Face, off!

Crytek hasn't been doing so hot critically lately, with the recent releases of Ryse and Warface. I would have completely forgotten that the latter game had existed if it weren't for the ridiculou???s name, which immediately fills my head with John Woo-related imagery.

It turns out that Microsoft isn't so keen on it, because it's being discontinued entirely on the Xbox 360 after less than a year. While there was confusion abound when t?he announcement was first heard with blame placed on Crytek, the developer has since responded that Microsoft was actually the one who wanted to phase it out.

The game will continue to live on with the PC platform, and the Xbox 360 will cease service on February 1, 2015 -- so you have so??me time.

Warface?? Xbox 360 Edition fires its last shot on February 1, 2015 [Xbox Forums]

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Next year

Okay. I'm willing to admit it -- for as silly as the name Warface is, it's fairly memorable. In a sea of free-to-play first-person shooters, this is among the first (and only!) to immediately come to mind. Not that I've ever bothered to play the game, which see?ms to perpetually be in beta.

In addition to the existing PC version, Crytek intends to release Warface on Xbox 360. That'll happen in early 2014 and, unsurprisingly, this title will be "free-to-play with [Xbox Live] Gold." How painful it must've been to have typed that up for the official website.

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Beta invite, Y U NO IN INBOX?!

Warface, Crytek's upcoming free-to-play shooter, looks like a lot of fun. I'm genuinely excited about this game and have been anticipating the launch of the closed beta for a while now. Well, said beta is now officially live and some of those who applied for beta access should start checking their inbox for a possible invite. I've been staring at mine all day?? -- still nothing.

The beta servers, according to the team, will be "live continuou??sly ?until the game's official launch in Spring 2013." If you have yet to register for the beta, you can still do so here.

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For your face

Trion Worlds and Crytek have kicked first-person shooter Warface into gear, announcing that the free-to-play game's servers are now operational for the closed beta. Amusingly, the "social entertainment platform" powering Warface has literally bee??n named GFACE. Might as well double down on the branding while they're at it.

Of course, if you weren't previously compelled to sign up for the beta and have since had a change of heart, it is not too late to become registered. The game doesn't laun??ch until spring 2013, so there's plenty of time. I'd be curiou??s to see how the monetization has taken form.

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Development budgets are swelling, while consumer tolerance for higher prices is shrinking. It seems that we are headed towards an impasse. Wh?ile the free-to-play model has already solidified itself as a viable alternative, there are few, if any, free-to-play games that capture what we expect from core, $60 experiences.

From the house that gave us Crysis comes Warface, a multiplayer shooter that aims to bring all the glitz and glam of a triple-A title to the free-to-play space. Originally an? experiment to combat PC piracy in European markets, this game is hoping to replicate its success in Western markets and prove that AAA is not syn??onymous with premium.

Warface (PC)
Developer: Crytek Kiev
Publisher: Trion
Release: TBA 2013, open beta: Q4 2012

First order of business we need to get out of the way: Warface is absolutely gorgeous. Running on a modified version of CryEngine 3, the game is optimized to look great and run well on older rigs. While the PC we played on was pretty beefy, you just don't see game this good-looking -- with visuals comparable to titles like Crysis 2 -- in the free-to-play space.

Once you hop into the game, you'll see there is quite a bit of meat on Warface's bones. The game features both adversarial a?nd cooperative multiplayer modes, with daily updated content for PvE. Combat is class-based across both PvE and PvP. The rifleman is your soldier archetype, acting as your team's point-man, while engineers are tech and demolition experts. The sniper class plays as the name suggests, and medics revive and heal teammates. You'll need to find the appropriate balance for each scenario if you plan to do well.

Co-op in Warface is essentially a mission mode for up to five players, and it is designed with this number in mind. In my time with it, enemy AI flanked, took cover, and otherwise adapted and reacted intelligently to the team. Warface really does demand teamwork from its players. The aforement?ioned daily updates add new elements to the game, such as XP boosts, as incentives to rev??isit even the most well-tread missions.

The PvP modes are pretty much the usual mix of Team Deathmatch, with a healthy sprinkling of objective-based modes. The moment-to-moment combat plays pretty much how you would expect a contemporary FPS to play, and while there's nothing terribly exciting?????????????????????????? in that respect, it's all good fun. The co-op provides a hardy challenge and that sense of relief and accomplishment when you finish a particularly challenging mission, while the gunplay controls well, offering f??ast and frantic fights in PvP.

With a free-to-play game that looks amazing, plays well, and offers a lot of content, the next obvious question is how this will be monetized. The answer: make the grind to unlock everything a steep uphill battle. Progression doesn't move according to the modern FPS leveling system that Call of Duty 4 popularized. The system here is comparable to what we saw in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer. Every batch of unlocks is a random event, and what's more, there is an insane amount of items to be unlocked. Items in Warface co??me in?? three flavors: weapons, outfits, and equipment.

Weapons are self-explanatory, but even here, the guns are more about preference than acquiring that end-all-be-all?? gun that you stick with, so you'll have to unlock a good amount before you fi??nd that batch of favorites. Equipment is essentially weapon attachments, running the usual gamut of scopes, suppressors and the like. Outfits change the appearance of your character while providing useful effects. These include vests that protect you from one-shot deaths by snipers, gloves that give you faster reloads, and so on.

