Look, I’m not saying Far Cry 3 is responsible for *gestures vaguely towards modern AAA games* but it’s definitely a prime suspect. If I was trying to connect a piece of red string from the middle of my evidence board (which would probably be a picture of the map screen from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla), I’m not sure I’d push a pin directly into Jason Brody’s face, but I’d definitely circle it in black Sharpie a few times. Basically, in the eleven years since its release, I’ve grown a bit suspicious of Far Cry 3’s lasting legacy.
]]>Boo! Did I startle you? GOOD. I'm currently competing for the title of trickster-in-chief here at RPS, and I'm never going to have a chance of receiving this promotion unless I reach my daily scare quota. If only there was a way I could package together a collection of scary stories as told my colleagues and claim them all as my own.
Aha! I got you again! They don't call me the Merry Trickster Of UK PC Gaming Websites for nothing! You've been Halloween'd, my friends! To celebrate spooky season, I gathered seven members of the RPS treehouse to tell me about one moment from a PC game that scared them the most. The results were exactly as I expected. Some recounted events in classic horror games that shocked them senseless, whereas others told me anecdotes about games that most wouldn't consider scary at all. The result is seven tales of spooks that are sure to chill your bones this All Hallows' Eve.
]]>Horror games are great and all that, but what about games that make you the monster? Yeah. Chew on that for a second.
I'm not just talking about games that belong to the horror genre, either. In fact, spare those asymmetrical multiplayer games that are all the rage with their worryingly young audiences, there are few actual horror games that let you assume the role of the villain. But that doesn't mean there isn't a deluge of titles where you play as a creature so vile, so menacing, that the residents of their worlds undoubtly view the player as evil incarnate. Far from it. The games on this list may not all be spooky in tone, but your character is still the stuff of actual nightmares.
]]>Today was due to be the day when some older Ubisoft games would see their online services decommissioned, but the company is granting them a temporary reprieve. You now have until October 1st to cram in some multiplayer for several early Assassin’s Creeds, the original version of Far Cry 3, Driver: San Francisco and others. Ubisoft say they’ve been “exploring what is possible to reduce disruption” over the last month, hence the shuffled date for decommissioning.
]]>Ubisoft are switching off online services for several older singleplayer games, including Anno 2070, Far Cry 3, Prince Of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. For several of those games, that means that as of September 1st, "the installation and access to DLC will be unavailable," according to an Ubisoft support page.
]]>Ubisoft's autumn sale is underway, with substantial discounts on recent games. They're also offering Far Cry 3 for the biggest discount, free. That's a fair price for RPS's game of the year 2012.
]]>Y'know that X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully wear cybervests and jack into VR to fight a cyberbabe? What if that, but Far Cry 3? I am thrilled to tell that Far Cry VR: Dive Into Insanity is what, a new game coming to a type of VR arcade where you and your pals strap on cybergoggles and cyberarmour and hold cyberguns and run around a room playing together.
]]>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.
]]>I have very much enjoyed the Far Cry series, most often despite itself. Far Cries 3, 4 and Primal (why is everyone forgetting poor old Primal?) have all occupied me for countless hours, provided enormous amounts of entertainment in their kleptomania-inducing maps, and always done so despite everything it thinks is so compelling about itself. Far Cry's self-belief in its own abysmal stories is always so grossly apparent, like a strutting buffoon bursting into the bar and looking around, confused, when every man, woman and animal doesn't immediately throw themselves at his feet. So then he starts loudly demanding people throw themselves at his feet. And when they don't, runs around putting his feet as near to people as he can and declares to the room that this counts. Oh Far Cry.
Unfortunately, this time out things have gotten a lot worse. Far Cry 5 - to run with the previous analogy - barges up to you, grabs you by the collar, and throws you down onto the ground by its shoes, screaming "MY FEET! WORSHIP MY BLOODY FEET!" Which is to say, engaging with its godawful cutscenes has become less optional. Far Cry 5 has the most egregiously bad imposition of its story.
]]>It's been a long time since Far Cry games were how you gave your PC its fiercest work-out, but hell, old habits. Ubi have just put out system requirements for March's Montana-set Far Cry 5 and they're pretty reasonable, in the main.
Basically, if you have at least a GTX 670 or R9 270 you're getting in the door, though if you want to crank it all the way to 4K and 60FPS and don't already have the high-end cards to do it, it's second mortgage time.
]]>I don’t know how I finished Far Cry 3. Luck and perseverance, I suppose. It’s hard to play when you’d happily take a bullet for a dog, though. The island paradise is full of them, and for some reason they are extremely aggressive. But I refused to harm a hair on their precious little heads.
