance Xbox 360 experiences – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Nintendo’s Wii U: Safe on first, weak on third-party – by Rus McLaughlin

Why Nintendo will have a tough time adding a second GamePad tablet controller to the Wii U – by Dean Takahashi

Tomb Raider is not torture porn – by Rus McLaughlin

Would it be a mistake for E3 to move out of LA? – by Dean Takahashi

Bored, impressed, and giddy: Our final thoughts on E3 2012 – by Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Move over, consoles – mobile is the future – by Rob LeFebvre

Microsoft’s E3 2012: Analysis of 16,000+ comments shows Halo 4, South Park impressed, rest did not – by Andrew Hiscock

Sony’s E3 2012: Analysis shows “shotgun blast” won big, Wonderbook lost – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo’s E3 2012: Reactions show hardcore gamers lost faith in Wii U – by Andrew Hiscock

Memes

All it takes is one memorable quote, one Freudian slip, or some facepalm-worthy banter to prompt the Internet community’s creative and unrestrained hand at animated gifs, a worshipful use of Impact font, and hastily jangled Photoshop edits. Here’s what we’ve found.

The best memes of E3 – by Jeff Grubb

Remember these crazy memes from past E3s? – by Jeff Grubb

The wildest memes from the Microsoft E3 press conference – by Jeff Grubb

Silly memes inspired by Sony’s E3 press event – by Jeff Grubb

Aisha Tyler: Ubisoft’s meme machine – by Rus McLaughlin

The oddest Nintendo E3 gifs and Photoshops from the Internet – by Jeff Grubb

Galleries

We snapped plenty of pictures while attending parties, pressers, and meandering the showfloor. Direct your eyeballs upon these galleries, and enjoy the view!

The big gallery of E3′s huge banners – by Mike Minotti

E3 2012 will get your hands up – by Evan Killham

Our editor-in-chief’s E3 adventure – by Evan Killham

The many costumes of E3 2012 – by Jacob Lopez

Retro games have a place at E3, too – by Jasmine Rea

Videos

Dubstep. A beleaguered Lara Croft. Ham-handed hosts. No, this isn’t the latest entry in Alex Trebek’s dream diary — it’s some of our E3 video and trailer content below. Enjoy!

Tomb Raider trailer shows how Lara Croft feels sorry for shooting you – by Dean Takahashi

Konami pre-E3 2012 event: More Castlevania and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance – by Jasmine Rea

Ubisoft shows strong commitment to the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

6 awkward moments from the E3 press briefings – by Evan Killham

Why we wub wub wub E3 2012: The dubstep of E3 – by Jacob Lopez

Press conferences

Surprises and snooze-fests alike emanated from E3′s five major press briefings held by Microsoft, Electronic Arts (EA), Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo. Check out all the announcements and debuts here.

Microsoft (video)

Halo 4 trailer video shows Forerunners, new tech – by Rob LeFebvre

New Splinter Cell: Blacklist borrows from Uncharted – by Jeff Grubb

Gears of War: Judgment sets Sera on fire (again) – by Rus McLaughlin

Microsoft previews Xbox Music at E3 press conference – by Rob LeFebvre

Forza Horizon brings street racing to the franchise – by Jasmine Rea

Microsoft introduces Xbox SmartGlass to integrate smartphones and tablets with Xbox 360 – by Dean Takahashi

Nike+ Kinect Training brings in-depth fitness measuring to Xbox 360 – by Jeff Grubb

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer coming to Xbox 360 this fall – by Jacob Lopez

Usher hits the stage to announce Dance Central 3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Xbox Live is getting Nickelodeon, Machinima, and tons of live sports – by Tom Cheredar

Kinect voice commands hit EA Sports flagship titles – by Eduardo Moutinho

South Park creators introduce their game and playfully mock Microsoft – by Jeff Grubb

New Xbox 360 games coming from Signal Studios, Twisted Pixel, and…Gore Verbinski? – by Stefanie Fogel

Microsoft E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Electronic Arts (video)

SimCity Social: If this free-to-play game is too good, will you pay $60 for the full PC version? – by Dean Takahashi

EA reveals Battlefield 3 Premium and fields “15 million players worldwide” – by Omri Petitte

Star Wars: The Old Republic gets new planet, new species, and free trial – by Jacob Lopez

EA nabs UFC from THQ – by Jeff Grubb

Medal of Honor: Warfighter’s beautiful carnage – by Rus McLaughlin

EA shows off Need for Speed: Most Wanted at E3 – by Rob LeFebvre

Ubisoft (video)

Rayman Legends rhythmically runs to the Wii U – by Eduardo Moutinho

You are the network in Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs – by Rus McLaughlin

Here’s where that Watch Dogs cube-head QR code goes – by Jeff Grubb

Sony (video)

Experimental developer Quantic Dream reveals the haunted life of Jody Holmes in Beyond – by Jasmine Rea

Nathan Drake and the Big Daddy Bouncer join PlayStation All-Stars: Battle Royale – by Mike Minotti

J.K. Rowling is writing PlayStation’s Wonderbook – by Rus McLaughlin

Sony announces Assassin’s Creed III Vita and PS3 bundles with exclusive content – by Jeff Grubb

Sony brings down the house with The Last of Us demo – by Dean Takahashi

Sony E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

Nintendo (video)

Social networking comes to Wii U, Miiverse will interface with PCs and phones – by Jasmine Rea

First look at action-strategy game Pikmin 3 – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo confirms 23 games at E3, video streaming, and more for Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Wii Fit U will make you sweatier, livelier, and happier – by Rob LeFebvre

