Far Cry 2 Progress Report

January 22, 2008 - Out from the tropical island jungles and into the plains of Africa players will go in Ubisoft Montreal's Far Cry 2, a game which we're hoping manages to further along the open-ended first-person shooter genre. The original, developed by Crytek (those also responsible for Crysis), did have open-ended elements its first sections, letting you explore a lush tropical island and blast apart enemies from whatever vantage points you wanted. GSC Game World's S.T.A.L.K.E.R., though flawed, still gave players a satisfying degree of freedom when it came to how they could choose to behave. Wiping out a town for no reason or hunting irradiated dogs upon the bleak, windswept plains around Chernobyl were some of your options. You could simply stand around and watch the groups of AI attack each other if you wanted – this genre, like open-ended single player RPGs, is all about, or at least is supposed to be about, giving the power of choice to the player.

Things have changed since we first saw this game at last year's Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, and Ubisoft took an opportunity last month to let us know how things were going and show us a demo with an updated build of the game on PC. We didn't actually get to see the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions, but were told those are being done by the same team at Ubisoft Montreal, that they'll both, like the PC version, ship with a map editor, and that some of the same folks who worked on the editor for the Xbox's Far Cry Instincts were on board with this one. If you've ever used the Far Cry Instincts editor, then you know that's good news. For PC users there'll be some additional features built into the editor, but Ubisoft Montreal isn't planning on releasing the SDK.


It was nearly three years ago when development started on Far Cry 2. "Far Cry on PC had just come out when we started working on this," says Clint Hocking, the game's creative director. "We had a mandate to make a next-gen sequel to Far Cry the PC game, and we knew that the tropical island as a fresh and new environment was going to be burned for PC…I mean burned conceptually." For the development team, it was important to maintain a sense of wonder while exploring a new type of environment akin to the feeling players experienced when wandering around the jungles in the first Far Cry. Though Africa was eventually settled upon for the setting, it wasn't the only place being considered. "We though about jungle islands," says Hocking, "we thought about going more science-fictiony in certain ways, we thought about an underwater city because it would give you that sense of wonder…we thought about the arctic frozen tundra, but that was overruled by a team that didn't want to work on a snow game."

Despite the debate, the African setting was eventually decided upon, brought to life by Ubisoft Montreal's Dunia (a Swahili word meaning World) engine which they've built from scratch. Since the team wants to focus on realistic weaponry and the human versus human conflict from the original Far Cry, there'll neither be any mutants in the game, nor will there be any special player powers such as in Far Cry Instincts. There will still be jungle, though, covering several square kilometers of the game world.

Much of what makes an open-ended game like this immersive is AI. If NPCs are standing around like mannequins, well it's pretty hard to believe they're anything but a target or a place to buy more ammo. In Far Cry 2, Ubisoft Montreal says they're programmed in patrol paths, rest points, and the need to eat and sleep. From behind cover we surveyed an enemy camp where foes milled about, wandered the streets, stood guard in certain areas, and occasionally appeared to socialize with each other. Behaviors differ at night, when, as you might expect, more of the NPCs would retire to bed. For the purposes of the demo, Ubisoft Montreal ran their character into the camp and hopped into a truck, in the process alerting the seven or eight enemies that were guarding the place. As the truck fled the scene to avoid the loads of bullets whizzing by, a few enemies jumped into another truck and gave chase, bouncing over the terrain, trying to run our jeep off the road and firing at it. As our jeep took damage the engine started to fail and the truck slowed, forcing us to give up the escape and try to fight.

Like in any first-person shooter, you're going to get shot quite a bit in Far Cry 2. Last year it was said the health system in Far Cry 2 was going to require a good deal of the players' attention, as you'd have to manually patch up wounds and remove bullets. In the most recent build of the game things are more forgiving. The reason for the switch was the old system took the player out of the fight too often, forcing you to stop in almost every fight to reset a dislocated shoulder or remove a bullet. Now it's a health system where you use syrettes to stay at maximum health but also incorporates regenerative elements.

