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Far Cry 2

Monster Engine

Far Cry 2 is built on Ubisoft's in-house Dunia engine, and it's quite impressive piece of code. If you just look at the visual detail, it doesn't quite match Crytek's CryEngine2, but what little it loses in complicated shader code it more than makes up in being a very good engine for a sandbox game. A lot of stuff can be broken, blown up or burned. Flames can actually spread across the landscape according to the direction of the wind. Trees and grass move in the wind convincingly (most of the time) and everything is crowned with impressive day/night cycle that is a true cycle with the sun slowly moving across the sky, not just "day" and "night" with a fake transition between the two. Weather effects, when it stops being sunny, are also visually impressive.

Sunrises and sunsets look especially nice.

Fire and destruction is presented very well.

Lighting is also fairly advanced during the day, but at night the shortcuts show up. Impressive shadows shown during the day go missing at night and what artificial light sources you find only lits up the surrounding landscape - shadows are nowhere to be found. Bit of a downer, but I guess a fully realistic lighting model with real shadows cast from multiple light sources is a bit too much for today's hardware in a game like this.

The engine is also slightly unstable. Not sure if it's the game or the drivers - either way, on ATI hardware the game has a tendency to crash to desktop unexpectedly every hour or two even with the ATI Far Cry 2 hotfix drivers specifically released for the game. NVIDIA hardware isn't quite as punctual with the crashes to desktop, but with latest WHQL drivers the game tends to stutter a bit while the beta drivers released for Far Cry 2 were apparently having some other problems based on the fact that they are no longer available on NVIDIA's website (the actual download page is missing). I'm sure a patch or a driver update will sort out the most obvious faults, but the lack of polish is a disappointment.

Console Gaming

While the engine is very advanced and the Ultra High setting on the PC goes beyond what's possible on a console, Far Cry 2 feels like a console game. Even if it's true that Far Cry 2 was initially developed for the PC, the Console Gaming Disease is present. The menus are the first indication - very much console-style with large font size suitable for reading on a TV screen - console-y, but passable. Far bigger problem is the horribly narrow console-style field of view - probably 65 or 70 degrees, instead of the PC "standard" of 90 for 4:3 screens (100 for 16:10 widescreens). To make matters worse, not only is the FOV narrow, widescreen monitors are "supported" by chopping off stuff from top and bottom of the screen (Vert-) while keeping the narrow FOV untouched.

I could probably go on for several pages, explaining in detail why Far Cry 2 is doing it wrong, but to summarize; Console games are usually played from a couch, easily ten feet (3m) away from the screen. At that distance, even a large widescreen TV covers only a narrow section of your field of view and a FOV of 65 or 70 degrees is understandable and looks natural. Computer games are played mostly on desktops with the monitor situated about a feet or two away, covering a much larger portion of your field of view (especially on larger videscreen monitors). On the PC, Far Cry 2 feels like playing through a mail slot and it can cause motion sickness to people who have no problems with first person games with a wider FOV.

In addition to the FOV issue, Far Cry 2 features built-in mouse acceleration that cannot be turned off. The actual magnitude of the problem seems to depend on your mouse and mouse drivers, and with enough tweaking the problem can be minimized to a bearable level, but it's another console-related disease and indicates lack of final polish.

Bioshock failed in the exact same way - narrow FOV, cropped widescreen, mouse issues. That was last year. Has nobody who is involved in developing PC versions of these multiplatform titles been listening? Almost all new monitors are widescreen and developers should really start listening to Widescreen Gaming Forum on how to do widescreen right on the PC. There is an unofficial hack to cure the FOV issue, but it won't work in multiplayer and you shouldn't have to scour the web for such hacks. If the developer insists that the game should by default use same FOV on the PC and the consoles, at least provide an option to bump up the FOV to a more reasonable setting.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Graphics, FOV IssuesPage 4: Performance, Visual QualityPage 5: Multiplayer, Summary and Scoring

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