Far Cry 2 is almost upon us, and I’m seething with anticipation. PC Gamer’s Tim Edwards telling us that it effectively kills off the entire linear shooter genre doesn’t do anything to ease that. His review in the latest PC Gamer UK is worth reading. If he’s right – and I dearly hope he is – that will stand up as one of the best game reviews of 2008. Of one of the best games.
While Far Cry 2 is very definitely just a shooter, Edwards’ review suggests that Stalker’s “wide corridor” model (that I loved so much) is going to be made to look shabby by this seamless 50km world, as executed by a talented, well-funded studio. I can’t wait to get to grips with the kind of freedom in an FPS that has previously only really manifested itself in GTA games. This latest trailer doesn’t make the longing any better, showing off loads of the open world stuff, including character dialogue, gun-play, speeding vehicles, and the ubiquitous fiery explosions. The dynamic story-telling perhaps doesn’t lend itself well to trailers, but trying reading our previous interview with the lead designer to get your head around that a bit better.
It’s out on PC Oct 22nd in North America, and on the 24th on the rest of the world.
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Perhaps more importantly, what’s your definition of “anything Far-cry or crytek related”? Other than the name, I can see no relation between this and Far Cry, or CryTek.
Yeah that’s a great reason to deny yourself an awesome game.
@radiant
“I’ll bet ten bucks that the jackel is a myth and that YOU end up becoming the jackel.”
lol.. I was thinking the same. What with the comparisons with stalker and all, what i thought was the player is amnesiac..”He is Jackal and he is hunting after jackal” and thats why the tag line “Become what you hunt”
24th October. The day I get paid.
Destiny.
@ Jim
how about:
Guns
Pretty graphics
Hang gliders
A reason to scrimp and save for a new graphics card…
om nom nom
Is there going to be a Demo so i can try this baby before i cough up some reddies?
Awesome. Im sure they’re already working on Cry Far with a Vengeance
Just for anyone wondering, Play.com have got this available (in a shiny collectors-type metal box, even!) for a mere £25, if anyone wants to nab that.
The game looks really good and I’ve got it preordered, but the Far Cry name is totally misused here. It has more in common with Boiling Point or Just Cause than anything Crytek worked on. They’ve taken the name from a completely different game (only thing in common seems to be ‘it’s set outdoors’) and slapped it on it.
The Jackal seems like a pretty nice guy to me. He justs wants you to hold on to a few million dollars for him.
Also if that’s the size of the diamonds one of those glittery bastards could buy half of the country.
No… and Piracy doesn’t count!
The title ‘Far Cry 2′ becomes more perplexing and inappropriate with every trailer.
They could have kick-started a hugely powerful new franchise here, but instead they’ve latched it onto a cheesy last-gen series that seemingly has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Very, very odd.
I hate to be cynical*, but I’d guess a sequel to a well known and fairly well received game was an easier pitch than a shooter set in a sandbox, and now they’re stuck with the name.
(* lies)
But it’s not a sequel! This is like renaming Battlestar Galactica ‘Star Wars Episode 7′.
Why, the guy in the shirt of course.
There’s a lot more to a game than staging, so I’m not sold on FC2 sight-unseen (well, ‘game unplayed’, I should say), but I hope it’s a goer.
I must ask though, was FC2 coded with PC in mind from the start? Because at this point, I absolutely do not trust Ubisoft regarding console-to-PC ports.
Well, it’s sort of a sequel in spirit, isn’t it. The main character in both is a man who points guns at things. In the jungle.
Far Cry 1 was more of an open world than Crysis. Crysis emphasizes the action bubble concept far more.
i read an interview with one of the far cry 2 developers who basically admitted it was piggybacked on the far cry name. He made some interesting points. He reckoned that they managed to sneak onto the pc gaming radar by calling it far cry 2, and that without a name people would have started out complaining that it was too ambitious.
I’m going to watch this one patiently. I’m not going to preorder in case it’s another Ubi hype job, and there are some worrying signs with the multiplatform release and promising the earth. Hopefully it’s a classic.
@James T
Yeah, it was a PC exclusive until January when they announced the console ports. I wish it was still exclusive to PC just to show the rest of the world how awesome the PC is, but I guess more fun for everybody right? It still looks solid and definitely worth buying. I just hope it’s gonna go the way sandbox games should be (like the way that Crysis did objectives). I only played the Crysis Demo, but one of the things that really stood out was how open it was. There was one objective in the demo to take out a base on a sort of peninsula, and you could take a boat and shoot it up, drive a truck over there, sneak in on foot, or take the Koreans out from a distance. This felt sooooo good in comparison to GTA, where the whole game felt like a tutorial for the real fun that never came. In GTA you had to do everything exactly the way they wanted, going into every red circle and it playing a cut scene. It never said “We’re gonna rob this band, figure it out!”. Instead it walked you through and took away a lot of the fun. Anyways, I just hope Far Cry 2 can make this idea of the truly open world game a reality.
And also, I’m fairly new to RPS, and I have to say I love it! Thanks!
Quake 2 had nothing whatsoever to do with Quake 1 neither.
One more game after this and the idea of a series based purely on ‘adventures in exotic locales’ won’t seem so hard to take.
