Crysis Remastered With Ray Tracing Support Seemingly Confirmed, Will Run On Nintendo Switch
At this point, it seems one of two possibilities are most likely—either Crytek is getting ready to announce a remastered version of Crysis, complete with support for real-time ray tracing, or the developer is trolling us. The latter does not make much sense, so we are much more inclined to believe the former, based on the latest leak.
Before we get to that, let's recap Crytek's cryptic Twitter post earlier this week. Crytek's official "@Crysis" Twitter account had been silent dating all the way back to December 2016, then this past Monday, it came out of hibernation and posted in all caps, "RECEIVING DATA." This led to a flurry of speculation, especially in light of the Crysis.com domain being recently updated to hint at a ray-traced remaster (albeit with "April Fool" among its tags).
Now here's where things get really interesting. Twitter user Iasman (@RobotBrush) posted screenshots of what appears to be a premature posting of an announcement, on the same domain. Assuming this was not faked, then Crysis Remastered is indeed in the works, with "API-agnostic ray tracing" support. It will even feature fancy visuals on the Nintendo Switch, according to the supposed announcement.
"Crysis Remastered brings new graphic features, high-quality textures, and the CRYENGINE's native hardware- and API-agnostic ray tracing solution for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and – for the very first time – Nintendo Switch."
— lashman (@RobotBrush) April 16, 2020
oooops ;) pic.twitter.com/4EVNOHzLzb
"Crysis Remastered brings new graphic features, high-quality textures, and the CryEngine's native hardware - and API-agnostic ray tracing solution for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and – for the very first time – Nintendo Switch," the updated site stated.
Crytek also apparently posted a splash image (seen up top) of Crysis Remastered, and noted it would be released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.
Several websites are treating this as confirmation, and it might turn out to be that way. We are being a little more reserved because (A) nothing has been officially announced yet, and (B) we can't find a cached copy of the page(s) in question.
One thing that's interesting is that Crytek mentions the PS4 and Xbox One, but not the upcoming PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, both of which will have hardware-based support for real-time ray tracing—AMD has built custom RDNA 2-based GPUs for each console. However, Crytek also notes that it's implementation is API-agnostic, and if it can run on the Switch, then surely current generation consoles could handle it.
Wouldn't that be ironic? After all, the original Crysis was a demanding game for its time, paving the way for the 'Yeah, but can it run Crysis?' meme that is often tossed around when new hardware is announced (still today).
Hopefully this turns out to be real. Considering Crytek's recent tweet, we suspect it is, but will have to wait and see.
