Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>Far Cry 2 is a lot of things, based on the memories I have from playing it a decade ago. First and foremost, I recall Far Cry 2: Parasitic Pain, which tasks you with running around begging for pills to stave off a growing infection. Next comes Far Cry 2: Buddy Bonanza, which lets you make lots of lovely AI friends, charge into battles together, and then hide while they die. Then, there’s Far Cry 2: Firewatch, which is all about watching fire. It's the best.
]]>With Far Cry 6 launching later this week, what a great time to dredge up old arguments and declare once more that Far Cry 2 was the best one. Also dredging up old thoughts, Far Cry 2 creative director Clint Hocking has confirmed an old fan theory: the man we hunt in FC2, the Jackal, is indeed meant to be the fella we played in the first Far Cry. So despite the wildly different tone and seemingly unconnected plot, it really was a sequel after all.
]]>FPS games are a classic PC gaming staple, and whether you've been playing them since the 90s or started your journey more recently with the boom in battle royales, there are plenty to choose from when it comes to the all-time greats. To help you narrow down what to play next, we've created this list of the best FPS games to play right now, from single-player epics to team-based shooters you can play with mates. Heck, some don't even necessarily have guns in them at all, and you may find the odd boomerang or bow in here too.
]]>Looks like Ubisoft will be announcing Far Cry 6 during this weekend's Ubisoft Forward event, because the game's existence and a few details have been revealed by a page on the PlayStation Store. It appears to have gone live by accident and has already been taken down, but it was there. Far Cry 6 will send us to the "tropical paradise" of Yara to fight against a brutal dictator and his son, and yes we will get animal friends again. The store page said it's coming on February 18, 2021.
]]>Maybe my perception of time is getting a bit wonky in my old age, but didn't we just finish Spring Sale season a week or two ago? No matter - cheap games are always in style. GOG's summer sale opens with a giveaway of Goldhawk Interactive's solid X-Com tribute Xenonauts. GOG also asked us to pick a few favourites from the sale, so check out our list on GOG.
]]>Last week, in the wake of MGSV opening my eyes to a series I'd long disdained, I shared a quartet of games I now feel I either dismissed out of hand or unreasonably feted. Here's the rest of that list, though I suspect if I sat down and went through every review I ever wrote over the last 15 years, I'd find quite a few more. I'm not going to do that, because making me read 15 years of my own writing is pretty much the worst thing anyone could ever do to me).
]]>Clint Hocking has been cursed by a witch and is now doomed to travel the games industry, joining new developers and then leaving before releasing a single game. In the last five years, the Far Cry 2 designer has joined and left LucasArts, joined and left Valve, and as of yesterday, joined and left Amazon Games Studios.
]]>You shouldn’t always give people what they want. This is focus testing’s fatal flaw. It’s also the reason that Far Cry 2 - a game which doesn’t give you what you want and slaps you for asking - is the best game in the series by far.
]]>From: Alec Meer, Brighton, February 2014
To: Alec Meer, Bath, October 2008
Hey kid,
Hah, I've probably pissed you off already, haven't I? That was easily done back then, as I recall. Yeah, yeah, you're no kid - right now, every one of your twenty-nine years feels like a scar. It's been a bad year, even by your standards. You're burning to up and leave this fusty old town you've spent the last eight years in, but you feel so tired, so broken, so bitter. You're also about to sit down with Far Cry 2, and you're not going to like it. Everything's going to change in time, including how you feel about that game.
]]>Clint Hocking, he of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2, has departed from Valve after eighteen months working as a something or other designer and level designer. Meanwhile, Gabe Newell has been talking to noted videogame blog The Washington Post about the company's structure and strategy. Observant readers will notice that this post contains two pieces of Valve news but not a shred of concrete information about any games in development. I reckon that's why Hocking left - he designed a couple of levels every week but couldn't find any games to put them in. After trying to drop a few into DOTA 2 when nobody was looking, he eventually left the building with a bag full of digital architecture.
