New CryEngine tech trailer rekindles memories of Crysis

Ah, Crysis. It’s been so long since you melted PCs. Surely, with the next-generation of consoles nearly upon us, it’s time to do so once again?

It seems unlikely. The last Crysis game, 2013’s Crysis 3, failed to meet publisher and IP owner EA’s expectations, and developer Crytek has hardly had a good time of it in recent years. But then we have this: a CryEngine tech demo that’s certainly set the cat among the pidgeons.

The tech video starts out as you’d expect. We see realtime volumetric fog from Hunt Showdown, Crytek’s recently-released multiplayer-focused game. There’s fully dynamic lighting in all its glory. Even vegetation touch bending gets its chance to shine.

Then, we go through a series of portals that doff their hat to previous Crytek games. One portal leads us to an area that looks a bit like Ryse. And then, at the 2.15 mark, a portal to what looks very much like Crysis.

CRYENGINE 5.6 Tech Trailer Watch on YouTube

Yep, that’s a lush jungle island, all right.

There’s more to the video that suggests Crysis was at least in Crytek’s mind when it put the thing together. At the beginning of the video, as the user opens a CryEngine project browser, we see the word Prophet in the location of the file. (Prophet is one of the central characters in the Crysis series).