Far Cry

Preview - Beautiful and original, could this unimposing shooter be just what the genre needs?

If there is one thing the games industry is not short of these days, it is first-person shooters – they are as ubiquitous now as platform games were in the 16-bit era. If Doom and its successors began this explosion of FPS titles, then Half-Life consolidated it, and it’s this title, along with Halo, that have had the greatest influence on the development of Crytek’s Far Cry.

Set around fifteen years in the future, Far Cry revolves around a boat skipper who finds his life suddenly endangered when abusive military types invade his home archipelago. He takes this rather badly, as one might, and sets off from island to island to see what exactly is ‘going down’. The game uses this simple yet adequate premise as the excuse it needed to embark on some nice tactical group combat.

Far Cry is being developed using Crytek’s proprietary CryEngine, and all the indications are that it’s up there with the best of them. It uses similar technology features as Id’s forthcoming Doom III engine, particularly the use of a technique known as polybumping. This involves generating character models at high levels of detail, around 250,000 polygons, and then converting this model to a far less costly 1500 polygons per character, with no or very little loss of detail. All the usual bags of tricks are also present, including some impressive rag-doll physics and accurate vehicle movement modelling. Impressive as these features sound, such techno-jargon is common propaganda emanating from all kinds of developers these days. Crytek have wisely decided, therefore, to concentrate the greater part of their publicity on a more rounded view of the game, with particular reference to the game play itself.

What sets Far Cry apart, even at this stage of its development, is the design ethos under which Far Cry is being produced. The key point of this mantra is the avoidance of over-scripting as a design tool – that is, resisting the temptation to have all the game’s significant moments planned and executed in code, never changing with each replay. Rather, Crytek have sought to build a robust and powerful set of game tools and systems that allow them to simply set the parameters of a situation, and let the AI do the rest.

The influence of this decision has been both pervasive and positive. Essentially, the team aim to provide the player with a ‘sandbox’ to play in – the rules of the world are known and defined, but their application is left up to you. As such, the environments demonstrate a great degree of freedom. Expansive beaches and unrestricted island locales seem to be the order of the day – and doesn’t it make a nice change from the tree-textured corridor forests we’re normally subjected to? The terrain will also be deformable, and apparently will be to a much greater degree than Red Faction ever managed. The fact that the team make so little of this feature speaks volumes about their approach; to them, deformable terrain should be included not because it makes a nice gimmick or feature, but because in the real world a rocket launcher should be able to blow a huge hole in the ground.