Far Cry 3's Rook Islands contain bears, leopards, crocodiles, and what appear to be komodo dragons. And those things can dynamically hunt the other animals - and humans - on the island. Ubi have put a video which attempts to show off some of these dynamic features, which you can see below. There's a lot of things on fire, of course, and many dudes are exploded. But will all these things add up to an interesting open world? Bears + explosives is an equation that I am very interested in examining with a critical eye. Perhaps writing down the resulting functions on a blackboard. Yes, I'm going to be reviewing this over the weekend, so I'll be able to tell you all about lizards versus pirates next week. Review on the 21st.
(It's got to be better than Far Cry 2, right?) The game is out November 29th in Europe and December 4th in North America. Haha.
]]>Oh man, you're going to hate me so much for saying this. So much. But - I'm so sorry - now that I've finished playing Dishonored - I'M SO SORRY - and XCOM - I'M SO SO SO SORRY - for the time being, I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself in the approaching weeks. I've not played Torchlight 2, but I don't feel in right state of mind for click-frenzy right now. FTL forever sings to me, but I should move on to new pastures. I do have a new build of Hotline Miami... Then I saw this latest, thankfully generously-lengthed trailer for Far Cry 3, and for the first time (for I am an idiot) released it was out this year rather than next. It's a trailer that suggests something really... meaty. Wild. Strange. It's also got some somewhat dubious exploitationy aspects I'm not quite so sure about, but hell - I'd pretty much resigned the remaining months of 2012 to CODMOH bleh, and this looks proper interesting.
]]>The internet has decided that a picture on Clint Hocking's twitter feed of his son at Valve's industrial heart is confirmation that the Far Cry 2 designer is now absolutely definitely working for the Half Life honchos and most probably turning Episode Three into a work of divisive genius that throws out the baby and the bathwater, and then replaces them with something far more awesome than a tiny, dirty human. Maybe he's just consulting, maybe he's visiting a friend, but as he left his post at Lucasarts a couple of weeks back for "something new" the internet may well be right on this one. So, Clint Hocking is now lead designer of all development at Valve.
]]>While he's most known for the rightfully divisive Far Cry 2 (me, I'm glad it exists but never, ever want to play it again), Clint Hocking is a fascinating games-brain whose trajectory is well worth following. Not purely because he played a big role in the first three Splinter Cells, but also because interviews and talks suggest a restless, ambitious mind that seems taken up with the sort of emergent, open world, experimental experiences we generally crave here on RPS. So, while a bit odd, the news two years back that he was joining LucasArts was rather exciting. With Georgey-porgey's bunch having lately dropped any number of balls both in terms of Star Wars and, well, anything else, Hocking's presence was surely just what this hobbled giant needed. Only now he's bally left without any projects coming to light.
]]>I'm not going to lie, there are some perks to this job. One of them is that if I want to say "Look! Look, everybody! Far Cry 2 is, for the next few hours only, £2.50 on Steam! You should buy it, because it's really good!" Then nobody can stop me. Not even you, guy who hated Far Cry 2 and is reading this right now. You are powerless.
]]>I've talked about Ben Abraham's Far Cry 2 permadeath play through before. The point, of course, isn't about playing in Iron Man mode. It's about playing in Iron Man mode and then writing about it. And Ben's gone far further into this terrain than anyone else. His twenty-hour playthrough is immortalised in a 400-page, lavishly illustrated PDF complete with an intro from Far Cry 2's head-chap Clint Hocking. I've yet to read it, but this is clearly the product of true obsession as well as a monumental monograph in games journalism. Between this and Alice & Kev, it's proving quite the year for large-scale experience-orientated games writing.
]]>The notion of open game worlds has always appealed to me, ever since Elite. When there's even the faintest whiff on a free roaming environment, or virtuality that I can go off an explore, I'm interested. It's an impulse that leads me to spend endless hours in Stalker, or to expend an entire day driving around Fuel. But whatever game I play, I end up feeling somewhat dissatisfied. It's kind of dissatisfaction that does not seem to be so common with linear or arena games. I think it's to do with a specific tension that open world games create: between what the game is about, and what the environment - and its openness - implies.
