Yesterday, publisher Crytek – which has been facing financial troubles and controversies when it couldn’t pay staff in Crytek UK, resulting in Deep Silver picking up the Homefront IP – announced that Ryse: Son of Rome would be coming to PC later this year.
Speaking to Eurogamer, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli said the decision was made because, “Ryse is our IP. We do what we want to do with the future of Ryse. This is important. We are not 100 percent happy with Xbox One sales right now. So we want to wait till the current gen and next gen catches up.”
There have been rumours that a sequel in the franchise had been cancelled due to the aforementioned financial problems. But it’s more of a case of the original needing to be more successful first. “For Ryse 2, we aren’t saying it’s cancelled. It’s our IP. It just has to wait for the right timing. And the right timing means higher installed base across next-gen.”
Yerli further debunked rumours of Ryse: Son of Rome releasing too early just to get on the Xbox One at launch. “There were rumours saying, hey, there were penalties if you don’t release. This was all bullshit.
“We had agreed with Microsoft to put it out on time. In fact, we had conversations from Microsoft to us, telling us, guys, do you want to push out the game? We wouldn’t be offended by that. But when we let the team choose – not the management – when we asked, guys, do you want to try to get it done by Holiday or do you want to take a few more months time, unanimously they team decided to go for the launch window of a console because that’s something emotional to be a part of. To be part of an event like that, you do it once every five to 10 years. So everybody was pushing towards that.”
We’ll of course see how this develops further down the line so stay tuned.