By Jim Rossignol on June 26th, 2008 at 10:43 am.
“A completely real, no bullshit open world.” The presentation from this year’s Dreamhack shows the sophisticated AI in action, the scale of the open world, the way the missions are implemented, the freedom of the open world, the combat, the vehicles, fixing broken vehicles, the wildlife, the physics and fire-propagation.
Game Of The Year, anyone?
We’re going to try and bring you more on Far Cry 2 in the coming weeks.
26/06/2008 at 10:54 Ian says:
Oh well, I guess I know what I’ll be doing during my lunch break then.
26/06/2008 at 11:01 Josh says:
Yeah…I dunno, I attended a Spore presentation recently, and while this looks fun and all…Spore, man. Spore. I didn’t even need to play it. I’m 99% certain Spore will be my game of the year, and should absolutely be included as a contender.
26/06/2008 at 11:08 Turin Turambar says:
Dunno, this type of open, sandbox, dynamic game is very hard to well. Look at Boiling Point (buggy, perfomance issues, design issues) or Stalker (very scaled back from the original design) as examples.
26/06/2008 at 11:10 Jon says:
The most rapid surgeon of the world !! Is unreal this part of the game .
26/06/2008 at 11:10 Commando says:
I mocked the idea of Far Cry 2 without Crytek.
Now I need to unmock it somehow.
26/06/2008 at 11:11 Jim Rossignol says:
Stalker and Boiling Point were also done by tiny, poorly-funded teams. Far Cry 2 has Ubisoft’s deep pockets and some of the best developers in the world working on it.
26/06/2008 at 11:16 Feet says:
I am excited. Still. This looks great.
26/06/2008 at 11:27 John P (Katsumoto) says:
This will certainly be up there with Clear Sky I’m reckoning/hoping, in answer to the question. I’ve been blown away by Mass Effect in the last two weeks, wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near as good as it was as it averaged 8/10 (which I know is “good”, but I find it “mindblowing”), so was pleasantly surprised. FC2 and Clear Sky will need to do some fighting to get the top spot! This year will probably be remembered as one of the best in a long time for pc gaming, I reckon. Then again, 2007 was pretty awesome too.
26/06/2008 at 11:28 rb_lestr says:
Much…. MUCH better than Crysis.
Underwhelming much?
Bring on FC2
26/06/2008 at 11:43 Anthony Damiani says:
Can’t even muster a lot of interest, beyond remarking on the technical prowess of the graphics.
I guess the Rambo fantasy just isn’t my thing.
26/06/2008 at 11:46 Jonelo says:
Hum about the myth of the poor Ukrainian and Russian developers .
GSC – Grigorovich Sergei Company – not is a poor men – , He is the owner of the richest developer of CIS. He sold 5 million copies of Cossacks 1 – about a 100 million dollars of revenue – and most of the expansions of this game. Few independent developers have sold as much as GSC in the world.
http://www.my-b.ru/mb/m050207.htm
http://dpk.com.ua/files/u4/Ferrari.jpg
And
http://www.gameru.net/index.php?type=artc&id=266
“B. About the low salaries in the GSC, at 150-200 bucks, already widely known. Will be able to comment?
O. Wages are very low and often do not relate to the volume of work done by you. Happened that people came to leave, but heads do not even know what it is and who works .”
26/06/2008 at 11:46 FlupKe says:
Same here, this game is gonna rock !
26/06/2008 at 11:55 Jim Rossignol says:
GSC’s boss having money does not necessarily make it a well funded development team. Obviously a lot of his, and THQ’s money did go into the project long term.
26/06/2008 at 11:59 Someone says:
Looks awesome .
And to the guy who said he doesn’t like the rambo style,it’s only one of the ways you can do missions.
26/06/2008 at 11:59 CrashT says:
As good as this game is looking I still wonder about some of the mechanics they’ve included to make it appear more realistic.
Pulling bullets out of your arms sounds interesting but the last game to feature something like that was Dark Corners Of The Earth and it was only just this side of irksome in a game with a much slower pace and horror focus. In an action orientated game like Far Cry 2 I can see stopping to bandage yourself up rapidly becoming frustrating.
