It has been used in all of their titles with the initial version being used in Far Cry, and continues to be updated to support new consoles and hardware for their games.

It has also been used for many third-party games under Crytek's licensing scheme, including Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 and SNOW.

Warhorse Studios uses a modified version of the engine for their medieval RPG Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

It was originally developed by Crytek as a technology demo for Nvidia and, when the company saw its potential, it was turned into a game.

The purpose of licensing the engine was to create a program to allow clients to see exactly what a building or other structure would look like before any actual construction was started.

As of March 7, 2011, Simpson Studios has licensed CryEngine 2 out to use on a Massively Multiplayer Virtual World (MMVW) that takes place on a terraformed Mars.

[28] On March 1, 2010, a new tech demo of the engine was released for the i3D 2010 symposium, which demonstrates 'Cascaded Light Propagation Volumes for Real Time Indirect Illumination'.

[29] On June 11, 2011, the Australian Defence Force revealed that Navy personnel would train on a virtual landing helicopter dock ship made using the CryEngine 3 software.

[40][41] On September 21, 2017, CryEngine 5.4 was released,[42] adding the Vulkan API renderer as a beta, substance integration,[43] and other features including new C# templates, asset system updates, and new anti-aliasing techniques.

The Sandbox's concentration on potentially huge (in theory, hundreds of square kilometers) terrain, means that it uses an algorithmic form of painting textures and objects onto the landscape.

This is intended to save time and make the editing of such large terrains feasible while maintaining the overall "real world" sandbox-free roaming style.

The Editor also supports all the CryEngine features such as vehicles and physics, scripting, advanced lighting (including real time, moving shadows), Polybump technology, shaders, 3D audio, character inverse kinematics and animation blending, dynamic music, Real Time Soft Particle System and Integrated FX Editor, Deferred Lighting, Normal Maps & Parallax Occlusion Maps, and Advanced Modular AI System.