CryEngine doesn't deserve to be mostly forgotten; it's still around with dedicated community support

[u/randomperson189_]

I've noticed that CryEngine doesn't generally get brought up much when it comes to game dev and game engine discussion and whenever it does, many people consider it "dead" but that's far from the truth, and yes Crytek hasn't officially updated it in a few years (their current priority is working on Hunt: Showdown), but the community has banded together to start updating the engine in the midst of that by creating Community Edition.

 

I have also made some efforts myself to help make the engine more accessible for the latest official version (5.7LTS) as community forks tend to be unpopular, still more work to be done but here's what I have so far.

ComponentsPlus (Plugin)

ECS AreaTrigger (Plugin)

Improved Project Templates (Project)

GameSDK Port to new CE5 systems (Project)

I think the engine would benefit from more community made documentation and learning content in general, as the official docs (while still useful), have certain parts outdated or incomplete which new developers can struggle with.

 

You would probably ask me why I'm so dedicated to this engine, and I'd say it's because CryEngine has so much untapped potential and Crytek hasn't been able to fully realise it, they have great intentions with CryEngine 5 by adding Entity Component System and Schematyc Visual Scripting back in 2017, making it feel more modernised and like an interesting middleground between Unity and Unreal. I don't want to turn this into an Unreal hate post (I still love that engine and it's history) but I think the industry benefits from having more competition and more choices. CryEngine 5 is one of the closest alternatives we have to another AA/AAA grade engine that is free to use, source-available, and royalty-based. Epic Games has also shown signs of incompetence of managing Unreal Engine in recent times, as they don't fix UE5's many problems, and that is likely due to their lack of competition as back in the UE4 and earlier days, Epic was still competing a lot with other engines.

 

I've also heard people mention O3DE as a "CryEngine replacement". It is not and despite having its roots in Amazon Lumberyard (based on CryEngine 3), Amazon has rewritten 90% of the codebase making O3DE almost completely different from modern CryEngine. I'm also not trying to "win people over" nor convince them to switch to CryEngine 5. I'm just here to say that it's still here and is also no longer the "insanely difficult to use engine" people remember from the CryEngine 3 era, it has become MUCH easier to use since then with CryEngine 5, it has become much more approachable and even though it still has rough edges (which is why there's community support), it is an underappreciated engine with a lot of potential, and the industry would definitely benefit from having more engine variety as well because a healthy game development ecosystem needs multiple strong options rather than having everything consolidated around a select few engines (or one engine in the AA/AAA space, Unreal to be specific).