]]>Poor Ubisoft. They crafted this enormous open-world icon-riddled niche of their own, trod it into the ground while flogging it to death, and then other people came along, borrowed their ideas, and built superior games with them. In the last year, despite decent showings from Far Cry Primal, The Division, Watch Dogs 2, and Wildlands, players and critics were beginning to weary of yet another open map of odd jobs. None was particularly at fault, but we were experiencing perhaps the sense of diminishing returns, and certainly the weariness of fatigue. And then this year we got Zelda: Breath Of The Wild from Nintendo and Horizon Zero Dawn from Sony. Pow. Two platform-pushing monoliths that schooled Ubisoft at their own games.
In the wake of being so astoundingly outshone, what can Far Cry 5 [official site] do to reclaim the crown?
]]>We already chose 13 of our favourite games in the current Summer Steam sale, but more games have been discounted since. So, based on the entirely correct hypothesis that you all have completed every single one of our first round games and are now thirsting for more, here are 18 more to throw your spare change at. Everyone on the RPS team has picked three stone-cold personal favourites, making for a grand old set of excellent PC games: here's what we chose and why.
]]>There's a scene in the new Far Cry Primal [official site] trailer in which the player character instructs his pet owl to eat someone's face. It's amazing how inconsequential the lack of vehicles and rocket launchers seems now that the full extent of the animal-taming can be seen. Feed wild beasts and they can be tamed, which leads to big cat snuggling, guard bears and tiger ridin'. Given that sniping the locks off animal cages was my favourite way to take out a baseload of baddies in Far Cry 3, Primal suddenly looks very tasty indeed.
]]>Ubisoft attempted to announce Far Cry Primal [official site] with a tantalising livestream, which was rather spoiled by a brief leak of the game's name and basic details. Now we know more, including proper trailers, screenshots, and a release date... which will see the game land on PC the month after it'll arrive on console.
]]>Update: There's now proper trailers and everything, embedded below, or hop to this post for Far Cry Primal's release date, screenshots, trailers and more.
Viral marketing isn't entirely going Ubisoft's way lately, but at least having their own promotional rug for the next Far Cry pulled from under them by a loose-lipped IGN Turkey means exciting news rather than quizzical looks. Yep, the next Far Cry is, it appears, to be named Far Cry Primal and is set during the Ice Age.
]]>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.
]]>Far Cry 3 was a lot of things, but a narrative tour de force wasn't exactly one of them. To hear Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem tell it, there were good intentions putting the wind beneath its hang gliders, the komodo (and/or blood) in its dragons, but the end result was rather... misguided. When Far Cry 4 was first announced, it seemed like it might be off to a similarly shaky start with box art that left some feeling uncomfortable, but the E3 game demo ended up telling a different tale.
That said, we still don't know much about this one is about, so I sat down with Far Cry 4 narrative director Mark Thompson to talk premise, plot, controversy, the inherent problems of videogame info hype cycles, and heaps more. Machete your way past the break for the full thing.
]]>So Far Cry 4 is a thing. It was pretty inevitable, given that Far Cry 3 sold like hotcakes stuffed with pornography. The next question, then, is obvious: will there be another Far Cry: Blood Dragon? Nothing's set in stone yet, but it sounds quite likely that Far Cry will take another turn for the weird. Just maybe don't expect another '80s spoof this time.
]]>I can no longer separate actual announcements from speculation, gossip and fever dreams, so while I *think* we've already heard a bunch of stuff about Far Cry 4 and how it'll have a snow-bound setting, for the sake of ease I'm going to pretend this is the first thing we've ever written about it.
Far Cry 4 is out this Winter, it is indeed set in the Himalayas and it's got a harpoon gun in it.
]]>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.
]]>As part of my continuing display of ignorance, I hadn't realised that the upcoming Far Cry The Wild Expedition - a bundle of all the previous Far Cries in one imaginary box - was going to contain something called Far Cry: Classic - a slightly remade version of the original game. Something that's already available for consoles, apparently, but sigh Ubisoft etc. It seems the PC will only get it on the 21st, as a part of the rest of the pack.
]]>I'm quite fascinated by Ubisoft's epic poem JRPG melting pot of madness Child of Light, and I think you should be too. It's an entirely bonkers concept, and - good or bad - it at least promises to be a thunderous step off the beaten path for a fee-fi-fo-fummingly gigantic publisher. I recently had the chance to chat with creative director Patrick Plourde and lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem, and you can find the first part of our conversation here. Today we pick up right where we left off: with guns and shootymen. Actually, that's not where we left off at all, but sometimes natural transitions are hard. So read on to see what Plourde and Yohalem learned from creating Far Cry 3, fielding controversy that arose from it, and now, working within constraints more commonly associated with indie developers.
