Far Cry

Nov 10

Far Cry is a first-person shooter computer game developed by Crytek Studios from Germany and published by Ubisoft on March 23, 2004 for Windows. Far Cry sold 730,000 units within four months of release and has currently sold over 1 million copies worldwide. The game’s story follows an ex-Special Forces operator, Jack Carver, who is stranded on a mysterious archipelago in Micronesia. He is searching for a female journalist he was escorting after she went missing when their boat was destroyed by mercenaries.

On April 8, 2004, Ubisoft announced Far Cry Instincts for the Xbox, GameCube and PlayStation 2 systems. Far Cry Instincts graphically resembles Far Cry, but is not a direct port, rather being made from scratch for consoles. The PS2 and GC ports were later cancelled because the systems were not powerful enough to support the game. Far Cry Instincts is now exclusive to Xbox and was released to wide acclaim on September 27, 2005, in North America. Another version, Far Cry Instincts: Predator is also available for the Xbox 360. On March 28, 2006, Ubisoft released a sequel, Far Cry Instincts: Evolution for the Xbox, which was met with less enthusiasm than the first version of Far Cry. A game based on the franchise was released as part of Ubisoft’s launch lineup for the Wii (Far Cry Vengeance). In the Wii version, the Wii Remote is used for many of the tasks assigned to buttons in previous iterations of the game, including driving vehicles, shooting, and running. Far Cry 2 has been officially announced by Ubisoft, although it will not be developed by Crytek, but by Ubisoft’s Montreal studio.

On September 1, 2007, Ubisoft released a single player-only version of the game as ad-supported freeware on FilePlanet, although this was temporarily removed when non-US residents downloaded the game. According to Ubisoft, the offer is no longer available.

Game Summary

Jack Carver has left his mysterious and bitter past behind him and dropped out of society to run a boat-charter business in the South Pacific. He is hired by Valerie Constantine to take her secretly to an uncharted island in Micronesia. After Val is safely delivered to the island, Jack’s boat is suddenly attacked by mercenaries. Jack manages to escape but is stranded thousands of miles away from home. With his only friend lost somewhere in the depths of the jungle, he must now find his way back to civilization.

With the help of a man named Doyle, Jack travels across the various islands, battling mercenaries in search for Val. Through encounters with the Trigens (genetically altered beasts) and information from Doyle, Jack soon discovers that the island is part of an experiment involving genetic modification.

As the game progresses it becomes clear that the Trigens are becoming too large a problem for the mercenaries to handle, and that the experiments are not limited to just primate mutations, but moved on to mutating mercenaries. When Jack finally catches up with Val, she is being taken to another area by a helicopter. Jack attempts to stop the helicopter and Val manages to escape. After swimming to shore, Val reveals that she is an undercover CIA agent and is investigating Krieger’s operations. Val then suggests that the two of them split up in order to better investigate the islands.

After further exploration, Jack must again search for and rescue Val. This is made increasingly difficult as more Trigens have escaped, and have begun a revolt against the mercenaries on the island. As a result Krieger has called in elite mercenaries, and Jack must battle them to reach Val. After that they split up again, and reunite when Jack has killed the mercenary commander, Crowe. Information Crowe had with him indicates Krieger has a tactical nuke on the island.

After the Department of Defense has supposedly analyzed the situation, Jack and Val steal a tactical nuclear weapon Krieger had intended to use as a last resort in covering his tracks, should his projects be investigated. Jack seems uncomfortable about setting off a nuclear weapon, but Val assures him “its only a tactical nuke, just enough to take out the factory and the base. By the time it goes off we’ll be upwind and out of range.” Before entering the factory Doyle warns that the mutagen might infect them when the blast goes off, and advises them to take some antidote before arming the nuke. Inside the factory, he directs them to inject themselves with serum from a red box with a biohazard symbol on it. They do so and arm the nuke, which detonates directly behind Jack and Val as they exit the factory, leaving them unconscious.

While Jack and Val are unconscious, Krieger has visited the site, and abducted them. Jack wakes up on a helicopter with Krieger and Val, and is kicked off by an elite mercenary as Krieger says “survival of the fittest, good luck!” On the ground, he finds a rifle has been tossed out as well, with 10 bullets. The player, as Jack, now has to fight through the trigen infested area to rescue Val – for the third time – and escape the islands with his life. Upon reaching a mercenary weapons cache, Jack notices his arm is turning green. Doyle responds “The antidote should have been able to handle it, but the explosion could have saturated the air with mutagen. That’s what happened to Dr. Krieger. He developed a serum to keep it from spreading, and he’s still on the treatment.” Jack is thus directed to find Krieger.