Brag to the Miiverse and take on new modes in New Super Mario Bros. U – by Eduardo Moutinho

Zombify your face with ZombiU for the Wii U – by Mike Minotti

Nintendo bets big on “asymmetric” tablet-based gameplay – one player against several – by Dean Takahashi

Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition utilizes Wii U’s GamePad screen – by Omri Petitte

Nintendo details 3DS Mario titles, Luigi’s Mansion, and third-party games – by Jeff Grubb

Nintendo Land brings asymmetrical multiplayer to Wii U – by Jasmine Rea

Nintendo’s E3 2012 press conference recap…in limerick form – by Andrew Hiscock

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Crytek prides itself on on creating the highest-quality 3D graphics in its games, from the original Far Cry to today’s upcoming title, Crysis 3. The Frankfurt, Germany-based game developer also makes the CryEngine, which serves as the foundation for a number of high-end 3D games. At this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the company showed off its Crysis 3 game and the downloadable free-to-play title Warface, which is expected to be published by Trion Worlds. With each game, the company is pushing the cutting edge of graphics in video games. Crytek is also working on its own social entertainment platform, dubbed GFACE.

We sat down for an interview with Anvi Yerli (right), managing director; Cevat Yerli (middle), managing director; and Nick Button-Brown (left), general manager for games. Cevat Yerli said that CryEngine already can handle the kind of graphics demonstrated by Epic Games with the new Unreal Engine 4, and Yerli hinted at great things coming for the engine and for cloud graphics. Here’s a transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: Tell me more about Warface. Why is free-to-play interesting?

Button-Brown: Well, so we started looking at free-to-play in 2006. We were looking at what was happening in free-to-play in Korea. We thought it was a really interesting way of bringing a game to people, allowing people to play it for free and to purchase virtual goods. What a revolutionary idea. We started working on Warface not that long afterwards. Warface has been in the works for more than three and a half years. In that time, it’s become a model that works in other countries as well. We’re really proud of what we’re doing with Warface. We think we’ll bring a really high quality game to free-to-play.

Anyi Yerli: When we had visitors for the first time from Korea, in the year 2001, 2002, like XL Games and NCSoft, with Lineage and such, they came to our office and brought an interesting range of technology. Then they talked about how big the community is, and how big their user base is — the community was over 10 million — we were completely shocked by that. Where does this number come from? It was unbelievable. So that was the first time we made contact, when we got in touch with free-to-play. But then we continued our own development on Far Cry and Crysis. And then in 2006 we went out to Asia, and basically try to understand what’s going on. It was primarily in Korea, actually, trying to understand what works there, and understand why it works, how those games work, what kind of models they were applying. This was back in 2006. And then we started, basically, the roots of Warface at around the end of 2007. And we started thinking about the strength of the model, what makes this model unique, why is this so big?

Cevat Yerli: When we saw that, we thought, this is the future. Not what we’re doing, what they’re doing. The quality isn’t there, but the way they were doing it, that was the future. For us, at that time, the concept of GFACE was born as well. GFACE is our social entertainment platform. It’s a new kind of platform for entertainment, for gamers who want to play with their friends together. They want to play live games in real-time. They want to be free-to-play. So the concept of this was born, and we designed this over the last few years. In time there was Warface. To make Warface a launch title for the platform. It was a big learning curve for us, but when we launch it, both Warface and GFACE, we want to be sure that it shows how we think triple-A games will be experienced in the future. In a new kind of platform.

GamesBeat: How are you distinguishing between, say, the quality of this, which looks good, versus something like Crysis? A $60 game versus a free-to-play game?

C. Yerli: The central difference comes from the fact that Warface is actually a multiplayer game first. If you look at any multiplayer game, on console or PC, the multiplayer part is usually slightly lower-quality than the single-player parts. That is because in single-player you only have yourself, and you can put more action around you. In multiplayer, you have so much more going on with real humans, every game in multiplayer must be sort of lower-quality. So in Warface, because everything is online, the co-op player versus environment experience as well as the player versus player experience.

It is triple-A quality, but it’s still lower than your typical single-player game. But it’s on par with your multiplayer games. At least that’s our aim and vision. But at the same time, the most important part is that we need to run on as many PCs as possible. So it can hit six years of specifications. The last six years, if you bought a PC, you can run the game safely. Unlike Crysis 3, or Crysis 1 back then, which was pushing the limits, pushing the limits, moving forward. With Warface, we don’t push the limits on specs, but we do push the limit of what we can do within the specs. The GFACE platform is designed to be a destination for everybody who wants to play games. And Warface does not compromise that by requiring a frictional engine barrier, but rather it says, because the specs are so low. The friction is reduced by the price, the specs, and by the accessibility of the game.

GamesBeat: And why work with Trion on this one?

C. Yerli: Trion has, first of all, they have…

Button-Brown: We’re not talking about the partnership yet… [lots of embarrassed laughter] We’re expecting to talk about the partnership in a bit more detail next week. We have approached it, it’s not a traditional publisher-developer relationship. We wanted to bring it to western users in a slightly different way.

A. Yerli: So let’s say it this way. What I can say is, it’s an eye-to-eye level partnership. And it revolves around each company’s strengths. Which are very synergistic. And also, each of us around Warface, launching Warface and GFACE, our social network platform…

Button-Brown: We want to bring Warface to the market and give people the best experience. But we’ll talk about it next week.

A. Yerli: And we want to make sure it runs through GFACE.

GamesBeat: It sounds like they have some useful infrastructure, basically…

C. Yerli: They have the expertise, and…

Button-Brown: They have a lot of really talented people. And that’s what it comes down to, is talented people.