The health bar itself, one of the few HUD elements in the game which pops up onscreen when you take damage, is a series of small segments. If you're shot, part of the color filling a segment will be depleted. As long as the entire segment isn't emptied of color, you can regenerate that segment. If you take enough damage where a segment is fully emptied and the color bar recedes into another segment, then you need to use a syrette to fill everything back up; health regeneration doesn't continue across segments. With enough punishment your health can recede into the red zone where you'll start bleeding, at which point you'll need to perform a little self-surgery to staunch the wound and keep yourself in the fight.



Restoring ammunition can be accomplished by raiding enemy bases and breaking into their stashes. You'll find separate caches of rifle ammo, explosives, and fuel for your flamethrower. These caches can also be used to your advantage as they'll explode and take out anything in the vicinity, but then of course you can't collect the ammunition. But having enough rounds to fire won't be the only thing you need to worry about with your weapons. Each has a reliability rating, and each weapon deteriorates with use. While some are better than others, a carbine Ubisoft was firing started jamming up regularly after three or four clips. As a weapon is used it'll actually get visibly dirtier, the sound it makes will actually change, and eventually it'll stop working altogether.

This ties into the focus Ubisoft Montreal has on keeping the player immersed in the game world, as fixing a jammed gun is actually done in first-person. There's an animation sequence where the jam is removed, just like you'll occasionally dig bullets from your character, apply syrettes to recover health, pat out your clothes when they catch on fire, and hop around between seats in a jeep without leaving the first-person. In conjunction with the dynamic enemy AI and open environments, it seems like the game could deliver the kind of immersive qualities Ubisoft is promising, though we won't actually be able to tell until we get to play for an extended period of time.

Ubisoft Montreal then went into detail on how they've laid structure into their open world. At about 50 square kilometers, the play area is undoubtedly large. It's broken up into sections of one square kilometer which you can examine with your map, which is also incorporated in a believable fashion – it's not a menu you access by hitting M or anything, it's an actual map your character holds. Within the vast game world are what Ubsoft called "buddies," NPC characters who will help you with missions you can do for some of the warring factions that rule over the game world.

These guys can be found at outposts marked on your map, and when you interact with them they'll tag along and provide backup fire while you're in combat and, more importantly, revive you if you're killed. They're not actually squad mates – you can't issue orders or equip them or anything like that, but they're definitely helpful to have around. Because it's an open world, you can choose to kill your buddies if you're feeling particularly maniacal, and then they're considered dead and removed from the game. There's no magical revive and instant forgiveness where your buddy reappears and forgets the whole shooting him in the face thing.

In addition to support, the buddies can offer different ways to complete missions, like removing a group of enemy reinforcements before assaulting the target compound. Hocking gave a more specific example where using a buddy would allow you to set up a roadblock, diverting a convoy carrying explosive onto a bridge you could then blow up, making completing the main objective of the mission a little easier. The more you work with particular buddies, the stronger their affinity towards you, and it is possible for all your buddies to die, making for what hopefully amounts to much different experiences during a play through from player to player. In all there are 13 buddies, one model of which you must choose at the beginning of the game to play as. Since three buddies are female and you can't play as a female in this game, you'll be able to pick between 10 models.

Using buddies to complete the alternate methods of completing missions isn't just to diversify gameplay, it affects your characters' reputation that allows access to different kinds of missions from each of the world's factions. If you didn't see it in earlier previews, your character starts the game crippled with malaria and few NPCs in this war-torn African state care about you. The first order of business is to get medicine, and from there you'll get an objective to assassinate a villain who screwed you over in the first place. To find him, though, you'll have to work with the warring factions to gain reputation and information. Depending on how effectively you complete missions and how notorious you become you'll move up in the ranks more quickly and competing factions will either see you as a target or try to recruit you, or the faction you're working for will begin to perceive you as a threat because you gained too much too quickly and might betray you.