However, once Jack reaches and defeats Krieger the plot twists. Jack asks a dying Krieger where the antidote is, and Krieger responds “Who infected you? The mutagen can only be administered through sub-dermal injection. I wish I could take credit, but I had no time to prepare the serum. You should turn out to be a beautiful specimen. Give it another hour… much less for her [Val].” Doyle comes up on the nearby volumetric display and says “The old man was always one for melodrama. Too bad he had no head for business,” and reveals the ‘antidote’ they took earlier was the very mutagen they were trying to protect themselves from. He also remarks that “Working for the government taught me that where there’s a weapon, there’s money to be made.” Jack threatens Doyle, who refuses to give them the real antidote, and then leaves Val at a dock with a Falcon .357 (high-power handgun) to find Doyle.

After battling through a horde of Trigens angry at him for killing their “father” (Krieger – this is why Doyle needed Jack to kill Krieger), Jack catches up with Doyle and corners him. Doyle’s last words were, “You don’t understand. They sent me. They’re all watching. They’re always watching. You can’t change this. You can’t change the future,” to which Jack replies, “Probably not, but I can make sure you’re not a part of it!” and shoots Doyle, killing him. “Stupid bastard,” Jack remarks.

Jack then escapes just before the volcano in which Krieger’s main offices were located erupts, and both he and Val are cured of the mutagen. The offices were completely destroyed by the explosion and he and Val sail off on the boat. The ending cutscene shows Val looking at a thick folder of papers and two CDs tied together labeled “Project Far Cry” (in French, it is labeled “Project Mutant”).

Graphics

Crytek developed a new game engine called “CryENGINE” for Far Cry. Reportedly, the game was born out of a technology demo called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island made by Crytek to showcase the capabilities of the NVIDIA GeForce 3. The game features relatively long view or draw distance, similar to Operation Flashpoint, but has a more advanced rendering system for vegetation. Also, all of the level territory is accessible to the player without loading pauses. The ga
me engine features seamless transitions between indoor and outdoor areas (for which slightly different lighting and rendering models are utilised).

Graphically, the game makes extensive use of pixel shaders. For example, water shaders are frequently used throughout the levels and have a significant effect on visual quality.

Character detail is also improved thanks to Crytek’s Polybump normal mapping technology. These effects are used extensively in both indoor and outdoor levels.

The release of the 1.3 patch saw the introduction of HDR (High Dynamic Range) in the CryENGINE. It can only be enabled on a graphics card that supports Shader Model 3.0 and 64bit blending support.

Human enemies in the game exhibit advanced artificial intelligence (AI), which can be favourably compared to other shooters (though its capabilities make minor glitches more apparent). The enemies are capable of navigating the large levels, using vehicles when necessary. They are frequently visible patrolling, chatting with each other (CryTek wrote a lot of humorous dialog for mercenaries that provides a backstory, showing how players’ actions affect the archipelago population), idling, fishing, fixing equipment, etc. One mercenary was seen doing push ups. They can call for reinforcements and execute coordinated attacks, outflanking and surrounding the player.

The tropical jungle provides a lot of concealment and the game allows the player to use it to hide from the enemies. These enemies don’t know the position of the player unless they see or hear him, but notably, they can remember his last known position and go there to investigate. On the other hand, the player is able to track the position of all enemies on an onscreen radar screen that are sighted and marked through the special binoculars found early in the game. Far Cry’s AI is scripted, but not scripted to the point such that the enemies can only follow one path. Crytek had decided to make the AI as such because of the open environment of Far Cry. Over scripted AI would allow the player to pass easily by approaching from a path not covered in the script, messing up the enemies and letting the player move through the game with relative ease. With the AI that Crytek instead made, the enemies now react dynamically to the player’s tactics and actions. For example, if the player was hiding in a bush and fired on a mercenary, the mercenary, unable to return fire because the player’s position is not known, would crouch and quickly sneak towards cover.

AI movement area and cover are defined in the level design. Without this definition set by the designer the enemies are far less effective against the player. They will also not move as realistically as would otherwise be expected.

