Far Cry 2

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of a semi-private viewing of Far Cry 2 in action.  Unfortunately no camera's were allowed but there wasn't really much more to see than what it already on the Internet.  The demo that was shown was a November 2007 build.

Source of image: Far Cry 2 Headquaters

Far Cry 2 is set in the savannah of Africa.  The Far Cry team has moved away from the jungle environment which we basically saw again in Crysis.  The weather is humid and green vegetation is rare in this vast openness.

At the demo we were told that the whole games playable area was 50x50km.  We supposingly only saw less than 1x1km in the demo.

The demo started off showing off some of the basics.  You are in the savannah, you carry 4 weapons, a primary weapon which is a shotgun/rifle or submachine gun, a secondary weapon such as a pistol, the 3rd weapon is a grenade launcher type weapon but we didn't really see much of that.  The 4th weapon is a trusty machete.

Next we were shown how the wind affects a lot of the game.  You can pick up flame throwers and use them to burn vegetation and buildings, which will spread along vegetation in the direction of the wind.  You can see the direction of the wind by looking at the trees and vegetation and your compass that you have also shows you the wind direction.

At this point the game got in to a bit of action.  AI seemed a bit like the Crysis AI.  We were told they weren't scripted and would do whatever they want, and that they did.  They didn't really seem to care that the enemy was around until you started shooting them.

Another interesting point of this game was the way you get health.  You can pick up morphene from around villages etc which you need to inject yourself with when you get low on health.  If you die, you don't really die.

In the game there are NPC that you can become friends with.  Once you befriend them, all you have to do is talk to them, they will come and assist you in a fight if you die.  Well you don't really die.  The NPC will drag you away from the firing line and heal you.  You are now in a reasonably safe situation with no weapons apart from a machete and I think you get a pistol too.  If these friends die though, they don't come back.  So it is best not to use them for fighting as they can be used to get equipment from them.

It was at this point that the guy playing actually did die.  So they had to restart the demo.  On the restart the game was flickering so they had to stop the demo there.

We went on to a short Q&A which revealed a few things.

The game will be released around August/September 2008.  The release will be on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC at the same time.

The level is designed to be seamless and should have no loading screens at all once in game.  Unlike Oblivion on the consoles which had loading screens.

At this point we were asked to leave while they reset all their equipment and to let the 200 waiting people in to view the demo to.

...those 200 people were actually around 30 or 40 max.

The first of many lie's from the developers I am sure.

Far Cry 2 homepage