C. Yerli: It’s a very different level of cooperation, and hopefully it’s something that will be a benchmark going forward for others.

A. Yerli: I think the relationship that Crytek and Trion will portray will be a model going forward. And from a quality perspective, it will elevate the potential of how online games should be perceived. Something that both of us wouldn’t be able to do without each other in such a short amount of time. There’s not much left… [laughter]

C. Yerli: We just dance around the whole thing right now.

GamesBeat: How does Warface evolve over time? Is it as much a service as it is…

C. Yerli: Absolutely. Warface is an ongoing live service. We’re just starting it. We’ll be starting in Russia. It’s commercial. China is getting a closed beta now. So we’ll do Korea soon. We have a business plan for the next five years, on PC and mobile and tablet, for Warface. This is a business strategy, it’s not just a game strategy.

GamesBeat: When it comes to 3D graphics now, I sort of… I don’t know what distinguishes the different engines and the different platforms here, but…

Button-Brown: So our engine is the best… [chuckles]

GamesBeat: My eyes kind of tell me what I like. So Crysis 3 looks good. But Unreal Engine 4 looks good too. If you were to put some of these engines side by side, to me, I’m not sure I could tell what’s better. What can you explain about what makes yours better?

C. Yerli: The only thing I can say is that CryEngine 3 already exists at the quality of Unreal Engine 4. It already exists for three years now. You can go back three years ago to the GDC videos. What we put out there is pretty much what Unreal Engine 4 put out now. And what many others are doing now too. We haven’t really put out our latest stuff yet.

Pretty soon you’re going to see the next iteration of CryEngine, and I’m not putting a number behind it, just the next iteration of CryEngine. Very soon. But we already said, CryEngine 3 is next-gen ready since three years ago. We stand by that. If I look at what people call next-gen technology now, it’s what we were seeing three years ago. We already had massive particle systems, we already had GPU rendering, all these things. Deferred shading. We had tessellation already since we shipped Crysis 2. We already had DX11. We didn’t just talk it up as tech demos, we have games that are shipped and are doing it.

GamesBeat: As you go down this road, do you think that consumers are going to be able to tell these differences?

C. Yerli: There are tangible differences, but not in still images. It’s in the fluidity of the overall experience. It’s like you watch an Android phone and an iPhone. The iPhone, despite the fact that most Android phones can do the same things, just feels different. It feels more fluid, more organic on an iPhone. And similarly, with an Android, there are different limitations on an Android. One feels choppy, another feels better. Really, it’s not just about ticking off boxes next to features. It’s a holistic experience that has to be fluid and flawless and real. Not show. It must be real. That’s us and what CryEngine always stands for. It was always a very substantial, robust, polished experience that gamers will see. And I also think that we are dedicated to online games. When you look at our number of licensees in that space, we have more licensees than any other engine in the online space. In the console space it’s a different story. In the console space we’re definitely not leading. But I think the next time around, it’s going to be a very different picture.

GamesBeat: Is there a way to describe what you expect next-generation graphics to look like?

C. Yerli: Maybe one thing to add to this, actually. I think the biggest difference here between the engines is still the productivity. We have invented, back in 2001, what we called “what you see is what you play,” which is real-time editing of the game in the sandbox using the production tools. We did this in 2001, we put out a video at GDC 2001, and since then it’s been the heart of our technology. That’s something that even until today, our competitors, our main competitor, has still not 100 percent achieved. We’re talking about 10 years later, still not achieved. Some other competitors, when they started from scratch five years ago, they of course started from scratch with better ideas. Not a better idea than us, but a better idea than Epic. So in productivity and efficiency, it’s something where we claim we’re the fastest toolkit around. Because we’re 100 percent real-time. We’re the only engine that is 100 percent real-time. Look at our competitors and you will feel that every time they change a light or a shadow, it computes for hours. In our case, the lighting is real-time.

GamesBeat: For developers:

C. Yerli: For productivity, right. You can see the change in real time. It’s a huge iterative gain. And that’s true for everything, whether it’s our AI paths, navigation systems, our lighting and shadow systems, everything is real-time in CryEngine. Nothing is pre-baked.

GamesBeat: And that makes the difference as to whether you need 500 artists or a much smaller number to make a game?

C. Yerli: It can make productivity better. It can make your ideas come to concept better, you can test faster, you don’t have to wait for your modifications until tomorrow morning to see it. You can just see it. You don’t need a render farm or a lighting farm or a pre-baking farm. The artists just see the results right away. That’s a big difference, being real-time. And when you talk about next-gen graphics, what will define next-gen graphics. It’s definitely going to be about tessellation. It’s going to be about better lighting. We claim we have the best lighting. I think we’ll push it further, another notch. You will see animation quality make huge gains. And more realistic surfaces. As in materials like metals or wood, copper… Aged materials. This kind of realism will be playing a big focus in the next generation. And higher resolution texturing, like in the film industry, where you have effectively no limits on texture sizes. In the games, you used to have 256 by 256 textures, those limits will go up to…pretty much as much memory as you have in your PC. The new texturing will become a big topic as well.

GamesBeat: So like Pixar quality, I guess…?

C. Yerli: I think we are going to be very close soon to rendering computer-generated (CG) film quality. I’m not necessarily pointing to Pixar. But we will, very soon, be able to render out film CG quality rendering in real-time. In the next two years.

GamesBeat: That’s a big deal.

