Apologies if this is old news, but I didn’t see any references here and thought I’d pass it along.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=169105
Peter
PS: Whatever became of the Far Cry expansion? (Maybe it turned into this?)
More open areas is a good thing.
Hmm, I thought Crysis was Far Cry 2? Well since I loved the heck out Far Cry this is good news to me.
Crysis is the next game from the Far Cry developers, this is the cash-in from the IP holder.
It sounds like they are headed in a better direction than the developers of Far Cry. Focusing on the realistic aspects of the first game, and not on the supernatural and alien aspects seems like a good idea.
“Our research with consumers showed that there was more interest in the earlier parts of Far Cry - the highly realistic parts where you were raiding mercenary encampments using planning, infiltration and then explosive action to win the fight,” explains Louis-Pierre Pharand, Far Cry 2’s producer.
“Many people seemed to feel the game suffered a bit with the introduction of the Trigens, and the fantastical story that they brought with them. We agreed.”
Oh and lets hope its save anywhere this time.
Nobody cared about the damn story. They would have been perfectly happy with the mutants if they were fun to fight. But they weren’t, so people hated them. There’s nothing preventing Far Cry 2 from making a similar mistake and nothing preventing Crysis from avoiding it.
True.
Whether Far Cry 2 has unfun monsters again or not, I’ll buy it if it allows you to go in developer mode and just play certain levels for a bit. That’s what I did mostly in Far Cry: load up Fort or Pier or Steam and have fun.
If they were handling it off to some random studio, maybe, but Ubisoft Montreal is a very fine developer.
“Our research with consumers showed that there was more interest in the earlier parts of Far Cry - the highly realistic parts where you were raiding mercenary encampments using planning, infiltration and then explosive action to win the fight,” explains Louis-Pierre Pharand, Far Cry 2’s producer.
“Many people seemed to feel the game suffered a bit with the introduction of the Trigens, and the fantastical story that they brought with them. We agreed.”
I just want to go on the record as saying “Fuck the consumers”.
They were the same bastards that hated on the supernatural parts of Thief, leading to the snooze-fest that was Thief 2 (Now with fewer zombies!)
Why are people always hating on the supernatural? It’s a fucking video game - if you want to shoot real people, join the army.
I don’t think the problem people had with the trigens was the fact that they were sci-fi creations. They just sucked as enemies.
Imho, creatures generally tend to suck in FPS games because usually their tactics consist of the same old ‘jump out and bite you’. That kind of gameplay is getting pretty old.
I disliked Far Cry quite a bit, but I have a lot more faith in Ubisoft’s internal teams than I do anyone at Crytek. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.
I felt the same way. Either they surprised you and killed you in one sweep of their claws, or they killed you with one shot of their rocket launcher. I didn’t mind at all the scifi “island of Dr.Moreau” story they had, but it would have been more fun had the mutated soldiers remained smart enough to employ the tactics used by the mercenary AI, as well as hit you with more forgiving weaponry. Sandbox levels aren’t as fun to indulge in or as replayable when you’re one-hit dead.
I gotta say, though, the level with the boat and the cluster of island bases was sheer joy.
Hopefully they’ll be taking the majority of the indoor corridor crawls. I also don’t mind supernatural monsters, just not ones that can two-shot me when I’m full health and armor, and whose mobility is such that they can perform Olympic-level jumps. Also - please make sure there are fewer difficulty spikes and fewer situations where all my hard-earned weaponry is taken away from me.
Time for someone to include some creatures which hunt you. I want to be peering through the foliage and see the pack picking up my scent.
I don’t mind (indeed, I actively encourage) supernatural/alien content in my games. Particularly shooters. However, there is an issue when said content is actively less fun to deal with than the standard human enemies. I really haven’t penetrated far into Far Cry at all, so I can’t comment on the trigen. But Thief’s zombie levels were annoying because they largely discounted the stealth mechanics that were the core of Thief’s game and instead made you actually fight enemies, which the game doesn’t do particulary well. Similarly, I hate Half-Life 2’s zombies because they’re very one-note, not at all satisfying to kill, and don’t really have much in the way of tricks up their sleeves. I would have been much happier using Ravenholm’s arsenal of tricks on the Combine soldiers.
I agree with bigdruid on Thief vs Thief 2 for the most part. Plus malkav11, I disagree about zombies in Thief taking the focus away from stealth mechanics. Every enemy in Thief had their own audio cues as to when they were looking for you, when they actually spotted you and came after you, etc. This included all the supernatural enemies. Sure, it wasn’t as obvious as a guard saying “What was that? Is somebody out there?” but it was pretty distinct.
The variety of Thief’s missions is something that made it really enjoyable for me. The only place I got really impatient with Thief is the second to last level called “Escape” or something. That’s when the story was hurtling toward a conclusion and lurched to a standstill because suddenly you were in this level with grasshoppers and insects and god knows what else, and I just didn’t have the patience left for a long level like that, not with the story being at such a critical juncture. I thought the pacing there wasn’t well done. But other than that level, I really loved the game.
I should also point out, that one of the levels that people complain about, where you go into the haunted cathedral. After you get what you’re looking for, the front door automatically shuts and locks, and you have to go through a long and complicated path through many supernatural things to get out. When that happened, I just restarted that level, because I noticed there was a big rock by the cathedral door that I picked up and put in a place so that when the cathedral door tried to shut, the rock was blocking its way. So one of the supernatural levels that people complain about was a cake walk for me, and as a bonus, I really felt clever for figuring out an alternative way out. Although I do wonder to this day whether the designers wanted to allow the player to be able to do that or not.
I don’t relate to the quote. but I did love it.
Anyhow enemy mutants don’t ruin a game. boring and annoying enemy mutants do.
At first I thought this sounds like a very bad cash-in, but I have enough trust in Ubisoft actually, in fact, crytek is brilliant on the technical side, but as far as it comes to far cry had much more to learn about game-making.
Hopefully both Crysis and Far Cry 2 will be good, if not we can probably settle for just one of them. It will be hilarious though if Far Cry 2 will be the more successful and highly rated one.
I wonder if its using the same game engine as Crysis?