A listing on the Microsoft Store revealed that Crysis Remastered will arrive on July 23. Microsoft pulled the product from its store, but not before watchful eyes grabbed the description to get us excited once again about melting our PCs.
"The classic first-person shooter from Crytek is back," the description read, "with the action-packed gameplay, sandbox world, and thrilling epic battles you loved the first time around – now with remastered graphics optimized for a new generation of hardware."
Crytek confirmed the Remastered edition in April 2020, revealing that it will appear not only on PC, but the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch consoles. That latter port will be interesting to see given how the recently released Outer Worlds coughs and stumbles while running on Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC.
According to the company, the Remastered version will see an HD texture pack, motion blur, improved art assets, high-quality textures, particle effects, new light settings, and loads more. In other words, the near-13-year-old game will get a nice facelift for modern gamers.
The underlying CryEngine was ahead of its time in 2007, bringing high-end PCs down to their knees. The expression "but can it run Crysis" became both a joke and a serious question when referring to the overall performance of PCs for years. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided seemingly fills that spot now.
In Crysis, players don a special Nanosuit that gives them unique abilities, like added strength and invisibility. Players assume the role of U.S. Army Delta Force soldier Jake "Nomad" Dunn who, after a mission unexpectedly goes awry, finds himself captured by strange creatures along with two other members of his squad.
Crytek also notes that the Remastered version will include software-based ray tracing, meaning you won’t need a GeForce RTX 20 Series GPU to see the benefits of ray-traced lighting. Screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and shafts of light will also be injected into the now-classic shooter.