The whole thing with rights and licenses can be hilarious at times. As CryTek, the makers of the original Far Cry, are hard at work on Crysis, by all rights a spiritual successor to Far Cry to be published by EA, Ubisoft, who now own the Far Cry license, have put their Montreal team to work on Far Cry 2. The team at Ubisoft Montreal has been working on the sequel for the last two years.

And while the legal BS surrounding the fate of what was originally CryTek's game is not exactly filling me with joy about the creative potential and drive of our industry, the bottom line for the gamer is that instead of just getting Crysis from EA, we'll be getting two shooters to play! Naturally, Crysis has had a bit of a head start, but then, the Far Cry license itself does give a certain boost to Ubisoft's efforts.

Today, I was led into a small improvised theater where two guys from the Montreal studio actually played an early alpha build of Far Cry 2 for us.

The action took place in Africa, as our guy is sent in to whack a rather nasty arms dealer who's been feeding both sides of this particularly vicious local conflict with weapons. Right off the bat, the team pointed out that what we'll see is about 1 kilometer of what is going to be something like 50 square kilometers of land - the actual game world. No, there will be no loading times. You can shoot a grenade into a bunch of trees a mile away and you will actually see the grenade hitting the trees and doing damage. Consistency is the name of the game. Each tree in the game sways in the wind according to the characteristics of the actual wind that's blowing. The physical properties of the entire world are pretty amazing. The way that fire spreads as you set ablaze a certain part of savannah depends on the wind and humidity; when you drive through tall grass in a jeep and look back, the physical properties of individual grass will change as it bends beneath the weight of the vehicle. The whole world is a total giant sandbox. Same goes for the AI, which is liable not to do the same thing twice, if you would to replay a certain level.

During the presentation, the demo driver played with the weather by showing the ultra-realistic presentation of the night and day cycle and how the AI adjusts certain things in the environment according to which time of the day it is. So, for example, camp fires will light up as night falls. Next, the guys from Ubi created an actual wind storm that would increase in strength and eventually break branches off trees. Different trees would behave in the wind differently, again depending on their properties.

The feeling of immersion in the game is further heightened with a complete lack of any clearly visible interface. If you want to check out where you are, you will actually take out a map from your pocket and a compass and use the little indicator on the map to move around. Sure, the functionality is the same as bringing up the map screen, but this just adds more immersion to the game. It's the same with getting shot at and taking damage. Essentially, the team showed only a couple of examples of ways you'll be self-healing yourself, but as you take damage, the important thing to know is that your character will actually be shown pulling a bullet out of his foot, or his hand.

In that same context, your gun will be liable to rust and jam in the middle of a fire fight - a nasty predicament to say the least. Luckily, if you get torn up really bad, instead of dying there and reloading, a friendly NPC that you may have gotten in contact with previously in the game, might come in, lift you off the ground, and carry you to cover.

If we are talking about pure entertainment factor, however, the best part of the presentation by far was seeing the demo "driver" actually drive his jeep (like a complete rookie) into a bunch of tattered shacks. A total chaos ensued with him running over entire shacks only to jump out at one point and start tearing through just about anything with a heavy machine gun. I actually had fun just by watching that.

Second fun moment was seeing the flame thrower in use. Why? It was used to set a fuel depot on fire. Now you can only imagine how this one went. This is also the time I saw the fire spread naturally across the terrain, engulfing trees in flames in a very believable way.

In a nutshell, the Far Cry 2 demo shown here seemed more like an engine tech demo than anything else. The inevitable question whether Far Cry 2 or Crysis looks better is something that will be dragged around quite a bit in the near future. Personally, I call Crysis on this, but it's truly amazing how powerful Far Cry 2 code is.

Still, let's not forget here that it's the story and gameplay that will make or break both of these games, and so far we've seen a lot more of that from Crysis (at this show), so comparisons at this point in time would be rather unfair.

-- Uros '2Lions' Jojic

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