Battle royale is coming to Crytek's futuristic shooter Warface

Crytek are looking to capitalise on the battle royale explosion by adding the mode to their futuristic free-to-play shooter Warface. It's coming in the next update (no date is given), and it will hang around temporarily to allow the developer to gather feedback, tinker with the formula, and then reintroduce the final package later on.

Expect a large desert map and a ever-shrinking play zone with random loot—basically, it's the formula that PUBG proved grabs players and doesn't let them go. Crytek says that the map is the largest ever in the game, but from the looks of early footage (some international versions of the game already have the mode added) it only supports 16 players. Rather than parachute in, players are randomly spawned across the map.

I haven't got particularly high hopes for this one: Warface, as Chris explained when the game came out in 2014, is thoroughly mediocre. Up to now its game modes have been a mixture of Call of Duty-style PvP matches in small arenas and co-op missions in larger spaces.

The fact that it's free means that if you liked the original game, or you're getting bored of your current battle royale of choice (PUBG and Fortnite Battle Royale are keeping me very busy), then you may as well take a look.

Read the full announcement here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.