Before Free Radical went into administration last year, concept art and rumours about TimeSplitters 4 were flying all over the place. Now that the developers are back on their feet as Crytek UK, could we finally see the fourth entry into the franchise? Quite possibly, but not just yet says Karl Hilton, managing director for Crytek UK.

“Going forward, we’ve always made it very clear that we want to build original games and we’re going to do that, and we are concepting some of that up at the moment. It’s early days, but there’s some really exciting stuff that we’re concepting. When we’re ready we’ll talk to publishers, and hopefully publishers will like it, and we’ll own and produce those games in our own studio.” So we still will have to wait some time before we see TimeSplitters back on our screens. But what about the idea of developing a game like TimeSplitters, which bears a cartoon style, with an engine designed for hyper-realism like CryEngine 3?

“Going forward with future projects, it will be up to us to talk to publishers about what they want, be it the old TimeSplitters or Team Fortress route of slightly stylized or comic characters, or whether they want hyper-realistic games.” With games like Modern Warfare 2 gearing up to be the biggest holiday titles this year, its no wonder that the developers are cautious about making a game that differs so greatly in design.

Crysis 2 is understandably the team’s main focus at the moment and any other projects from Crytek UK are a long way off. But perhaps one day we’ll be shooting monkeys in the face once more… I mean in a TimeSplitters game of course.