Also weapons that jam? System Shock 2 tried that and, well that didn’t really work so well did it? I can understand the desire to encourage players to improvise by forcing them to think on their feet if their weapon jams, but after spending half an hour to scouting an enemy base only to have your plan to go casters up when you silenced MP5 jams is again likely to frustrate very quickly.
Of course this game does remind me of what is still my favourite game of all time, Midwinter II. So it’s got to be doing something right.
On and …
[Geek Mode]That was an MP5SD not an MP5K[/Geek Mode]
26/06/2008 at 12:06 Flint says:
Flint wants.
Although “this is too much of realistic nitpickery for my taste” things like jamming weapons are meh.
26/06/2008 at 12:16 Ghiest says:
I thought Crysis looked excellent from the videos and previews ect, but when I played it – suckage.
26/06/2008 at 12:37 wcaypahwat says:
Stalker had jammimg weapons. No one complained about that now, did they? Well obviously some people did, but not here, now, and considering we are comparing the two….
26/06/2008 at 12:41 Crispy says:
Brings back memories of Operation Flashpoint.
26/06/2008 at 12:41 SuperNashwan says:
Looking good, makes you wonder why they developed it under the Far Cry brand with its reputation spoilt by Ubisoft milking it and everyone aware Crytek aren’t involved any more. The one thing that really distinguishes Far Cry and Crysis is they’re very wide corridor shooters giving the illusion of free approach without the drawbacks of a truly open world and this doesn’t follow that.
26/06/2008 at 12:57 redrain85 says:
Looks pretty darn impressive. There are a lot of neat little touches, like having the character’s hands actually grab items and hold the map in front of him. Too bad the surgery and car repair is rather oversimplified, though.
But I’ll withhold judgment until the game is released, and people have had a chance to play it. Been fooled by early promises before.
26/06/2008 at 13:07 Ian says:
There’s a lot of exciting stuff in the demo, but as with everybody else I’ll be trying to reign in anticipation and just hope it lives up to the hype and potential.
Gotta say, that hang-glider looked FUN.
26/06/2008 at 13:07 essell says:
Game of the year? With LittleBigPlanet and Spore coming out, I seriously hope not…
26/06/2008 at 13:10 Duncan says:
I really don’t see what is so amazing about this. It looks like a fun beautiful game to be sure but the gameplay, as seen is this video, is pretty much exactly the same as Far Cry 1 although obviously with better tech. It cracked me up when attacking the base a second time he told the player to go the other way this time and then he trumpeted the whole ‘open world’ thing. ‘Oooh, a fork in the road! That’s new!’ and those red ‘go this way dumbass’ sign posts better be optional.
Fixing cars, removing bullets look like gimmicky one-trick things which won’t really add anything to the game.
26/06/2008 at 13:28 Batolemaeus says:
This looks like the game Crysis should have been to be completely honest.
26/06/2008 at 13:47 itsallcrap says:
I’m actually not that excited about the idea of Far Cry 2, but that is definitely the best lighting in any game anywhere.
Anyone know what sort of video card that needs?
26/06/2008 at 14:02 Chaz says:
I like the way you get to watch the game’s loading screen for 40 secs. I thought my PC was having trouble buffering the video.
26/06/2008 at 14:04 FhnuZoag says:
Pretty long load times, eh?
26/06/2008 at 14:24 MeestaNob! says:
The enthusiasm was kind of infectious. Gotta love any tech demo that has an audience with fog horns.
“You like flame throwers?”
“BLAAARRRRRRG!”
26/06/2008 at 14:52 Majorb says:
@ essle
Littltbigplanet? It’s a platformer it might be good but not in the realm of other games coming out.
26/06/2008 at 15:04 The D-Man says:
“A completely real, noble shit, open world.”
Noble shit???
:P
26/06/2008 at 15:04 Heartless_ says:
ROFL… game of the year? How about…. bore of the year? Sigh, we’ve seen FPS games before. Give me a break.
26/06/2008 at 15:18 PaulMorel says:
crap. This looks like a better version of STALKER. I hate it when games look so good that I have to buy them on launch day.
Also, I should just give nVidia my soul. When I bought the 8600, I swore that it would be good enough for me. I swore that I wouldn’t need to upgrade to the 8800. So far, I’ve been ok, but I don’t know if I can run this game on less than full settings. It just looks .. soo … pretty.