C. Yerli: I said already a couple of years ago, we’ll be able to do Shrek-quality graphics in 2012, and we can today. In 2008 I gave a speech on the future of computer graphics, I said in 2012 we’ll have Shrek quality, and today we are Shrek quality. I think in two years more… But then again, film will be further head as well. And then we’ll catch up again. It’s going to be like that for a while.

GamesBeat: It seems like there’s a lot of different vectors for trying to make things look good.

C. Yerli: Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, it’s not about being realistic. It’s about being believable and emotionally rich. If you believe in the world you’re in, and you believe in the characters you perceive, and believe that what you do has a consequence in a realistic way. So you can buy in to the world of the game. That’s the ultimate vision. The quality, the higher it gets, the easier it is for you to immerse in it. The barrier gets lower.

For the mainstream market. I would say that the better the quality gets on our games, the more mainstream gamers are going to come into this world and accept the richness of our content. Because when they go to a film, they see it. And when they see a game they ask, why doesn’t the game look like a film? They don’t understand… Most people don’t understand. And most people don’t care about it. To reach the same kind of critical mass as film, where we take hundreds of millions of potential viewers, like DVD and whatnot. To get that kind of volume of consumers, I think it’s where the quality has to increase. And yeah, some people do it with a lot of things happening on the screen. Some people do it with focusing on one thing, making it the best thing ever. Some people focus on environments, making those the best believable worlds, fantastic worlds, so you can immerse yourself.

GamesBeat: What about the advances in cloud gaming and Nvidia’s newest cloud graphics effort? Are those getting interesting for you?

C. Yerli: Yeah, we have been talking to Nvidia for a long time about that. They were talking about cloud gaming three years ago, the first touch points as far as what we want to do and how we could collaborate and things like that. But that being said, we cannot talk about that relationship at this moment. What and how and if we’re doing something with Nvidia. But it certainly was already mutually inspirational for the both of us, many years ago. Cloud gaming is not a new topic for us internally. It’s been a project of ours, and there is…a CryEngine cloud per se…

Button-Brown: [begins Coughing Suggestively]

C. Yerli: I did it already. It’s already out.

Button-Brown: I can start talking about it! Excellent.

C. Yerli: I just announced CryEngine cloud!

GamesBeat: Does that have a parallel sort of high-quality single-player, lower-quality multiplayer, and then cloud quality, I guess…? Is it harder to do high-quality graphics on…

C. Yerli: No, cloud quality will be up there. The CryEngine cloud philosophy is, how do you offer the best visuals at the lowest friction barrier, with the most efficient cost? So low friction, low cost, highest quality to the user. It’s really about the user benefit. And with this CryEngine cloud platform, the way we see it, it’s going to be tied into GFACE, our social hub. And it’s going to be very different from Gaikai or OnLive. Very different.

GamesBeat: As I remember, Trion has online gaming infrastructure, but they don’t call it cloud, because they’re not streaming, right? They’re doing the computing at the client. So to you, what does cloud mean? Does it mean computing in the data center, or computing partly in the client?

C. Yerli: Time will tell. [laughter]

Button-Brown: Yeah, that much we’re not announcing yet. We have something cool in the pipeline.

GamesBeat: So then it seems like there’s a variety of cloud architectures.

Button-Brown: Well, “cloud” means something very different depending on the context. People use “cloud” to mean a huge variety of things.

C. Yerli: Some people say “cloud” is just downloading a game and that’s it. Apple’s App Store is a cloud for some people. But it’s way beyond storage, for sure. And from a user experience perspective, it’s got the highest quality and easiest possible… From the company perspective, it’s to provide the user the highest quality at the cheapest per-user cost. This is our friction. The cost factor doesn’t work out on OnLive or Gaikai.

GamesBeat: So what seems attractive about it? Self-publishing is a lot easier…

C. Yerli: Yes. You touch your consumer and you deliver to your consumer directly. And most of the friction goes away. But friction starts, not just from the content experience, but also the platform itself. So GFACE has been designed to be as easy and simple as possible to get your friends together to play a game. And then change it into another game and another game and watch a movie and listen to something together and then finish the day. So this isn’t trying to be a Facebook, by the way. This is trying to be a platform, akin to Xbox or PlayStation. It’s just not a hardware platform. We are seeing this cloud platform, its interface is called GFACE. And Warface has CryEngine cloud, that in total gives you a very simple experience and a high-quality content experience.

GamesBeat: So are you liking the PC or the consoles right now.

C. Yerli: Right now we like both.

Button-Brown: We like tablets, too. We like mobile.

C. Yerli: We like iOS, we like Android… We are a content developer. We do technology as well, that’s CryEngine and CryEngine cloud. But we also have a platform, that’s GFACE, and GFACE will sit on iOS devices, Android devices, on the PC, and hopefully also the consoles as a software layer, a software platform.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Right after the GamesBeat staff got back from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, we started wondering if we were all at the same event. Despite a combined 38 years of experience attending the annual game-industry trade show, lead writer Dean Takahashi, culture editor Sebastian Haley, and I (GamesBeat’s editor-in-chief) came away from the 2012 edition with drastically differing opinions on what we saw.

Here’s what we thought of this year’s E3:

Sebastian Haley, culture editor:

I might be alone on this, but E3 was a disheartening experience for me this year. Sure, I’ll buy and love Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and a ton of other games that were shown off, but everything was just so iterative — from the countless sea of sequels and spin-offs, to even the press conferences that seemed to focus less and less on what gamers like myself actually want.

