FarCry
2 did a lot of bold, weird things. It moved the setting from the
tropical island of the first game to the African savannah. It
introduced “buddies”, friendly NPCs who acted as save points and whose
survival or death shaped your personal story. It gave the main
character malaria, and forced you to travel the world to find medicine.
It’s early days for FarCry 3 – there’s a lot the presentation I saw
didn’t show, and a lot the producer I interviewed wouldn’t say – but it
seems to be walking back from that weirdness, keeping what worked, and
re-establishing the things that made the original FarCry feel like such
a wonderful holiday.
The presentation opens with the player in a dense jungle, stood
alongside a crashed, rusted fighter plane. It’s old, and isn’t how you
got here. You’re Jason Brody – your girlfriend is gone, your friends
are gone, and you’re “off the edge of the map,” says Dan Hay, the
game’s producer
Peering over a nearby ledge, we get our first look at the island
laid out before us. There’s a small camp not far from here, beyond
which spreads blue ocean, blue sky, and more green, jungle-covered
mountains. It’s beautiful – the primary colours of FarCry 1 made with
today’s technology and running on a beast of a PC sat under the screen.
In the village below, people are being lined up on their knees by
armed men. Brody takes photos for the brief moment before he gets
knocked unconscious with the butt of a rifle, and we wake up to this
guy staring at us:
You can tell he's crazy because of his stupid hair.
This is Vaas. “Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?” he
says. “Doing the exact same thing over and over again, expecting shit
to change. That is crazy.” He rambles, he’s nuts, but he speaks at a
reasonable pace. That’s an improvement over FarCry 2′s hurried acting.
So far, so scripted. It’s a few minutes later, when the fighting
starts, that it begins to look more like FarCry. There’s a jungle,
there are patrolling guards and, from the looks of it, there’s more
than one way to approach the situation. On the far side of the camp in
front of us, there’s a military helicopter. It’s the best way out of
here, if the player can reach it.
In the video, the player approaches quietly, using a machete found
in a corpse’s back. He pounces on an enemy below from a small ledge,
and moving between shacks, uses the knife again to stab one guy in the
neck and then hurl it into the face of another sitting close by. These
are special takedown moves.
The bodies can then be looted for money and guns afterwards – and, we’re told, the guns don’t decay any more.
Drug gangs love shadow puppet theatre.
“We wanted to make sure we were giving the player the ability to
turn on the action when they want to turn on the action,” says Hay.
“Making sure that the AI isn’t always hammering you with bullets.”
FarCry 2′s enemies were so bloodthirsty, they’d smash their cars into
trees, leap out and begin firing the second you appeared on the horizon.
The player turns on the action, using an AK-47 to take down three
guys in the middle distance, before sprinting and diving into a river.
It’s beautiful under here. “We wanted to give you that same feeling you
had in FarCry 1 the first time you jumped in the water. ‘Oh my god, I
can’t believe how good it looks’”. I can believe how good it looks, but
it looks very good.
Emerging on the other side, the player pops some explosive barrels
foolishly positioned on a wooden bridge, and sprints for the
helicopter. It switches back to a scripted scene, thankfully without
breaking first-person, and Jason threatens the pilot with a pistol:
take off, now. It’s 15 seconds before he’s shot back down, back face to
face again with Vaas.
“Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?” he says. And scene.
You will never see the game from this angle.
Let’s be clear here. A seven-minute presentation of a linear, partly
scripted combat bubble isn’t the best way to show an open world game.
What we saw looked like a first-person shooter – and not just without
the boldness of the last game, but without so much of the core of what
makes FarCry special.
What we did get were some promising words from Hay; mainly, that
exploration will be a big part of the experience. “You’re walking
along, you’re on a mission – maybe you’re in a truck, bombing along
pretty quick. There’s always something just off the edge of the map –
‘what is that?’ You stop, you get out, you explore. Exploration is key
to us.”
In the demo, there were little glimpses of things: the downed plane
at the start, statue heads buried in the grass, ancient temples spotted
through the trees.
There’s also more to the game than just Vaas – he’s not the big bad,
but just one enemy leader. The buddies, too, will return, albeit in
changed form. Tim has an interview with the narrative designer later
this week which should reveal more.
The biggest question mark, though, is the respawning enemies that
made so much of the last game a slog. The question seemed to flummox
Hay slightly, which is worrying.
For now, though, I’ll give the game the benefit of the doubt. For
all the interesting things that made me like FarCry 2, I wouldn’t mind
another summer holiday in a better, monster-free FarCr
23.44
sheno_kudo
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