]]>Say what you will about Ubisoft, but you can't deny that it's significantly less risk-averse than triple-A publishing kin like EA and Activision. Assassin's Creed III's alternate history Washington DLCs weren't the best, but that didn't stop them from being patently insane. Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, meanwhile, was a quirky, out-of-nowhere gem. And then of course, there was Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which Papa Ubi has apparently taken quite a neon-tinged, cyber-eyed shine to. But Child of Light might just be its biggest leap of faith yet. Inspired by the massive success of Journey on PS3, the publisher has let two of Far Cry 3's leads run wild on a co-op coming-of-age JRPG epic poem about a young girl and also there are drunken crow people for some reason. I recently got to play a small section of it, and I must say that I found it quite enchanting.
]]>Do you remember that there were decades previously to this one? Far Cry 3 seems to think it does, with the appearance of an expandalone spoof of the 1980s, Blood Dragon. How does this mini-adventure hold up? Here's wot I think:
]]>Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, wherefore art thou Blood Dragon? Well - and this is just a hunch - I'm gonna go ahead and say it's because of all the blood dragons. Thing is, our peeks at the neon-drowned shurikensplosion of a game have thus far been confined by story, (somewhat oddly) removing said retro-future laser reptiles from the spotlight. Now, though, it's time for a tour of the expandalone's open world, and the dragons are done tip-toeing about. They are real, they are pissed, and they want cyber hearts for some reason. Watch them frolic, romp, stomp, and shoot helicopters out of the sky using only their eyeballs and their wits after the break.
]]>Who shoots the shooters? Well, I don't think Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 3 writers Walt Williams and Jeffrey Yohalem have ever shot anybody, but they are attempting to skewer gaming's shooter genre – or at least give it a good paddling. In the previous two installments of this gigantic chat, we discussed everything from the art of critique, to violence, to the effect of treating gamers like they're stupid, to Dante's Inferno and the Sistine Chapel. Seriously. It's been a very long and interesting road, but now we're finally at its end. In this thrill-a-millisecond conclusion, we discuss real, long-form criticism of games (including that one guy who wrote a book about Spec Ops), what's next for these sorts of dissection of videogame culture, games as tools for exploring the future, and where games like BioShock Infinite fit into that.
]]>When last we joined Spec Ops: The Line writer Walt Williams and Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem, they discussed everything from the problematic nature of modern escapism to Western culture's disturbing disconnection from real violence. Today: art! Or rather, the process of creating it using someone else's money when that's not really what they wanted in the first place. Also, we delve into the notion that gamers (often rightly) assume games think they're dumb, and how that factored into the receptions of both games' messages. In the process, the likes of Mass Effect, Shadow of the Colossus, the Sistine Chapel, and Dante's Inferno (the literary work; not the bizarre EA game) get ruthlessly dissected. NO ONE IS SAFE. Flee beyond the break while you still can.
]]>The shooters! They've become self-aware! Now they're in the vents, skittering around menacingly and writing lengthy commentaries on why the very mechanics that make them tick might just be hyper problematic for, you know, society. Two games, especially, have claimed the forefront of this movement and have succeeded to - erm, depending on whom you talk to - varying degrees. If nothing else, however, Spec Ops: The Line and Far Cry 3 should be applauded for aiming right down the sights at a very important topic. Thing is, they furrowed their proverbial brows at shooters in extremely different fashions - Spec Ops by charting a slow descent into bodycount-borne madness, and Far Cry by "straight-faced" (and/or frustratingly obtuse) satire. So, during GDC, I brought their respective writers, Walt Williams and Jeffrey Yohalem, together for a wide-ranging chat about, well, everything. In part one, we talk the industry's emotional disconnect from the realities of shooting, how to critique violence without accidentally glorifying it in the process, getting these critiques past publishers, and tons more. Oh, and of course, beware of SPOILERS.
]]>Edit - bah, videos removed. If anyone's found another source please say so below. Edit2 - A new source for one of the vids is now in this post, but presumably it won't hang around for long.
This half hour of purported footage from Far Cry 3 expandalone Blood Dragon is obviously fake. You can tell by the way the shader polarity is reversed at 11m07s in the first video, and the vertex flux lacks external consistency at 03m40s in the second video. Don't even et me started on how unconvincing the e-dough modulation is. If you're naive enough to want to watch thirty minutes of fabricated video from a pastiche sci-fi shooter, I can only wave you at the supposedly leaked videos below. They might have gone by the time you get there, as Ubisoft will doubtlessly feel the blatantly counterfeit muzzle occlusion diodes will give the real version of their game a bad rep.