After years of being the punchline of the Internet, why is it so hard to make a good E3 press conference? Microsoft gave carte blanche to Nike and ESPN to talk as long as they wanted, but when it came time to show off the only three original intellectual properties (IPs) in the entire lineup, if you blinked you would have missed it. And even if you didn’t blink, you’d still have no idea what the games were even about. Then Usher and Joe Montana come out for awkward performances, and that’s supposed to make things better?

The industry more or less seems to be on autopilot, and I can only hope it’s saving up all its energy for a massive 2013. But again, maybe that’s just me.

Dishonored

Dean Takahashi, lead news writer:

The game industry didn’t have such a bad showing at E3. The traditional game publishers showed off new original games such as Beyond: Two Souls, The Last of Us, The Unfinished Swan, Dishonored, Warface, Hawken, World of Warplanes, and Watch Dogs. New technologies such as Unreal Engine 4, facial animation, SmartGlass, the Wii U, and Sony’s Wonderbook were cool. The staple franchises such as Assassin’s Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Tomb Raider, SimCity, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and Crysis 3 will keep gamers delighted and busy in the next year.

But like Sebastian, I also have high expectations of game makers in the core console market. And I’m not sure they have done enough to shield themselves from the disruption that is hitting their industry. This E3 was an in-between year. Next-generation consoles are in the works, but only Nintendo showed off its cards, and they weren’t very disruptive this time around.

From the outside, the game industry is under pressure. Apple is one of the driving forces of the real disruption, but it isn’t alone. Samsung announced at the show that it will create its own cloud gaming service in partnership with Gaikai and Nvidia. It will in effect become a fourth major platform for game makers, launching a cloud-based game service that could threaten the core console business. Apple and Samsung could bring cheap, high-quality games into the living room that could compete quite nicely against $60 games that come with the number “3″ or “4″ after their names.

This is a very real threat. At E3, I didn’t see a masterstroke to deal with it. There was innovation, but not enough of it to make a difference.

The Last of Us

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, editor-in-chief:

Last year’s E3 only gave me one stick-with-me moment: the BioShock Infinite demo. It left me near breathless, and even though I don’t smoke, I felt like I needed a cigarette after watching it.

Nothing this year quite matched that, but three games came awfully close, all from my personal top 3 games of E3: Watch Dogs, The Last of Us, and Dishonored. I saw The Last of Us on the last day of the show, and it just put the biggest smile on my face. Right when that amazing, frightening, tension-filled demo finished, it cemented this E3 as one of the best in recent years for me. So I’m quite surprised at Sebastian’s reaction — this show was amazing! When was the last time so many new IPs surprised and wowed us like this? We’re always complaining about the sequel parades (and rightfully so), but it’s up to us to look past the flashy hype of the Call of Duties of the world to champion original games like the ones I just mentioned.

Nintendo Land and ZombiU on the Wii U were both pleasant surprises as well (though the latter proved to me that first-pers0n-shooter controls will take a lot of hand-eye-coordination reconditioning due to the controller’s new layout — a reconditioning I’m not sure I want to commit to). Even the known quantities got me excited again: I honestly thought I was over Halo and Gears of War, but both Halo 4 and the overrun mode in Gears of War: Judgment were a lot of fun to play in multiplayer.

I went into my 16th E3 jaded and thinking I’ve seen and experienced it all. I left a surprised, giddy gamer.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With publishers showing so many games in such close proximity, the Electronic Entertainment Expo is a great place to discover the directions that developers are taking the entire industry for the next year and beyond. Below are eight trends that GamesBeat’s writers noticed during the annual trade show.

1. The year of the bow.

I don’t know when bow and arrows became so cool. Maybe we should blame Hawkeye from The Avengers? Or maybe that girl from the Hunger Games? Whatever the reason, many of gaming’s protagonists have traded their rifles for wood. GamesBeat writer Jeff Grubb actually detailed this phenomenon quite a bit, listing Crysis 3, Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, and Assassin’s Creed III as examples of string-tugging action.

Now, some of these characters use bows because of limited resources (Tomb Raider) or because of the technology of their day (Assassin’s Creed III), but why on earth is the guy from Crysis 3, who probably has access to the most advanced weapons technology on the planet, using such a primitive device?

2. Fourth installments of franchises, aka fourquels.

This industry has always loved its sequels, but when you reach the fourth installment of a series (in many cases within the same console generation), you begin to want for a bit more originality. Microsoft is the most guilty party here, showing off an upcoming library of software that includes Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgement, and Fable: The Journey.

Not that Sony is completely off the hook, thanks to God of War: Ascension, the fourth console release of the series. Sure, all of these titles are likely to be enjoyable on some level, but franchise fatigue is definitely setting in.

3. Shocking brutality.

Video games have been violent for a very, very long time. It seems like ages ago when we all gasped while Kano tore a guy’s heart out of his chest in the original Mortal Kombat. Still, the violence was usually treated with a sort of action movie level of seriousness…meaning it wasn’t taken very seriously at all.

Well, now all of the killing, cutting, ripping, bludgeoning, and bleeding seems much more real. The trend seems to start with the new Tomb Raider, which sees protagonist Lara Croft screaming in almost constant pain as she is impaled and beaten. Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us is also a clear example of more visceral violence, especially thanks to a notable scene from Sony’s press briefing where the player shot a guy in the face with a shotgun while he begged for his life. Despite a lifetime spent watching polygons and pixels explode into bits of organs and limbs, for the first time ever gaming violence is making me wince.

4. Everything looks like Uncharted.

I’m guessing that we’re beginning to see a lot of the games that were put into production after 2009′s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves proved to be a big hit. There were multiple titles on the show floor that featured climbing and mouthy characters that could easily be describe as, “It’s like Uncharted, but….”

