Nexuiz To Run on CryENGINE 3

I'm not normally into "this game announced to use this engine and this middleware" news, but this announcement caught my eye. Nexuiz, the upcoming downloadable first-person shooter from Illfonic, is going to run on Crytek's CryENGINE 3. This is the same engine that Crysis 2 will run on when it's released. That's not really a big story on its own, but Nexuiz's path to the marketplace is a little... odd.

Nexuiz started out as a free, open-source first-person shooter for the PC, Mac, and Linux, and it runs on something called the "Darkplaces" engine, which is a highly modified Quake 1 engine. So it's not exactly advanced technology. In fact, the game's official site claims that work began on Nexuiz in 2002. So when the game was first announced as an upcoming console release, I figured it was just a way for this community-developed project to bring in a little bit of money, but that it'd probably look like a polished-up version of the original game. Obviously, changing to a modern engine opens up all kinds of weird possibilities.

Nexuiz (the original one) is kind of a cool game, and since it's totally free, you might want to give it a look if you've never seen it before. You can grab the latest version from the game's official site. Meanwhile, this CryENGINE-based Nexuiz game is due for Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network this Winter.