There's no story controlling all this, so what happens in the game is basically a result of a network of systems Ubisoft Montreal has implemented that trigger events when certain combinations of conditions are met. We're hopeful this kind of free-form narrative that responds to your actions has the same kind of effect as in open-ended single player RPGs, where each player's style can have dramatic effects on their own experience with the game. For us, or me specifically, another attractive element here aside from entertaining and unpredictable gameplay is the post-play storytelling, where you stand around with friends talking about how you completed a section of the game. It's one thing to talk about how thrilling a scripted sequence was, but that's always limited by the fact that you always see or experience the same thing. It's much more entertaining to have a discussion, like is possible with Western-styled open RPGs, about how you double-crossed a certain faction, or wiped out a town, or found some NPC located in a hidden cave, and then find out from someone else they did the complete opposite and discover all the different ways a scenario might play out. Those kinds of experiences are the sort of thing that keep you interested in the game and keep you coming back.



According to Hocking, mission assignments are , "…all done behind the hood…When you get a mission briefing it's not like cut-scene now we play the scene, it's all in-game and the characters are calling the dialogue dynamically based on your reputation, based on their feelings about the other faction, based on their standing in the world, and based on the goals they're trying to achieve." You start out taking orders from lowly lieutenants but as trust is built you move on to captains, and eventually higher up the ranks until you're talking to faction bosses, warlords, and that's basically how the game's progression is structured.

It seems before your character arrived in the area there was a rebellion of sorts, after which the government fled and mercenaries scoured the land for diamond wealth. Finding none, the leaders of the mercenary bands picked up and left, leaving behind troupes of armed forces in a country torn apart by war. Not such a nice place. There are large population centers where the notion of a civil urban area is attempted to be upheld, but they're still basically full of mercenaries wandering around. Walking up to these guys helps to reflect the type of reputation you've earned. NPCs will shove you around in towns if you're a nobody, but keep their distance if you're notorious. There is no actual progress bar or numerical representation of your reputation in the game, so you'll have to take cues like this, as well as the things enemies scream during combat, as the measure of your degree of infamy.

At the game's beginning you will be limited to some degree as far as where you can go, as only 25 square kilometers will be explorable. The rest will be blocked by a sandstorm, but eventually open up. You'll also be limited at the beginning by your malaria, which can cause you to intermittently pass out. After the first act of the game, which isn't really defined in the game with something like a cut-scene, just a certain plot climax, the rest of the game world opens up.

Beyond opening up the game world and increasing your infamy, there's another progression mechanic at work that relates to your gun skills. Completing faction missions gives you money which can be used to buy and unlock weapons. At NPCs you'll be able to purchase a weapons crate which then unlocks an unlimited supply of that weapon for use in the game. The crate is located in a specific location in the game, somewhere you'll need to revisit to restock if your preferred weapon breaks in the field. Beyond that there are a few character augmentations to be had like bandoliers that increase the amount of ammunition you can carry with you. When you do buy weapon crates, special challenges are unlocked that, if you complete the related objective, like kill six NPCs within a discretionary fire zone without being detected, it unlocks manuals. These can be thereafter be purchased at vendors to upgrade your damage and accuracy with that specific weapon, and can also increase a weapon's reliability and the speed at which you remove jams.

So it's safe to say we're really looking forward to this one, and we haven't even talked about how gorgeous the game looks. The game world is very impressively designed, and you've the ability to do a great number of things to it. You can set grasslands on fire, which will actually require more fuel to start and maintain if it's just after a rainstorm, cut trees to bits with your machete, and blow up nearly everything. To see the world you'll have access to gliders and be able to coast out from orange mountains across the desert plains or section of jungle. Dust storms will occasionally start up as well, there's a full day night cycle in the game, which currently Ubisoft Montreal is saying will take about six hours to run through.

Once we're able to play we'll be able to deliver a better sense of how the game feels, but from watching Ubisoft demo their product it seems like you're free to do whatever. Driving vehicles into town and detonating them in front of groups of enemies, lashing flamethrower fuel against explosive drums, sniping from afar, or sneaking in and setting explosive charges were all methods of attack and infiltration shown to us. You can even deliver non-fatal wounds to enemies in the open to draw out others, as the AI is programmed to drag their wounded behind cover. When the other enemy shows his face you can hit him with a sniper bullet as well, just like the scene from Full Metal Jacket.

We're very hopeful this game delivers on the kind of free-form, open-ended gameplay the studio is promising. All signs so far seem to indicate it will, so it's without a doubt a game to watch for 2008. It's currently scheduled to ship later this year on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.