Oh, and I hope that the PC version isn’t just a crappy port from the 360 version. That was the reason that I didn’t buy Assassin’s Creed.
26/06/2008 at 15:27 Ian Dorsch says:
It did start life as a PC exclusive. Not that that’s any guarantee, but hey, it makes me feel better.
26/06/2008 at 15:28 Turin Turambar says:
Yes Jim, Ubisoft have resources that didn’t have GSC or the BP’s team, but also Ubisoft is the type of big company interested in making big bucks in the mainstream public, so they will assure the game is enough simple and “streamlined” for everyone to enjoy. Look at Ass Creed, Splinter Cell, PoP, etc, imo they are not exactly brilliant.
So i am waiting to try it before deciding his worth, it could be excellent, of course, but it also could be a shallow and gimmicky action game where your actions are not really important and the AI is underwhelming.
26/06/2008 at 15:40 Riotpoll says:
@PaulMorel, you shouldn’t be looking at at nvidia for budget cards now, new ati stuff is really good (4850 is £125 and outperforms/is on par with the 9800gtx and 8800gtx/ultra, and the £180 4870 outperforms the gtx260). /hardwaremodeoff
Does look pretty, but I’ll wait for impressions of the actual gameplay.
26/06/2008 at 15:40 John P (Katsumoto) says:
“Sigh, we’ve seen FPS games before. Give me a break.”
All FPS games in “automatically shit” shocker! I was kinda hoping for this to be a Morris Dancing Sim tbqfh.
26/06/2008 at 15:41 hungSolo says:
The presenter’s voice sounds like a toothpick being jammed between the folds of my brain. Maybe he needs to take up smoking or drinking or testicular augmentation.
26/06/2008 at 15:45 MisterBritish says:
All future posts from me will contain ‘tbqfh’ :)
26/06/2008 at 15:51 gaijin says:
i was just pleased to see that someone else scrolls through their weapons in the wrong direction and ends up vainly flailing around with the melee weapon when the nearest enemies are a hundred yards off and pumping them full of bullets.
26/06/2008 at 16:05 Ian says:
@Turin Turambar: So… you’re criticising Ubisoft for making accessible, playable games?
Being the ignorant gaming philistine that I am, I’ll take Sands of Time over something so unwilling to let me have fun that it makes me want to cave my head in with my own keyboard every day of the week.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Far Cry 2 is going to be game of the year or anything like it, but you seem to have a rather peculiar thing stuck in your craw about this one.
26/06/2008 at 16:13 Turin Turambar says:
I am criticising Ubisfot for making unfun games. Accessible games are good.
26/06/2008 at 16:13 dhex says:
while the announcer has a bit of the amway presenter thing going on, i guess that’s sort of the point at an event like that, right? except instead of getting people excited about “selling up” and whatnot, it’s about flameflowers.
i can live with that.
26/06/2008 at 16:23 Dinger says:
Man, that Far Cry 2 dude has a pretty bad morphine addiction.
So the map is 7kmx7km, or roughly 1/4 the size of the original OFP maps. Of course, the detail is better, and the engine looks pretty (except for the tearing, and with allowances for stutters on loading sound files, textures, and what not). It’s nice to see they’ve kept the super-slo-mo RPGs from the original Far Cry.
Game of the Year? Let’s talk about awards after they bring it to the market. The only thing we can judge at this moment is the pre-release story (aka Hype). And, if we’re judging the history of the game and not the game itself, then, on that account, Limbo of the Lost has set the bar pretty high; it’ll be tough for Far Cry 2 or LittleBigPlanet to maintain that standard for GOTY honours.
26/06/2008 at 17:27 a-scale says:
The bullet pulling thing seems very strange. I know this is still beta, but the guy pulled like 10 bullets out of his arm. Were they shooting at him with real bullets, or toothpicks? I would say an AK-47 has enough power to pierce right through one’s arm.
26/06/2008 at 18:00 hungSolo says:
@dhex: “except instead of getting people excited about ‘selling up’ and whatnot, it’s about flameflowers. … i can live with that.”