]]>We've not taken our medicine today, so things might seem a little woozy. Perhaps there's some drugs behind this latest window?
For the sixth game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me…
]]>You can download a bunch of new free missions for Far Cry 2 over at Intel Game On. The download apparently adds the new sequence of missions to the open world shooter, where playing through the first six missions unlocks a seventh final scenario. All that adds at least three hours of game. And it's free.
]]>Richard Leadbetter is a man with more patience in one day than I'll ever have in a lifetime. Somehow he finds it within himself to run comprehensive investigations into which versions of videogames are best for Eurogamer. The latest is Far Cry 2, and I mention it here because the PC dun won it.
]]>So, most of the season's biggest games have landed on our hard drives by now, which means two things will follow in their wake:
1) A torrent of finely-detailed complaints about this, that and the other feature. With maybe the occasional compliment thrown in for good measure. 2) Patches!
There tends to be this weird two-sided coin for PC versions of big games - on the hand they often don't receive quite as much spit'n'polish as the console versions, which is at least partly because there's no Microsoft or Sony certification hoops to jump through. On the other, that lack of certification means fixing up minor holes can happen a lot more quickly. Case in point - in the last couple of days, two very recent biggies have already seen their first patches: Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2.
]]>[With Fallout 3 topping UK charts I should have titled this "sequels unrelated to original games top charts"... Ooh, handbags.]
The Big K posted up this week's US retail PC chart, and Far Cry 2 is in with a, er, bullet at number one. That does please me, despite the general opinion circus we're facing with the game. More importantly, Kotaku are making a commendable effort to balance out the brokenness of the NPD chart by also posting the Steam and Direct 2 Drive charts. Of course there are no explicit numbers available, so there's no way to amalgamate and come up with a realistic overview of PC game sales across all outlets, but it does give a fairer impression of the overall picture than the retail charts and their Sims expansion packs.
NPD top ten after the jump.
]]>So I'm a few hours into Far Cry 2 and I'm going to just quickly report my impressions of it so far. Firstly, it pains me to have to quit out of the game to blog about it, which is a good sign, but also a bad sign. The bad being: it locks up if I alt-tab. That said, I have ignored the game's pleas to update both Vista and my Nvidia drivers, so I'm probably partly to blame for technical difficulties. That said, even with my updating laziness, the game runs fantastically on my 8800 with everything maxed. Not quite comparable with Crysis, perhaps, but that really doesn't matter: it pulls of the dense, jungled African valleys impeccably. The action is smooth, and the world detailed.
]]>Ubi's latest trailer for their Far Cry 2 multiplayer map editor shows off some of the more radical possibilities for map creation that the tool offers: with big crazy maps with Eiffel Towers, Pyramids and vast rope-bridge mountain-islands. "Crazy" they're calling it. Better still, however, is how the headshots and explosions of the trailer are timed to coincide with the "Uhh!" of the human beatbox soundtrack. There's something wrong about that particular juxtaposition. Or maybe that's just me.
]]>See, I didn't even realise Adult Swim had a music publishing arm. It's amazing what you find when poking your nose around the internet during the breaks of the baseball game you've stayed up until a million o'clock to watch (go Phillies). So to coincide with the release of Far Cry 2, Ubisoft are getting all cross-promotional, sponsoring the free distribution of an album of South African hip-hop, called African Swim.
]]>Far Cry 2 is almost upon us, and I'm seething with anticipation. PC Gamer's Tim Edwards telling us that it effectively kills off the entire linear shooter genre doesn't do anything to ease that. His review in the latest PC Gamer UK is worth reading. If he's right - and I dearly hope he is - that will stand up as one of the best game reviews of 2008. Of one of the best games.
While Far Cry 2 is very definitely just a shooter, Edwards' review suggests that Stalker's "wide corridor" model (that I loved so much) is going to be made to look shabby by this seamless 50km world, as executed by a talented, well-funded studio. I can't wait to get to grips with the kind of freedom in an FPS that has previously only really manifested itself in GTA games. This latest trailer doesn't make the longing any better, showing off loads of the open world stuff, including character dialogue, gun-play, speeding vehicles, and the ubiquitous fiery explosions. The dynamic story-telling perhaps doesn't lend itself well to trailers, but trying reading our previous interview with the lead designer to get your head around that a bit better.