I mean, there was Star Wars: 1313, which was like Uncharted but with a sci-fi setting, and Tomb Raider is like Uncharted without any of the lighthearted comedy. Even Splinter Cell: Blacklist seems to take the series in a more climbing-focused direction. I guess imitation is flattery, right?

5. Stealthy franchises are less stealthy.

Remember when Metal Gear was a stealth-based franchise? Sort of hard to believe that series could inspire a hack-and-slashing affair where you cut a guy into a dozen pieces with a sword, but that’s exactly what we have with Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. What about Assassin’s Creed III? The new protagonist, Connor, seems to prefer to charge directly at his foes rather than stunning his adversaries with surprise like his ancestors, Altair and Ezio, did.

Even Agent 47 has gotten bold enough to kill his targets in the middle of giant crowds in Hitman: Absolution. Of course, these could all just be vertical slices that are focusing on more action-oriented aspects of these titles, but you still couldn’t escape the feeling that stealth was out of style at E3.

6. Second screens.

Dual screen gaming was made popular with Nintendo’s DS hand held device back in 2004, but now we’re seeing that concept taken to the consoles. We already knew about Nintendo’s Wii U, the new system that heavily features the use of a tablet controller, but Microsoft showed off SmartGlass technology, with allows preexisting smart phones and tablets to act as a second screen for Xbox 360 experiences.

We saw a lot of examples of this technology being used for unique gameplay possibilities, notably in Wii U platformers New Super Mario Bros. U and Rayman Legends, where the second screen can be used to assist the main player. Microsoft, meanwhile, showed off the ability to instantly transfer a movie from the television to a smart phone mid-scene. It’ll be interesting to see how consumers take to this innovative (and potentially expensive) technology.

7. Revenge!

A lot of characters seem to be motivated by revenge this year. Just look at the tagline for Dishonored, the new steampunk, action-adventure title from publisher Bethesda: “Revenge solves everything.” You can also look at the trailer for the four player co-op mode in Far Cry 3, where four random people unite in their quest for (what else?) revenge.

Don’t forget about Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. There’ so much revenge that they have to make up new words for it!

8. Amazing facial animation.

Last year’s L.A. Noire impressed many with its exceptional  facial animation, and it seems like the trend for more realistic looking characters will continue. The PlayStation 3′s Beyond: Two Souls, the new title from Heavy Rain’s David Cage, leads the pack with some absolutely stunning faces that are able to emote and act as well as any real person.

Even franchises which aren’t normally renowned for this kind of technology have stepped up their game, notably seen in trailers for Far Cry 3 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Man, I remember when the character’s mouths didn’t even move.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Electronic Arts has taken the wraps off of the hands-on gameplay for Crysis 3, and it looks marvelous. The first-person shooter is the third in developer Crytek’s series that debuted in 2007 with Crysis and returned in 2011 with Crysis 2.

Crytek just can’t stay out of the jungle. When it created Far Cry back in 2004, that game was set in the jungles of a beautiful tropical island. The graphics of the trees, fauna, and water were amazing for that time. Crysis and its ancillary game Crysis Warhead were also set in the jungle. But Crysis 2 took the firefights into Manhattan. Now, with the CryEngine 3, the Crytek team is bringing the jungle back, by putting it inside Manhattan.

Crytek and EA are hoping that that formula will keep this video game franchise in the upper echelons of the of multibillion-dollar FPS market. EA is revealing more of the gameplay today at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the game industry’s big trade show, in Los Angeles, Calif.

You might say it’s a funny way to show off the developer’s talent for creating rainforest 3D graphics. They’re twisting the story so that the odd mixture of jungle and skyscrapers makes sense. This tale is set in 2047, or 24 years after the events of Crysis 2, and the plot isn’t easy to follow. The hero is Laurence “Prophet” Barnes, a Delta Force major who appeared in the first two games. He actually killed himself in the second title and is now back as a revived memory — a separate consciousness inside your high-tech Nanosuit. Now, he wants revenge in the overgrown canyons of New York City.

Prophet is wearing the same cool Nanosuit that integrates into his body and gives him superhuman powers. In the past couple of games, the alien forces wanted to get their hands on that Nanosuit and hunted its wearer. But this time, Prophet is doing the hunting. He’s got a huge high-tech bow with flaming, explosive or razor-sharp arrows. I was able to play a full level hands-on and get a feel for what it’s like to be an invincible hunter.

CryNet Enforcement and Local Logistics (CELL) corporation, which wants the Nanosuit, pursues Prophet. CELL has also built a giant Nanodome around the wrecked city of Manhattan to contain the virus introduced by the squid-like alien invaders known as the Ceph. That dome acts as a kind of greenhouse, and it has sparked the accelerated growth of a rainforest in the middle of the ruined the city. Within this structure, Prophet is going hunting, and he isn’t taking prisoners.

Hojengaard promises that the narrative will be compelling.

“It’s a deep and engaging story of revenge and redemption,” he said. “You find out who you are. The game pits human will against technology. Who will be the victor?”

This game is as much about showing off high-end 3D graphics as it is about a sci-fi story. The original Crysis debuted in 2007, and it was one of the best-looking games of its time. Crysis 2 came out in 2011, and it used the CryEngine 3 graphics technology. Crysis 3 also uses CryEngine 3, but it certainly seems like the visuals are prettier this time around.

Rasmus Hojengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, said to a group of game journalists that the team has tweaked the engine to produce even better graphics than before, including cool lens flares and realistic-looking water.

“We’ve worked on this for the past 16 months, and it’s the most ambitious project we have ever done,” he said.

