THQ has announced that the next chapter in the Homefront saga will be developed in conjunction with a partnership arrangement with Crytek. The sequel to the game, which was released last year and sold about 2.6 million copies by March, will be developed using the Crytek CryEngine platform.

As we told you about previously, THQ closed Homefront developer Kaos Studios in New York when it became clear that Homefront was not going to be the smash hit necessary for THQ to reconsider its plans to keep the developer open and working on the next sequel to Homefront. Once the announcement had been made it was thought that THQ’s Montreal studio would be taking over the Homefront franchise, as Kaos employees were given the chance to transfer to the Montreal, Canada facility.

From what we have been able to dig up so far, Crytek will apparently have at least some “creative freedom” over the design of the Homefront sequel. Crytek apparently plans to spin the sequel into something new and innovative over the first release. The sequel will be developed in Crytek’s Nottingham studio (which used to be FreeRadical, perhaps best known for TimeSplitters and most recently for the work on the Crysis 2 multiplayer) for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC platforms, with a proposed release date that should be sometime between April 2013 and March 2014 or THQ’s fiscal 2014.