CRYENGINE 5.7 roadmap revealed alongside our plans for the future of CRYENGINE.

We know you’ve been waiting for a long time, and today we’re sharing the CRYENGINE 5.7 roadmap with you. We appreciate your patience in waiting for this update, and alongside the roadmap, we also wanted to share our plans for the future of the engine. Those plans, and the roadmap, may not be what you expect, so first, some context.  

The past two years have been challenging. Internally, we hit bumps on the development road that led to a change of plans regarding CRYENGINE V’s development and overall vision. Ultimately, and particularly with the disruption that COVID brought upon the way we work, we haven’t been able to hit the development goals we set because priorities had to be adjusted.

Crytek is a studio with 20 years of experience in making AAA games and a fanbase of millions of gamers worldwide to support. This year, we strengthened our signature IP, the Crysis franchise, adding ray tracing technology and other modern graphical advancements to create the Crysis Remastered Trilogy. We kept pushing technological boundaries with The Climb 2 for Oculus Quest, effectively launching CRYENGINE’s first Mobile VR title successfully to the Oculus ecosystem. And we continued to invest in our newest fan-favorite IP Hunt: Showdown by adding new maps, content, and ways to play. Its growth has been spectacular. We even released a music album from our very own Port Sulphur Band, enabling you to immerse yourself fully in the rhythm of the bayou, even when you’re not hunting down bounties. 

We are proud to be both a technology company and a game development studio. But as a company of moderate size, we were forced to make the tough decision to focus on supporting game development over advancing our plans with CRYENGINE as we’d like. That said, innovations and advancements like ray tracing, the mobile and mobile VR pipeline, better net code, visual scripting, and much more will benefit everyone using our engine in the near future. And we have plans to grow the studio’s headcount significantly over the next couple of years to support both CRYENGINE and our game development teams.

But first, we have decided that we need to make structural changes both within the company and with the engine’s architecture to achieve our goals. 

Our Head of Product, Arto Ruotsalainen, explains what’s next for CRYENGINE:

“CRYENGINE is a huge product, and to deliver the cutting-edge and production-proven solution we all can be proud of, we had to change our plans in order to focus to realize the ambitious goals set. Unfortunately, this means a delay in releasing the next major public version of CRYENGINE. Ultimately, we need some time to consolidate the engine advancements we've made with our game teams, and restructure, innovate and strengthen CRYENGINE for all our licensees and the community. We know that a delay isn’t what many of you would like to hear. But, in the long-term interests of everyone, we believe it’s the right one. And be assured that not having a timeline for the next public release doesn’t mean that we are not going to continue working with current CRYENGINE licensees and our active community members. For how we continue to do so without major public release insight: we are laying out plans as we speak, so stay tuned for updates throughout next year. For now, I wish everyone a relaxing Christmas and New Year holiday season. We will see you in 2022.”

We understand you will have questions. And we will answer them. 

Arto will be making himself available for a live Q&A on the CRYENGINE Discord Server on February 1st, 2022. You’re all invited to join, but until then, please send your questions to the #ama-questions channel here.

Your ongoing support means the world to us, and while we are very well aware that we couldn’t support you as much as we would have liked in the past couple of years, we will make up for it in the years to come.

The CRYENGINE 5.7 Long Term Support (LTS) update will hit in early 2022, bringing the changes mentioned on the roadmap to ensure you are equipped with a stable and reliable engine for your current projects. For future projects, we are planning a beta program that invites selected developers who have been working with the engine over the past few years to help us make sure that the next CRYENGINE iteration will not just meet but exceed your expectations.  

We also have a Launcher release with quality-of-life updates and more in-store, and you will also see the ecosystem surrounding the engine restructure and transform too.

We can’t wait to share the full vision for the engine and what’s next as soon as we can. Thanks for sticking with us over these past couple of years. And as always, don’t hesitate to reach out to us on Discord, the official CRYENGINE forums, our contact form, or social media. And as we mentioned, we are growing our studio. We value diversity and encourage people from all backgrounds and experience levels to apply to our open positions, so join us on LinkedIn and check out our careers page.