Answering one of the main questions by Crysis fans, Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli has confirmed to Eurogamer that the series will continue after Crysis 3 but won’t be following logical succession of our Arabic numerals.

“I wouldn’t name it Crysis 4 at this stage because it would be misleading. We want to finalize Prophet’s story, and Crysis 4 would imply the story just moves on.

Instead, the series will go down – gasp – the free-to-play route.

“We do have a plan for a F2P version of Crysis, but how this looks and when this will be done, whether this is the next one or the next next one, is to be decided,” he said. “I believe F2P is our inevitable future. I believe there are F2P titles out there that can be story-telling and cooperative with your friends and competitive with your friends. It’s all possible.”

With Crysis 3 being set for a release sometime in February next year, the Crytek could already be in the pre-production phase for the next iteration in the Crysis sage. However, with a totally new approach, that might be a hollow guess. Indeed, Crytek remains silent on their early ideas and Yerli explains that:

“We want to make this something much more radical and new, we’re looking at it as a bit more of a long-term thing. It’s too early to talk about it for these reasons.”

In Yerli’s opinion, the quality, content and design of the game will not suffer from a change to F2P.

“The business model is independent from the way you design games. It’s a very important thing. People always make these things dependent, but it’s actually completely independent.”

Whether it truly is, is more debatable than Mr. Yerli points out, but that is a different story. Are you a fan of the Crysis games? Tell us what you think.