And while it may have little in common with Far Cry, that should be a good thing. I love Far Cry, right up until the mutants appear. Then it gets really dumb.
Looks great, I just hope my computer will run it at a reasonable level of smoothness. It’s just about within the minimum requirements, and it runs Clear Sky decentish, so I’m hoping this will be playable for me. But yeah, the game itself looks fantastic.
I’m fairly sure I’m completely alone here, but I’ve always thought that while the quality of Far Cry did drop a bit after the Trigens are first introduced, the best moments and setpieces were all after that point. The James Bond-esque speedboat chase and the entire ‘Rebellion’ level (the gigantic branching three-way firefight) in particular.
It seems that most people just quit the moment they encountered a new enemy type that was tougher to kill than the mercs.
Can you really call Crysis a sandbox game? You never really choose your own path, there’s no factions to join, you aren’t offered conflicting missions and the story won’t change whatever you do.
Really I think its just as linear as Half Life 2 but with bigger rooms.
Also the highlight of Tim’s review is describing how this game coldly executes the whole genre. He says it’s essentially killed all other shootems as they just can’t compete. Also the chick sucking on a gun in Tim’s review actually gave me a quiet moment. A review made me feel melancholic and question the nature of war. A review made me do that. A review. Thats a new one.
I’ve already pre-ordered the collectors edition from game and I was pretty skeptical until I read the review.
Bhazor, check out what Eli posted just above:
“I just hope it’s gonna go the way sandbox games should be (like the way that Crysis did objectives). I only played the Crysis Demo, but one of the things that really stood out was how open it was. There was one objective in the demo to take out a base on a sort of peninsula, and you could take a boat and shoot it up, drive a truck over there, sneak in on foot, or take the Koreans out from a distance. This felt sooooo good in comparison to GTA, where the whole game felt like a tutorial for the real fun that never came. In GTA you had to do everything exactly the way they wanted, going into every red circle and it playing a cut scene. It never said “We’re gonna rob this band, figure it out!”. Instead it walked you through and took away a lot of the fun.”
The way you played through a map in Crysis was nothing like HL2. Crysis gave you the primary objective, a few sub-objectives (take out the radar, check out this place for intel), and then left it up to you to get to the end. HL2 was basically a narrow hallway connecting event after event to one another. Play both back to back and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I want FREEDOM to choose how to tackle a mission, exactly in the way the trailers are showing for FC2. I could use a jeep and blast my way in, or snipe everyone from a hill, or set fire to the grass and burn the place down, or use a grenade launcher to blow the place up, etc, etc. It’s up to ME how I want to assault a place, I make my own fun, I choose when and where to fight. Games like HL2, Bioshock, COD4 don’t give me that freedom: In those games, I HAVE to go through this alley to get to the next area, I can’t go over this wall/fence and flank the enemy, etc, etc.
So, what I’m getting from this is if someone could modify Far Cry 2 very heavily and add in, say, artifacts, a map of Agoroprom, anomalies, and a cranky man named Sidorovich, it would be the best thing ever?
Why do I even bother to posit that as a question? Of course it would be.
Reply to Chris R
But how is that different to choosing whether to use a pistol, or a shotgun. One lets you kill from a far the other being an assault weapon. You still don’t pick what to do, just how to do it. Far Cry 2 on the other hand has an adaptive storyline, the ability to choose missions and picking which filthy mercenary to take with you.
In short I’m saying this looks closer to S.T.A.L.K.E.R which was a true sandbox in my opinion rather than a fat corridor shooter.
Oh I didn’t quit. I’ve played through it all at least twice, and there are incredible bits after the trigens appear. In particular that level with all the rope bridges, and also the car chase through the swamps I thought was very good.
When I talk about the trigens / mutants ruining it, I’m referring to the story. It started out as a sort of Commando rip off, and I think it would have been so much better if it stayed with that idea. Maybe some sort of a bond villain plot involving private armies and nuclear weapons – something cheesy. I just think the best things about Far Cry were the tropical island setting, and the sneaking around and finding ways to take out groups of mercenaries. Once those mercenaries became gigantic monsters shooting rockets out of their arms and jumping twenty feet into the air, it tore the arse out of the realism, and the sneaking around was pointless.
I’m like two days late for this post but I’ve wanted to pontificate about something to lots of unreal Internet people for a while. 50km of open world, is this actually something to commend?
The game is either gonna flow beautifully from one mission to the next with quality pacing like say Half Life 2 or Halo 3, OR it’s gonna have a stilted, laborious pace where you spend a great deal of your time wandering around aimlessly, checking maps in driving into rivers. Plus I’m sure all those trigger happy NPC’s are gonna make getting lost a barrel of laughs.
The game looks amazing I’d say and apart from the Crysis island I’ve seen nothing that looks as good. I haven’t read the PC gamer review yet either, but does he mention any of the sandbox trappings of hours of wasted time being lost, pointless side-quests and lots of time spent travelling to the fun? My first impressions make me think these these things.
If the hype about this game turns out to be true, it will be so painful that a)I don’t have enough money to upgrade my computer and b)even if I did, I wouldn’t know how.
How painfully boring do you have to be to think that having to make your own fun is a downside?
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