The game was notable for its open ended structure, providing a multitude of ways to complete a given objective. It incorporates a mix of arcade-like and realistic gameplay, forcing the player to effectively use cover while still allowing an upfront approach. For instance, there are no forced stealth segments and setting off an alarm would not result in mission failure.

The ragdoll physics are not limited to corpses. It is possible to throw rocks at either Valerie (a character you meet later in the game) or mercenaries who have fallen into water and can’t return fire. The rocks damage them and make them move realistically according to the place the rock was thrown at. Dead fish also have ragdoll effects, slashing at one with a machete would make it fly around realistically. The boars also have similar effects.

However, Far Cry was criticised for being poorly balanced. The difficulty increased sharply in the later levels with the introduction of incredibly tough creatures created by the game’s villain, causing many problems when combined with the game’s “checkpoint” saving system, which eliminated manual saving. The increased difficulty required stealth and precision to even up the odds against the player, but many found being forced to replay the same sections over and over tedious or frustrating. The promised quicksave-update was never widely publicised, however it can be activated by bringing down the console (pressing ~), and typing “\save_game filename” and you can later load it with “\load_game filename”.

Although the game was developed by a German company, it was subject to one of the most heated controversies about video games in Germany. Upon release of the demo version in March 2004, the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien found the violence level of the game (including gore and ragdoll physics) to be too high even for adults and quickly indexed the demo. The full version had most of that violence edited out (e.g. removed ragdoll behaviour of corpses), nevertheless it received a “Not suitable under 18″ rating. A storm of indignation broke out. However, German gamers found out only days after the release that a slight modification of some files in the game’s directory brought back most of the original gore. The first issue of Far Cry was also indexed, and several weeks later a new version followed with the same censored content but without the possibility to revert the changes. This version (also rated “Not under 18″) is now for sale and can be recognized by the note on the cover saying “Deutsche Version” (German version).

Multiplayer is available in 3 different modes.

* FFA or “Free For All” – score points by killing other opponents
* TDM or “Team Death Match” – score points by killing opponents in the other team
* Assault – a type of game where the attacking team must capture 3 enemy bases, one after another. The defending team must repel the enemy until the timer runs out. Victory is awarded to the team who fulfilled their mission.

The game engine features a built-in real-time Sandbox Editor that makes creating large outdoor levels easier, circumventing the need to load the game to test a custom level, or to see the in-game effects of any changes. This enabled CryTek designers to add much detail to levels, creating many different paths while reducing the time spent on level design. It also allows the player to choose more approaches to solving goals, providing a more open and non-linear experience. The SDK (software development kit) and the FarCry modding community can be found at the webpage crymod.com.

Far Cry is the film adaptation of the video game. The game-to-film enthusiast Uwe Boll (Alone in the Dark, House Of The Dead) gained the rights to a Far Cry movie, purportedly even before the game was released.

There are currently weekly On the Set clips and interviews being shown on youtube.com.

On August, 2007, Far Cry was released for free supported by in game advertising. The download is hosted by several websites, for example the game can now be downloaded from the servers in FilePlanet or GameSpot but only to US residents.

System Requirements

Minimum:

* Operating system: Windows 98 SE/2000
* 1 GHz CPU
* 256 MB RAM
* DirectX 9.0b
* Video Card: 64 MB DirectX 9.0b-compatible graphics card
* Sound Card: DirectX 9.0b compatible PCI expansion card
* 4x DVD-ROM; 16x CD-ROM
* 4 GB hard drive space
* Multiplayer: Broadband with 64 kbit/s upstream to play (512 kbit/s upstream to host 8 players)

Recommended:

* AMD Athlon 2400-3000+ or Intel Pentium 4 2 GHz
* 512 MB to 1024 MB RAM
* Video Card: 128 MB GeForce 4 to GeForce FX 5950; ATI Radeon 9500 to 9800 XT
* Sound Card: Sound Blaster Audigy series
* 8x-16x DVD-ROM or 32x CD-ROM

There is also a free patch for the game to upgrade to the 64-bit edition. This version only works with a 64-bit CPU and Windows X
P Professional x64 Edition, although an aftermarket patch has been released to convert the 64-bit features to 32-bit systems. The 64-bit enhancements include bumpmapped rockface textures, increased environment activity (extra birds, insects), as well as some 64-bit-specific improvements. Several new maps were also added.