And Frank Builders! Flamethrowers and Frank Builders, who you can actually play as! ;)
26/06/2008 at 18:03 Muzman says:
This does look nice. I’m kinda suspicious though. Mostly this is because I keep reading things about Bioshock’s development and such where they seem to swear that what these guys appear to be trying to do is not possible. And, what’s worse, it’s not what people want, can comprehend etc etc. Everything’s got to be focussed and spelled out not sprawly and complex and long. It might not be fair to compare the games directly, but the conclusions about gaming and gaming audiences that the Bioshock devs seem to have arrived at over the years and what it did to their design means that this can’t succeed the way it is. It’ll be niche and ‘hard-core’ and then probably buggy and nerfed as well.
That’s my pessimistic little viewpoint, just because I daren’t hope this game is as good as it looks.
Additionally, didn’t I hear these guys are some of the folks who did some of the Splinter Cell games? Some of whom were apparently big fans of Thief and so on, and from the way they talk have been kinda holding back on their dev dreams for a while now. If that’s true and these guys knock it out of the park where Irrational really kinda didn’t, it will slay me.
26/06/2008 at 18:05 Chris R says:
I was chuckling at how the presenter doesn’t really say his “H” sounds for certain words…
“‘Uge boats and ‘Uge environments! Everything is ‘Uge!”
Not making fun of his English, it just made me chuckle during those parts. :)
26/06/2008 at 18:50 whitebrice says:
Pulling bullets out of his arm? I thought he was injecting himself with some sort of painkiller.
When Ubisoft first started talking about this game, I was completely unconvinced that they could pull off what they were promising. To me, Ubi only made fun-but-inconsequential games, the also-rans. Why play Splinter Cell when you can play Metal Gear Solid? Or why bother with Rainbow Six: Vegas when you’ve got Gears of War?
But after playing Assassin’s Creed, which I kind of fell in love with, I can’t help but have a bit of hope for this game.
26/06/2008 at 19:36 a-scale says:
It’s definitely a bullet in the arm. They went into great detail on how you have to perform battlefield surgery on yourself. They claimed that they would have 40 or more animations for stitching yourself up/pulling things out of yourself. I’m still at a loss why it is necessary to remove a bullet from your arm during the heat of battle, or why it didn’t pass through in the first place!
26/06/2008 at 19:44 Nick says:
Maybe it was a hollowpoint?
But then you wouldn’t have much luck getting it out. Or using your arm again.
Meh.
26/06/2008 at 19:51 rei says:
I don’t recall ever getting motion sickness from an FPS before, but based on the clip I’d say there’s a good chance I will with this one.
Still, looks awesome. There was another long gameplay video a while ago that looked even better, with the fire propagation and such. Can’t find it now, though.
26/06/2008 at 19:57 Saflo says:
No, it’s clearly one of those morphine syrettes. You can see him flick the cap off and jab himself. Either that or his left forearm contains a very powerful magnet.
26/06/2008 at 20:25 Chris Livingston says:
Game of the Year? It looks neat, but I’m still more excited for Left 4 Dead.
26/06/2008 at 20:26 Sharpless says:
Yeah, it’s definitely him jabbing a needle into his arm.
26/06/2008 at 20:39 RichPowers says:
I don’t recall ever getting motion sickness from an FPS before, but based on the clip I’d say there’s a good chance I will with this one.
Playing Half-Life 2 for more than 20 minutes at a time made me nauseatingly sick, at least until someone told me to extend the field-of-view from 70 degrees to 90 degrees.
26/06/2008 at 20:42 Irria says:
OMG! A Carl-Gustav RPG! I had one of those back when i was in the military – never thought i’d see one in a game. :) (can say for sure – there’s NO way you can run like that with this thing on your back)
26/06/2008 at 21:01 Gap Gen says:
The Carl-Gustav was definitely in Op Flashpoint.
26/06/2008 at 21:15 Crispy says:
Wow, it takes 40 whole seconds to load a level. Jesus I remember Unreal taking in the region of 30 minutes to load when I was a kid with not enough RAM. Before that there were hour long loading times on the Spectrum.
We’ve got it good if it only takes 40 seconds to load stuff of that quality.
26/06/2008 at 21:41 sluzzuls says:
i was wondering what all that area was needed for. diamond exploration seems cool as long as i dont have to mine for hours to get a nug. i was hoping for some other stuff like picking herbs in the jungle such as khat for speed increases or wormwood for health or.. yohimbe for the native women. stuff like that
26/06/2008 at 22:46 Ergates says:
Is it just me or was that the worst Irish accent ever? (he was meant to be Irish right?)