The gameplay is also different. Prophet can fire deadly arrows while using the Nanosuit’s cloaking ability, Hojengaard said. He can fire an electric arrow at a circuit board to open a door from afar.

Prophet also has a new ability to hack systems. He points his hacking device at an automated enemy turret. If he can withstand the fire for long enough, he can reprogram the turret and then turn it against his enemies. This skill is a great way to get around what seem to be insurmountable enemy forces.

In this level, Prophet had to sneak up on a bunch of guards of a secret military faction and stealthily kill his foes. But at some point, he had to start shooting in the open because the guards were just too close to each other. In the Nanosuit, you have some awesome powers and can get your hands on some great weaponry. Butyou can always retreat and redirect your suit’s energy to a near-invisible mode if the fighting gets too hairy. You can also use your energy to maximize your suit’s armor strength or set the suit for speed if you want to outrun your enemies. But the various enemies have countermeasures, such as a way to strip the suit of energy, which eliminates your stealth powers.

The level was a tough one where I had to approach an automated turret guarded by a bunch of soldiers. I could have taken any number of paths through the sandbox-style level because the path wasn’t scripted. Then I had to fight through hordes of enemies. I could only get past some of them by hacking their support turrets. I had to plant a bomb and then escape. Overall, it was a visually amazing experience.

The game debuts in the spring of 2013 for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week in news: Digital downloads for full retail games coming to 3Ds and Wii U, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami working on a new survival horror game codenamed “Zwei”, Valve reveals inventive Defense of the Ancients 2 pricing, and Nintendo posts its first fiscal year loss.

You’ll also find a review for Bloodforge and previews for PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale, Dishonored, and Crysis 3.

Other GamesBeat stories included:

The DeanBeat: Follow the people. Follow the money. Into casino games.

Leaked Rayman Legends trailer shows NFC tech in action on Wii U (gallery)

PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale: Really, though? (preview)

Nintendo CEO Iwata: No Wii U pricing at E3; digital downloads coming to 3DS and Wii U

Draw Something now on the Kindle Fire

Star Wars: The Old Republic launches in 38 additional countries

World’s tiniest Star Wars arcade cabinet is fully operational

How Dishonored’s artists created an oppressive, Victorian, steampunk world from scratch

Bethesda’s Arkane shoots for an original action game with Dishonored (preview)

Breaking down Conquest Domination in Battlefield 3: Close Quarters’ Donya Fortress (preview)

How gaming’s biggest blockbusters affect monthly sales (infographic)

Cryptic Studios hacked in December 2010; attack only “just” discovered

Resident Evil creator working on new survival-horror game codenamed “Zwei”

X-rays of game controllers reveal ghostly circuitry

Xbox 360-quality graphics could come to mobile devices by 2014

Bloodforge brings a good, gory romp to Xbox Live Arcade (review)

Crysis 3 first look: Bullets, bows, and the Big Apple (preview)

Free-to-play games on Xbox 360? It could happen sooner than you think

The four lessons other developers can learn from the Valve employee handbook

Max Payne 3′s massive 35GB install vs. other big games

Supposed list of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 multiplayer details leaked

Ben Sawyer on how Games for Health will lead to “human joysticks” (interview)

The Fez soundtrack’s hidden images and how they got there

Stories that also appeared on VentureBeat:

Google Zerg rush attacks your search results with this fun Starcraft-inspired easter egg

Non-gamers, here’s why you should care about games

Big Fish Games CEO hands reins back to founder Paul Thelen

Casino games surpass farm games as the darlings of social networks

Nexon to publish A Bit Lucky’s Lucky Space in South Korea (exclusive)

Two Angry Birds leaders leave the nest to start Boomlagoon (exclusive)

Zynga earnings call: three key wins in mobile, social and diversification

Zynga beats Q1 earnings estimates

EA stock spikes on rumor that Nexon will buy it (not likely)

Smith & Tinker revives Nanovor with mobile app (exclusive)

Nintendo posts fiscal year loss and expects to return to profitability

Arrggh: KingsIsle Entertainment unveils Pirate101 online game

YouWeb and StartEngine incubators to hold Double Demo Day for 20 startups

Japan’s DeNA signs up Kabam and Nimblebit

PixyKids launches 3D-animated characters for kids social network

Report: Amazon pulling ahead of iTunes in average revenue per user

Real online gambling and social network casino games are on a collision course

Valve’s new pricing will charge players based on how much of a jerk they are

AMD takes a swing at Intel and Nvidia with new mobile graphics chips

Gamers: Get the most out of your Android device

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Prophet wants blood. It’s difficult to blame him. After all, he’s been hunted since Manhattan crumbled from an alien-engineered virus in 2011’s sci-fi first-person shooter, Crysis 2. The diabolical CryNet Enforcement & Local Logistics (CELL) organization seeks his powerful Nanosuit technology. The monstrous Cephalopod invaders — tentacled space squids — just plain kill anything they meet. And on top of it all, his consciousness’ mental roommate is a half-sane soldier who shot himself after saving the world.

Enough running. As Prophet himself eloquently states: “We’ll see who gets hunted.”

Set 24 years after the events of Crysis 2, Crysis 3’s New York City sags beneath over two decades of decay and utter ruin. CELL is in full containment mode, erecting a gargantuan Nanodome around the wrecked city as a means to quarantine the rampant virus outbreak introduced by the Ceph. Overgrown flora chokes avenues and buildings with a dense mire of twisting vines and massive trees. It’s a common sight for post-apocalyptic sci-fi — and a clear throwback to the franchise’s wilderness roots — but according to Rasmus Hojengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, it’s the climactic stage for the series’ crescendo.

