Crysis Co-op mod

Hello everyone and Happy 12th Crysis Anniversary!

We come to you today with a surprise announcement: the upcoming release of the most feature complete Crysis Co-op build ever. As many of you have noticed our previous release was very much a proof-of-concept, since then we have revised our approach, started fresh and achieved the most ambitious and technically complex Crysis mod ever.

One of the most exciting aspects of this latest release is that it is accompanied by the entire Crysis campaign, but if that wasn’t enough we have done what was previously considered impossible by the modding community and supported the Crysis Warhead campaign too.

Getting Warhead levels and features to work in Crysis Wars was no small feat and to get it to work in multiplayer was an even bigger challenge. We have had to put in a lot of painstaking work to replicate behaviour and mechanics for the special alien types, such as the shielded troopers, the bombers as well as the train and more.

However, we are yet to request approval from Crytek to release the Warhead campaign.

Finally, in this iteration, instead of trying to make things multiplayer-compatible using brute force to work-around issues, we have concentrated on fixing the root causes of problems, which ensures a more stable and consistent gameplay experience that provides near full parity with the singleplayer game. Subsequently, most custom maps will be playable with minor, or no changes at all.

This will also be the first version of the mod to feature a cooperative game rules feature set. Dead players can now be revived by a defibrillator, which all players are given as standard equipment. If all players are defeated, the mission will fail and the level will restart. Of course the truly hardcore can disable the defibrillator if they so choose.

We have also implemented run-time “dataset” changing, allowing for Crysis, Crysis Wars or Crysis Warhead configuration to be activated on-demand depending on the level setup, which allows weapons, vehicles and AI to be balanced properly for each game’s configuration- in addition, we added a “compatibility mode” that works with Crysis Warhead data, including the improved particle effects, sounds and scripts.

Additionally in this version you can select which character to play as through the campaign. While this has no story implications we think it’s a nice touch and gives players more control over their experience.

As many Crysis fans know one of the saddest days in the community was back in 2014 when the GameSpy servers were shut down which rendered Crysis multiplayer unplayable.

We know that the GameSpy shutdown caused a lot of headache and created a technical barrier for entry to playing the old version of Crysis Co-op. For this reason we set out to replace the GameSpy implementation with Steam instead, including support for the Steam master server, so that you no longer have to connect to servers through direct IP addresses and removing the necessity of using VPN software.

However, all of this means that owning a legal copy of Crysis Warhead (includes Crysis Wars) on Steam is required to play Crysis Co-op, but we believe this decision will increase the likelihood of us receiving Crytek’s approval to release the Crysis Warhead campaign, given ownership of the game is required to play.

We have converted most of the essential Lua entities to C++ with full network synchronisation support, allowing level designers to use entities that previously caused network errors, or did not behave properly, in their multiplayer levels.

We also implemented more advanced network synchronisation for certain Flowgraph nodes, which will allow level designers more freedom when creating Flowgraphs for multiplayer use, allowing server-side Flowgraphs to be in control of the level’s general state- with broadcasting of these Flowgraph-triggered events to clients even after they have been initially triggered, ensuring players have a consistent experience- even if they join the game after it has already started.

We are targeting a December release for the Crysis Campaign. Though as you well know we already dedicate what little precious free-time we have to this project and that release window could change.

Yours cooperatively,
Fudsine & RaZoR-FIN