]]>I don't know about you lot, but all that Far Cry 2 coverage left me with a few questions about the game. So I dropped a line to Mr Clint Hocking, a creative director at Ubisoft Montreal, and the lead brain on Far Cry 2. He's a clever sort, and was patient enough to talk about how non-linear storytelling works, how your NPCs buddies operate in the game world, how bits of a car can be your undoing, the potential for exploration in a 50km tract of videogame Africa, the "visceral punch" of the injury system, and how people will overlook the awesomeness of a guided missile system.
Read on for a verbal monsoon of all things Far Cry 2. This is a game worth paying attention to.
]]>Well, it seems like it, anyway. I promise not to post any more. Unless it's tomorrow.
This clip (conspicuously marked CONSOLE FOOTAGE, but hey so what) shows off some forest sequence with sniping, sneaking, and killing. And some interface! See that intriguing map and compass bit. Oooh.
]]>UK-based blogchums Videogaming247 were clever enough to remember to go to Leipzig (unlike us) and consequently they've come back with special Far Cry information. Ubisoft Montreal are, apparently, already in the initial stages of the third Far Cry game. Here's the interesting bit:
]]>Could the best bit of Far Cry 2 be the map editor? That's what my secret Ubisoft contact has been reporting - and now there's a trailer to back up his ludicrous claims, which you can see after the jump. The lengthy mapping footage shows a map being put together with a gamepad - a sequence which inadvertently reveals that there's a hang-glider in Far Cry 2. There are also "over a thousand" miscellaneous objects. Excellent news.
]]>I can't think of why Ubisoft would have released even more Far Cry 2 footage except to show off what their new tech can do. It's running at some chronic level of detail in this trailer, which also has a jolly good soundtrack. It's the trailer equivalent of driving round town in your new Ferrari, or something. I still think this could emerge as GOTY.
]]>Lots of excellent new in-game footage here, with some detailed commentary by Clint Hocking. It turns out that you can even take a little nap to fast forward time. (And in the game! Aha!)
EDIT: You can check it out here since the embedded version seems to be broke.
]]>"A completely real, no bullshit open world." The presentation from this year's Dreamhack shows the sophisticated AI in action, the scale of the open world, the way the missions are implemented, the freedom of the open world, the combat, the vehicles, fixing broken vehicles, the wildlife, the physics and fire-propagation.
Game Of The Year, anyone?
]]>Certain game experiences seem to suggest other, older games, and leave me longing for them. Age Of Conan, which I've been playing a great deal for the PC Gamer review, somehow left me longing for Oblivion. There was something about the way that Age Of Conan tantalises you with elements of single player gaming that left me quite hungry for a proper RPG romp, and so I reinstalled the last Elder Scrolls game and plunged in.
To tell the truth, I'd been meaning to go back and play Oblivion a some point this year after being reminded of it in PC Gamer UK's Top 100 meeting. Tom Francis had talked about the moment he'd be most fond of in replaying the game: coming out of the underground tutorial into the bright, beautiful gameworld. “You get this incredible feeling of freedom,” he said. “It's wide open and it feels like anything is possible.” It's a feeling that, in some ways, is only possible in a game of Oblivion's calibre. That kind of feeling could be an antidote to the pressures of real life, and definitely an antidote to too many hours in a traditional MMO. I wanted to recapture that, although I had wondered whether Francis' was simply being hyperbolic. Was Oblivion better than I remembered?
]]>Far Cry 2 is making my 3D card creak with fear. That, in turn, is making my wallet weep tiny tears of fear and shame. Yes, it's going to be beautiful, but when my machine choked on the enormity of Crysis, how is it going to get on with all the visual cleverness that is contained in the recent techdemo of Far Cry 2?
Oh, who cares? Far Cry 2 looks technologically extraordimentary, and if it's half as good as the recent flood of info seems to suggests it's going to be well worth augmenting my PC with expensive sandwiches of silicon for. After the jump: vegetation in the wind.