“It’s essentially a highly advanced greenhouse,” he said during a recent press event. “We didn’t want to just paint a little green color over the cracks and call it a day. We wanted the city to define the shape of the rainforest, which in turn shapes the mood and storytelling of Crysis 3.”

Hojengaard also hinted CELL’s ulterior motive for constructing the dome wasn’t quite benevolent. Spoiler: It involves the words “world” and “domination” in it.

And yes, before you ask: The game looks amazing. CryEngine’s double reputation as the bleeding edge of graphical fidelity and the most consistent slayer of any PC hardware that’s not a supercomputer makes Crysis 3 pop off the screen like James Cameron’s wet dream. “We’ve probably invented the most insane lensflare system ever conceived,” Hojengaard boasted. Take a hike, Abrams.

The developers also demonstrated a set of new weapons for Prophet’s hunt. The compound bow’s utilitarian construction allows the player to shoot deadly spear arrows while cloaked, adding a “whole new layer to stealth gameplay and the feeling of becoming the hunter,” Hojengaard explained. Some example attachments included an automatic reload system, electro arrows, and explosive arrows.

In a short gameplay video, Prophet showed off the bow’s effectiveness in silently dispatching Ceph grunts from afar with carefully placed arrows, a mixture of high- and low-tech reminiscent of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter’s Tek Bow. Long-range shots provided a dramatic arrow-cam tracking the bolt piercing its target with a satisfying crunch.

As Prophet stealthily traversed the remains of Chinatown, an aerial remote — small, hovering probe-like enemies — stripped his cloak and sapped his suit’s energy in mere seconds. Hojengaard said “plenty of new countermeasures” such as the remotes exist to prevent players from simply sticking to the bow-and-camouflage combo throughout the game. Rambo would be disappointed, but that gives Prophet all the reason he needs for touting louder (and more explosive) weaponry such as the Typhoon rifle.

In a word, the Typhoon is ridiculous. In two, it’s really ridiculous. Its rate of fire settles somewhere between caffeine injections and cocaine, and it sprays lead with a sound like an angry wasp hive belching its contents. Going rock-and-roll on CELL and Ceph alike never gets old, but ammo management will be critical.

Prophet’s sleek Nanosuit doesn’t skimp on pimpage either. A new suite of hacking software conveniently installed itself after Crysis 2 closed up. In addition to the still-cool standbys of armor, speed, and stealth suit enhancements, Prophet can now tinker with certain electronic objects from afar, starting from simple turrets and door switches before scaling to “epic proportions” at end-game, Hojengaard said.

The Nanosuit also busied itself infusing increasing amounts of alien technology into its systems. As a result, Prophet’s arsenal swells with the capability to pick up and use Ceph weaponry. Halo players will feel right at home here — like the Covenant, every Ceph gun has a finite power cell before draining completely.

The Nanodome beckons. Manhattan rots away into nothingness. Prophet is locked in with everyone who wants him dead. But come Crysis 3’s spring 2013 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, everyone will learn they’re locked in with Prophet.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week in news: Polytron admits to bugs found in Fez, Kickstarter is on track to triple their earnings this year, and THQ reports its revenue is slightly higher than expected.

You will also find reviews of Trials: Evolution and Skullgirls.

Other GamesBeat stories included:

The DeanBeat: GamesBeat 2012 to focus on crossover strategies

Diablo III open beta weekend begins today

Awesome art: Disney princesses reimagined in Final Fantasy X-2′s dresspheres (gallery)

Blade Games World brings 3D game creation to everyone with Jumala

BBC to publish games with 6waves as the Brits invade Facebook

Prey 2: Not canceled, just delayed

Update: Sony confirms God of War: Ascension (with video)

Tim Schafer shares 5 tips to Kickstarter success

Temple Run sprints past 10 million downloads for Android

Zynga adds new social features to Draw Something, raises streak cap to 999

Sci-fi author sues Ubisoft over alleged Assassin’s Creed copyright infringement

Trials Evolution hits the throttle and never lets up (review)

XEOPlay’s beautiful iOS game Tilt World strives to make a real-world impact

Rock Band Blitz developer discusses dropping the plastic instruments

Beating Ocarina of Time in under 25 minutes and other crazy speed runs

Zynga’s got $1.8 billion in cash and is aggressively looking for the next OMGPOP

Electronic Arts announces Crysis 3 for Spring 2013 along with preorder packs

Skullgirls revisits the Golden Age of fighting games and animation (review)

How Fez’s first-day sales compare to Braid, Limbo, and other XBLA hits

Polytron acknowledges “pretty serious” bugs in Fez

Stories that also appeared on VentureBeat:

Author David Kushner tells the inside tale on Grand Theft Auto and the video game violence wars (interview)

Bicycle card game owner to launch Zeniz mobile social casino games platform (exclusive)

Can minors buy Facebook Credits? Parents demand refund in class action suit

Kickstarter funding explodes, on pace to triple this year to around $300M

With Xbox 360 sales slowing down, Windows Phone desperately needs to succeed

World Golf Tour, now simply WGT, launches Major League Baseball game on Facebook (exclusive)

Bluega takes web-based HTML5 touchscreen interface across platforms

THQ reports revenue to be significantly higher than expected

Aeria Games gets strategic investment from Sony division

Behind the scenes of how Bethesda marketed giant fantasy hit Skyrim

Finally shipping: The $35 Raspberry Pi computer that can play Quake 3 Arena

Social mobile game maker Zattikka goes public on London Stock Exchange

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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