MTV Multiplayer's Stephen Totilo writes:
"After talking to Far Cry 2 creative director Clint Hocking about explosive barrels, and fears of slumping PC first-person-shooter sales, there was only one more big topic for me to tackle with him: not selling out creatively.
Hey, I know how it is. I work for a big company. I know what expectations people have when you get involved with a big-budget enterprise. Folks begin to doubt that any interest you have in anything that's indie or alternative has no chance of showing up in your work.
So I challenged Hocking on this. He loves indie games, or so I'd heard. How does that square with making a big-budget first-person-shooter. He took me up on it and we wound up talking about emotion and death, and how Halo, Gears of War come up short in a particular way that he says Far Cry 2 won't."
If you’re new to this long-running franchise, we’ve got you covered.
I recently tried 3 for the first time but the frame rate was a turnoff.
I liked 5 and 6 though.
If you have a Series X or S, the Xbox 360 version runs at 60 fps with fps boost. It's a shame the remaster doesn't.
2 and 3, pretty much the only ones i really enjoyed. 1 was amazing for the time but aged quite poorly. 4 has the elephant gun, all i can praise from any entry after 3 lol
Ummmm 3 than stop.
Okay maybe two as well. But yeah probably 3 and then move on.
Far Cry 2. People constantly rant about games now being too easy, holding your hand, having too many unnecessary RPG-lite leveling features, etc. People specifically complain about open world games being too focused on tons of collectibles and "checkmarks" that just waste time.
Far Cry 2 is an answer to all of those complaints. It was made by Ubisoft before they fell into all the traps discussed above (and before they started inserting towers into their games to defog the map). It has respawning enemies, weapons that degrade, and the collectible diamonds are very useful in the game (which you find in a similar way to the way you find shrines in BOTW with a radar system). The map you have is an in game item you pull out while playing, not a pause menu that is unnecessarily detailed. Also the enemy AI and physics are much better than later entries in the series.
It has a mixed reputation because people at the time said it was too hard, the weapon degradation was annoying, and then respawning enemies were annoying. FC2 came out in 2008, so this was before games like Dark Souls and BOTW had come out and made it cool to like these types of features.
Far Cry 2, the one with the AI that find you through walls and trees, can one shot you from a mile away and have 100% accuracy? That was frustrating not fun because cheap AI.
Uhh, I mean, it isn't one of these games where once the enemies have detected you they will magically forget you exist because you walked behind a wall or went into a bush. And yeah the AI isn't stormtrooper level accuracy. Again, these are positives, not negatives to me.
To be fair, I'm really directing this at the people most critical of "Modern Ubisoft" or "Modern Open World" design elements. Like the type of people who fawned all over Elden Ring because it had a clean UI because they are so burnt out by the "checkbox" type of open world design.
If you like those types of games, then a later FC game like 3 and especially 4-5 would be more your style.
GF365: "There are some games with extraordinary visuals that impress us to this day. Here are old games with outstanding graphics."
Same as Killzone 2 and 3, uncharted 2 and 3, Infamous 2, Heavy Rain, Resistance 3
I wish this was entirely true, but you might want to load up Killzone 2 and Resistance 3 again.
@jason I watched some gameplay videos of KZ2 and R3 on my full screen. They are on par or succeed graphically to the first person shooters mentioned in the article that also launched on the seventh generation of consoles. Try the same and see what you think
Killzone 3 was super impressive! I could not believe the graphics back then as I was regularly pausing the game to stand in awe looking at the surroundings! Resistance however did not impress me that much. Heavy rain is also another amazing graphically speaking game. It almost felt next gen
I always thought the first 3 Gears of War games looked great and still hold up for today.
They did for their day. I recently played gears judgement with on the 360 and the draw distance was so blurry. The characters up close look great though
Far Cry 2 was awesome. In addition to having demonstrably better physics and AI than later games in the series, it had a lot of design decisions that, criticized at the time, have since been praised in games like BOTW and Dark Souls.
It might not be super amazing by today's standard but I thought Mgs3 looked really good
The Far Cry series’ best game – not Far Cry 6 – just got more brutal and realistic thanks a mod than revamps and remakes the classic Ubisoft open-world FPS
Far Cry 2 where your guns never ever jammed until you got into a gunfight is their best? I disagree.
I liked 3 more.
The malaria angle was more annoying than immersive.
And, the enemy AI had too good of eyesight to allow any stealth. They’d spot you a literal half mile away, I hated it.
Yeah, some weird mechanics for sure, some did really enjoy it, I certainly didn't.
The map was designed badly and an absolute pain to navigate from what I can remember too. You ended up having to go to the same few places all the time and there was a huge inaccessible area between them that you had to go around.
It definitely had the best physics system of the entire franchise, but a lot of the mechanics took the enjoyment out of it.
It was fun for its time but a bunch of those systems today won't survive a launch weekend.
I'd say it was their most ambitious and had the best setting to date next to the original island.
But gameplay wise it was clunky and maybe it was released to early if the teams had modern systems to build it on the game would have been much better less corridors more open and less gaurd outposts that auto regen
Yes and you could do that for hours in FC2 with a gun and it wouldn't jam, not hard to grasp is it.
Far Cry 2 may certainly not be the most "fun" game in the series but from a narrative standpoint it definitely is the most interesting of the bunch. FC2 couldn't be further away from the pointless fragfests that the following episodes turned out to be.
Passage is actually pretty amazing. As you played on you slowly picked up on what was happening and what was going to happen. It seemed pretty simple at first, but if you read the creator's note about the game, it's crazy to see how deep it is.
As far as this goes, let's see, Digital Devil Saga, Call of Duty 4, and possibly Days of Ruin are the only games where I've felt something of an emotional connection to the characters.
Ironically Final Fantasy fails as well. At least to me it does.
choose the difficulty level at the beggining of far cry 2. If you have it set to the most difficult setting, it auto saves when a character dies, and limits how old of a save you can reload.
was kinda wierd, i was thinking at the begging.."how could this make me feel anything but board?", then about 2 thirds of the way through i understood what was going on, then by the end it has you thinking not of the game butlife in general.
I have to WOW. Not many games can do that, no matter how much money they spend. Its good to see some developers care, and even try.
One of the reasons I didn't like Bioshock was the zero consequence for dying.
In multiplayer games I never really liked the respawn system either. It throws strategy out the window.
I don't get how anyone gets a emotional attachment to passage, walk and walk for 5 minutes and you die, yay. Ok I get what the game is saying, still stupid and boring as hell.