You can of course unlock all of this content by playing the game, and Crytek is balancing everything so this doesn't turn into a pay-to-win affair, but you have option to buy items. To clarify, you can not pay for individual items. Whether you pay or use in-game currency, everything you get is still random, so the grind persists. It's honestly one of the more clever pricing models I've seen in a free-to-play game. Even in a full-priced game like Mass Effect 3, the grind to getting my Phaeston to lev??el 10 or getting a new character was steep enough that I didn't mind occasionally paying for my next ??Spectre Pack.

Warface is c?ertainly a bold game. While the moment-to-moment gunplay is nothing terribly original, the game both lowers the barrier for entry, and raises it where production values are concerned. Anyone even remotely interested should hit up the open beta when i?t launches later this year.

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It looks like Trion Worlds' has a fair amount to show off at Gamescom, which is impending. During the conference, which takes place in Cologne between the 16th and 19th, Trion will be showing "Storm Legion" for Rift to consumers for the first time, as well as offering a first look at End of Nations campaign gameplay, Defiance pvp, and Warface -- which they are making with Crytek. 

I'm most intrigued by Warface, as the Russians appear to have been joying it for some time already. Nobody likes to feel left out. It's a free-to-play AAA shooter, and for some reason I can't get enough of those right now. Tribes did something to me and it won't let up. 

Dale and Hamza are being packed away in shipping containers for the long journey to Ger?many soon, so perhaps they'll get a peek. 

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To say that a lot of free-to-play games were at the show this year would ?be an understatement. Though they weren't all of the same genre, I saw a holy God crap-ton of F2P titles everywhere.

This model is spreading like a wildf?ire, and seems to be the payment plan of choice when it comes to online multiplayer PC titles. The appeal of micro-transactions to games that feature a continuous supply of content is irrefutable, and it's safe to assume that fun is indeed becoming free, in this industry that has, more or less, made fun its sole source of appeal.

And now, after seeing the beautiful Warface, it's safe to say that "qualit?y" is no longer a large concern for the free-to-play market. This game is not only the best-looking F2P game thus far, but it was also one of the most visually appealing titles at the show.

A blatant reason why Warface is so great looking exists: It's being developed with CryEngine 3. It's arguably the most technically advanced engine to date, so that says something for a game that will actually cost you nothing to experience. A lot of the CryEngine 3's trickery ?can be seen in the game: HDR lighting, real-time weapon customization, displacement mapping, etc.

You may be wondering why this even matters. Well, plenty of people still exist who seem to have a bias against anything free to play; they instantly associate games under this model as cheap or low quality. Also, plenty of gamers still judge the quality of a game (at least at first) by its visuals, alone. With that said, if you're one of those people, and need better graphics than Warface to be convinced that F2P games can be worth your time, then I'm sorry to say that you're screwed. This is about as good as they can look right now, and anything better can ju??st be considered the n??atural graphical progression of the medium. Sorry, bub.

Some gamers don't always judge games based on their looks, though, but rather the quality of the experience they provide. (We tend to also call these gamers "humans.") Still, a general stigma remains around F2P games as having poor production values and low development times. Well, I hate to ruin their preconceptions as well, but even Warface busts that ??theory. The game is just? as strong of a shooter as those you find in retail stores, and even does some great things with the genre that got me smiling and saying, "That's pretty cool."

The shooting is quick, tight and precise; I just want to get that out of the way right now. Players can pull off some decent moves, such as long slides behind objects -- or towards others to rack up a nice melee kill -- as well as boosting and pulling teammates up to high ground. For a game that's based solely on multiplayer, I had to co?njure up all my past MP experiences to critique it and, quite honestly, it held up very nicely.

What made it even better was that, instead of it merely being MP in the player-versus-player sense, the game will also feature daily ?alternated co-op missions for teams to complete for in-game currency. Essentially, four others and I faced off against the game's AI to reach specific checkpoints.

It wasn't until later in the game that we realized how much smarter it would have been for one of us to have played at a medic, however. Thankfully, Warface lets players purch?ase "c?oins" to resurrect themselves and get back into the action. These are available in co-op only, though -- wouldn't want to make things too unfair against others. I loved this PVE mode, as it sets this game apart from the others who only provide a PVP experience.

One of my favorite features that Warface offered was its clever way it implemented RPG elements. Like most other shooters these days, the game provides several weapons and gear to unlock via stacking kills and leveling up. The difference here is that Warface not only requires that you choose one of three categories per match to? level up (weapons, armor, equipment), but the items you unlock on those categories are randomly selected.

Why is that cool? Because now you're almost guaranteed to not have to grind your way to the max level in order to get that one gun you've been looking forward to. Remember your favorite weapon being attained at level 15 in one CoD, yet attained at level 60 in the sequel?? Yeah, no more of that crap.

To sum things up, Warface looks like a solid -- and pretty! -- shooter that not only provides some decent alternatives to gameplay, but it also costs you nothing to try. Many are saying that this E3 was the "year of the bow," but I say free shit was more prevalent ... and I'm not talking about all the T-shirts. This is one of the best times to be a gamer, because, when you?? really look at it, we have more opportunities to play on a budget than ever.

Prepare to download your copy of Warface on PCs later this year.

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It seemed odd that a company like Crytek would produce a free-to-play first-person shooter for PC and only talk about how it's going to be available in China. The powers that be are now discussing further plans: Warface "will hit the Western markets in 2012."

Short story even shorter, they are s??tarting with Asia to gain experience in the market, which can then be used to (in theory) better the product we receive. S??ounds like a plan.

The amount of games coming out with this business model is rapidly approaching absurdity, yes. But it's not every day you see a title with so much attention to detail; Crytek has the technology to make it rain men, after all.

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