News

By: Jarno Kokko Aug 22, 2007

Far Cry 2 first public demo - watch out Crysis

Breaking news! Ubisoft showed the first live demo of Far Cry 2 at GC 2007. What we saw in the in-game demo was very impressive for a build that is at least six months away from completion - Far Cry 2 just might have what it takes to be a worthy sequel to the mega hit Far Cry.

The build shown was a "pre alpha", and because of the early stage of development we were forbidden to take pictures and videos. Of course we tried, but Ubi's thugs were watching the crowd carefully - so we were forced to pack away our cameras, and only managed to get a shot of the title. Don't worry though, we'll tell you what to expect from Far Cry 2 - weapons, vehicles, engine capabilities and all!

Far Cry 2's setting has moved from a tropical island to Africa. The game features jungles, savanna and desert type areas, with a huge playing area (50 square kilometers) and a continuous streaming game world without any loading pauses. The engine looked impressive: all objects and characters in the demo cast proper shadows, and wind affected tree foliage and fire. What fire? Lots of it, actually. We were shown a flamethrower weapon, and an important part of the demo was set in a fuel depot, with the player character roasting large areas of the dry savanna. Realistic winds further spread the inferno.

Talking more about the game world, the developers mentioned that the game has a full 24 hour day and night cycle, and you will be able to choose whether to tackle certain mission during day or nighttime. Weather is also going to be modeled accurately, beyond the wind shown in the demo.

Just about everything in the game was shown to be destructible. Wooden huts were blown to bits under gunfire, trees actually shot to pieces and fire burned away large patches of foliage, leaving just charred earth and trunks.

The demo showed a pretty standard selection of realistic guns - a Desert Eagle pistol, an M16 rifle and an M249 SAW light machine gun, a scoped rifle (probably an SVD Dragunov), a Mac 10 sub-machine gun and the aforementioned flamethrower. We were shown two vehicles, a jeep and a dune buggy.

The demo closed with a sneak peek of some hang glider action - yep, the hang glider is back and the dev at the controls took the glider over a fairly long distance of the African savanna, and showed a us peek of the wildlife. A herd of gazelles grazed around a pond and roamed realistically. Draw distance in flight was just as impressive as in the original Far Cry.

Framerate and some of the effects looked like they might be some ways off from being final, but even this early version of Far Cry 2 looked promising. Not Crysis-awesome, but still impressive, as the devs have definitely paid attention to detail in the sandbox game world we got to see.

On the subject of release date, they had just a rough estimate - "Spring 2008".

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