]]>Far Cry 2 looks at least a couple of kinds of incredible. "You're free to go anywhere you want at any time," says creative director Clint Hocking of the stupidly detailed 50km2 slice of African terrain. "It's about giving the player the opportunity to play the game the way he wants to play it." Judging by some of the testimony and in-game footage we can see here, he might just be telling the actual truth. Mechanically, at least, it's looking rather like an expanded version of Stalker, with plenty of open space and the ability to tackle things as you see fit. I've said it before, but my money is on this being the best game on PC this year. After the jump: that video diary.
]]>Thanks to all the clues suggesting cleverness we've seen in the last few months, I'm pretty excited about Far Cry 2. Nevertheless I do have to wonder quite what Ubisoft are thinking when they release a "producer comment" video that is a short and pointless as this. Shakycam footage of some dudes getting shot outside some mudhuts? Talk about minimum effort. Could do better.
]]>Reportedly from an event in London this week that we totally weren't invited to. Hmmpf! Anyway, this is little bit too dark to really appreciate what's going on, but the tree physics are fun, and it does suggest that it might just have done right what Crysis got wrong, and allowed gamers to really explore the terrain. (I love terrain more than breakfast, I do.) Also, tantalisingly, there's a little bit more chat about the non-linearity of the game within the 50km zone: "We're giving the player access to the missions in pretty much any order he wants."
]]>[EDIT: Now with Mystbusters-stolen investigative journalism]
I'm so pleased Far Cry 2 looks amazing. There was an obvious fear (pun so intended) that after Crytek made their own sort-of-sequel without Ubisoft, that the publisher's sequel would be a, "Yeah! Well we'll make our own game too then!" revenge release, probably consisting of a side-scrolling platformer with bullet time. But instead, they seem to be making the most realistic foliage simulator of all time. Have a look:
Merci beaucoup Gametrailers.
]]>We've only seen brief glimpses of Far Cry 2 so far, but at last the first proper in-engine trailer is upon us. It may not show anything of how the game actually plays (clue: it involves bullets and mens' faces), but it does feature these things: Zebras! Antelopey things! Savannah! Forest fires! Huts! Goodness, it's awfully pretty. Suspiciously pretty. Gen-yoo-eyne Crysis-beater or bullshot? You decide...
]]>Despite some rumbling in the games industry jungle about the status of Far Cry 2, we have every reason to believe that this could be one of the finest games of 2008. The team have already shown off some aspects of the open-ended world, reminiscent of Just Cause, Stalker, or those opening islands of the original Far Cry game, and that alone is enough to get my non-linearity glands swollen with anticipation. I think it's clear that after the various degrees dissatisfaction we've all expressed with last year's batch of shooters, we all need a big, bold, freeform explosion to clear our conscience. Far Cry 2 could well be the game that provides it.
]]>Let me tell you a secret. Sometimes when you read an interview with a developer, rather than having sat in the room with the individuals involved, it's done by sending a batch of questions off and awaiting the reply. The trick is, ask questions that offer a sense of a narrative flow, and then arrange the results in such a way that it reads naturally. It's not a case of faking anything, simply making a Q&A an entertaining read. (If you want to see the difference, check out our interviews with Valve which were all done face to face, apart from the Eric Wolpaw one. Very rudely, he failed to rearrange his wedding around our visit.)
Sometimes, this can backfire. For example, German magazine PC Games Hardware's recent Q&A with the Far Cry 2 developers.
It all begins with a simple, innocent mistake. The thought that Ubisoft had licensed the Crytek engine. Find out what happens under the cut.
Beyond this, there's some useful Far Cry 2 tech info to plunder, for those who love to know what their Direct X 10s are doing, the AI programming, and its "realistic fire simulation".
]]>So I was a little indifferent to the Far Cry 2 announcements, and then I saw this shakycam footage from Leipzig:
]]>The Far Cry 2 teaser site is up and running. You can click on the trees and birds fly off! Man, I'm sold. I haven't been this excited about a semi-interactive picture of an African vista since I don't know when.
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