26/06/2008 at 23:26 nakke says:
I bet the mission structure is still linear :)
26/06/2008 at 23:30 Phil White says:
I see a linear shooter as well, nakke. The land beyond is apparently a mere window frame. Flashpoint allowed you to make tactical use of open terrain.
The frame-rate looks pretty shocking too, given that it’s running on a high-end PC. I think Bad Company’s destruction has FC2′s fire beat.
26/06/2008 at 23:47 born2expire says:
Looks alot better then i was expecting, but….
IT’S STILL UBISOFT! when have they ever done a game inhouse that was great?
I know its still a long way off, but those framerates where unplayable in my mind. Looks like they bit off a bit more then they can chew. The fact this is coming for consoles also frightens me, alot will have to be conpromised if its gonna make current gen consoles.
But I’m sure I’ll still buy it launch week, even if its terrible.
I love the part where the demo crashes and all the MC says is “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Ummmm did he say CHECKPOINT somewhere about the 15 min mark? UGGGHHHHHH why!
27/06/2008 at 00:12 One Man Reggae Festival says:
Wouldn’t worry about the guns jamming, that’ll be the first thing modded out.
And since we’re all throwing never-gonna-happen game-of-the-years out there I call Fallout 3. And remind you all that GTA 4 came out this year and will blatantly actually win most GOTYs for being critically well liked and massively popular.
27/06/2008 at 00:13 Erlam says:
Looks like a tech demo.
Well, to be fair.
Is a tech demo. That A.I. looks just a suicidally retarded as any other FPS.
Also, what is up with having an entire forest of trees that you can cut down on, apparently, every pixel – yet wooden scout towers are impervious to fucking explosive rockets.
27/06/2008 at 02:36 Razor says:
I really hope he didn’t mean 50 sq km. I hope what he really meant was 50×50 km. 7ishx7isk km is not exactly huge for a desert/jungle/woodland with lakes and rivers.
27/06/2008 at 04:59 john says:
So, seeing as this is in Africa, do you get to play as a black character or do you just play a white person shooting black people for 50 hours?
27/06/2008 at 05:37 InVinoVeritas says:
Regarding the terrible Irish accent, it sounded to me like someone on the dev team watched Snatch and decided that they would model the “buddy” character after Brad Pitt’s crazy gypsy.
27/06/2008 at 06:36 Lukasz says:
what is the size of oblivion and morrowind maps?
27/06/2008 at 06:49 Dinger says:
He meant 7x7km. He said it was “bigger than Oblivion. So that puts the map on the sccale of Joint Ops.
By the way, one thing Flashpoint showed was that building a map off real-world DEM data (not necessarily of the area to be modeled) produced much more interesting terrain faster than making up a landscape (or procedural generation).
The air horn? That’s Barnett’s Trumpet of Idle Wonder.
27/06/2008 at 14:24 Paul says:
john: I remember seeing the characters you can play in Far Cry 2 and at least one of them was black.
27/06/2008 at 19:24 Trousers says:
You guys must have missed the part where he said there is no loading during the game, so going through 1 long load when you start up sounds great to me.
27/06/2008 at 22:09 Dinger says:
No. We just remember WW2OL (a “no loading” soldier-ground vehicle-boat-aircraft game with abominable spawn times), and any number of “no loading” games that have long freezes like those featured in the video of the (certainly “not optimized”) game to have reservations. Okay, I won’t be a jerk and bemoan it (having loaded games off tape drive), but you don’t get stuff for free. All those megabytes of texture data gotta get to the right place somehow.
29/06/2008 at 00:14 chesh says:
Holy hell, hands! and feet! That pretty much makes this game of the decade, at least.
29/06/2008 at 14:07 Jimmy Mac says:
That guy’s voice is really annoying.
24/10/2008 at 04:01 Blunt says:
I got motion sickness playing this, sold it immediately. The only other game that I have had a problem with is Condemned.
31/10/2008 at 20:53 Fumarole says:
I got motion sickness playing this, sold it immediately. The only other game that I have had a problem with is Condemned.
That’s too bad, as there’s a fix for it on widescreengaming forum.com already.