CryEngine 3 Ready for Massively Multiplayer

Crytek's Carl Jones said that the future of gaming will harbor massively multiplayer communities.

Crytek's Carl Jones, director of global business development, recently predicted that most game genres will eventually harbor massively multiplayer communities. Of course, Jones also threw in a bit of advertisement on behalf of his employer, saying that CryEngine 3 is definitely ready for the upcoming task. That's not at all surprising considering the original CryEngine technology--released years ago--still serves as a high-end benchmark for today's hardware.

"Online gaming is without doubt the future of gaming," he told Develop magazine. "Where you draw the line at ‘massively’ multiplayer is a matter of opinion, but we can see most--if not all--games involving communities of players in the future. Products such as NCsoft’s Aion prove the power of CryEngine technology for these types of games."

He offers examples on how the engine is ideal for MMOs, providing environment sizes that are limited only to developer budgets. The engine also provides intelligent streaming technology that leeches everything it can from the host platform, taking advantage of multiple CPUs, data clustering and compression. Ultimately he said that the latest CryEngine incarnation is more "well rounded" than the first two installments, and will do quite well in the middleware market.

Currently Crytek has quite a few companies taking advantage of the CryEngine technology, spanning the just-launched Aion from NC Soft, the upcoming virtual world Blue Mars from Avatar Reality, and even an unannounced MMORPG from XMLGames.