But they can get hurt and die too, which cuts them out of the story entirely. The buddies are a context-sensitive second-chance mechanic woven into the fabric of the game who, if you remember, give you alternative routes through story missions. Five minutes in the savannah with a bunch of grenades and you can set the world alight like The Joker. "We wanted players to leverage the systems in place and create their own experience." After a short tutorial the shackles are, sure enough, released.
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"The idea was that we didn't want to tell players how to play," Rivest recalls. While later Far Cry games have gently eased you into the fold, Far Cry 2 was designed to leave you to it. A lot of players don't like to struggle these days, but this wasn't even a consideration for us back then, and maybe something like Dark Souls is making people realise that it's actually kinda fun to struggle." We couldn't say, 'let's make it like this game' because this was kinda like a first stab at it. "We did want to make the player struggle," Rivest admits, "but at the time, we didn't have a point of comparison. Heck, before you've even got a gun you're infected with malaria. Sometimes your weapon stops reloading in the middle of the gunfight because of dirt and grime. Fast travel points are spaced apart and driving in the open often leads to gunfire on the side of a dirt path. In the uncompromising African terrain luxuries are rare. Mostly, the muzzle of your rifle does the talking. The story - what story there is - is spartan. There's no mini map blinking cheerily with side quests and whaddaya know, there are no radio towers either. And yet it feels stripped back, positively lean. There are even a couple of stray hang-gliders lying around like remnants from a half-remembered dream, waiting to be snapped up for a jaunt in the highlands of Kyrat.įar Cry 2 is the blueprint that first babushka doll. You scout enemy outposts with a monocular (a less useful version of the binoculars found in later games). You save your game when you sleep at hideaways. On the ground, the details we've come to expect are present.
The APR and UFLL have headquarters on either side of a long narrow road studded with sentry posts and sandbags, like something out of a terrible scene from a Louis Theroux documentary. You're in Africa to bring down an arms dealer known by the name The Jackal who is fuelling both sides of a civil war.
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When you wake up in the morning and the sun is at half-mast spilling onto terracotta-coloured sand, you remember that this series is really, at its essence, about bringing spectacular locations to life. But put it this way: if the Microsoft boffins decide to bring the game up to speed for 4K TVs they wouldn't need to do anything to the art direction. And on the Xbox One X there's a strange artefact that makes shadows in the game look as if they're covered by a patchwork quilt. The results are beautiful, even today, though don't squint at the individual grains of sand too closely. Far Cry 2 would be marketed on the sheer size of the world - 50 square kilometres of fully explorable terrain. They set about repurposing the original Crytek engine to facilitate a giant sandbox, naming the engine Dunia in the process. Africa also gave the team space to work with. "We had things we could leverage, like malaria and black market diamonds and we could put the player in the jungle, the desert, varied areas," Rivest remembers. "Ubisoft might be working on them."įour of five locations were proposed and Africa was eventually chosen. "Yes, but I can't say more," he says with a smile. "We explored so many ideas, and some of the stuff we came up with hasn't even been done yet in 2018." "We could have done so many locations," reveals Pierre Rivest, lead game designer on Far Cry 2 and a veteran of the company from 1997 until 2009. We've had the successively sweet, sugar-laden adventures since, but the essential Far Cry experience as you know it starts somewhere in Africa. It was Ubisoft's first stab at the series. You've forgotten about Far Cry 2 no doubt. More cream is squeezed from the nozzle of a dispenser, a fatter doll is slotted into place and since we never look back, we take for granted that what we're enjoying is the way it's always been. Who's going to say no to the extra sugar? Not me. Or to use a food analogy, like a Five Guys milkshake - taller and sweeter with more whipped cream on top every time. Sequels tend to be like Russian dolls: they get bigger and bigger until the little doll that started it all is buried deep.