]]>I still can't quite believe that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon exists but as of this weekend, the standalone title not only has a release date, it also has Michael Biehn's voice. Actually, the Xbox Marketplace listing which reveals the May 1st release date doesn't specify 'voice', it says 'a VHS era vision of a nuclear future, where cyborgs, blood dragons, mutants, and Michael Biehn collide'. Is it possible that the man in possession of the only true Reese's Pieces has been transformed into binary code and inserted into the game? We'll find out soon enough.
]]>On April 1st, a peculiar thing happened: a game company debuted a seemingly implausible spin-off that wasn't a gigantic, painfully obvious hoax. Now, notice I said "hoax," not "joke." Reason being, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon still seems incredibly, absurdly silly. The advantage it has over its smoke-and-mirrors peers, however, is that it's actually, you know, real. What began with a schlocky (though impressively elaborate) '80s-style B-movie adver-site now has a series of neon-soaked screenshots, and - in a fun twist - they look almost nothing like Far Cry 3. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, well, I guess by that metric Far Cry's dev team has some pretty darn sterling mental health. All other indicators, however, would seem to suggest otherwise. In a very, very good way.
]]>Confession time: I never quite finished Far Cry 3. I've put infinity-dozens of hours into it, but I eventually got bored because I downed most of the outposts. As a result, my once-thriving pirate-and-oppression-overrun utopia devolved into a hive of peace and friendly cooperation. Gross, right? So I moved on to other open worlds and left Far Cry 3 stranded on its own little closure-free island, forever to rest until I forgot Just Cause 2 existed. But this, this is good news. We'll be able reset outposts soon - at least, after beating the game. Also, other things! Those things are after the break.
]]>The popular videogames in this instance being Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series. Of the former, we can expect a new installment, featuring a new time period and protagonist, to arrive before next March. For the latter, meanwhile, apparently the wait won't be as long as it was between Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3.
]]>In the first part of an extensive, illuminating and arguably controversial interview with Passage, Sleep is Death and Chain World creator Jason Rohrer, we discussed his new game, the fascinating but sinister home defence MMO The Castle Doctrine, making virtual possessions and people matter and why he chose to include only male protagonists. In this second and final part, we pick up mid-chat about issues of authorship in games, leading to his thoughts on the divisive Far Cry 3. Then we cover his outspoken feelings about gun control, before moving on to how house and trap construction works in The Castle Doctrine, how he thinks he's made player-generated content meaningful, and, inevitably, whatever happened to his mystery Minecraft mod Chain World.
]]>The break's nearly upon us, and the news has already fled into its cozy hibernation hole to avoid the harsh shifts in weather and people caring. So now I'm going to tell you about some patch notes, because they're all that's left in this desolate winter wonderland. Fortunately, Far Cry 3's brought a fairly sizable bounty of improvements back from its latest bug hunt, and it even managed to bag the big one: notifications. Yes, you can finally banish those loathsome pop-ups from Jason's face.
]]>Having completed Far Cry 3 a while back, I found that so much of the game's story just didn't sit right with me. Not simply in the sense that it appeared to contain colonialist nonsense and clumsily handled rape plots, but that I felt I was missing something. That the game was trying to say something to me, perhaps partly through that which I found problematic, and I hadn't been able to hear it. So I pursued the game's author, Jeffrey Yohalem, to talk it through.
Yohalem proves to be a very animated, very passionate writer, who sees Far Cry 3 as a complex exploration of many ideas, mostly questioning the role of the player in a game, and what they'll do in order to win. It was, he says, an attempt to break the loops of modern gaming, to ask the player to start to demand better. Fortunately, I'm animated and passionate too, so we get to discussing how successful this really was. What follows is a heated chat about what gaming could and should be. I return at the end with some thoughts on the conversation.
]]>Far Cry 3 has multiplayer. Or at least, I'm relatively certain it does. I am, you see, somewhat guilty of scampering into single-player's wide open jungles - like a frightened tapir who doesn't want to become a backpack - seconds after start-up. I honestly haven't touched multiplayer in spite of my near-obsessive love for Ubisoft's wild, wild wilderness rumpus, but I now have a strong reason to reconsider. While the mode selection's fairly standard on the whole, the powerfully robust map editor is anything but. Case in point: these brilliantly faithful recreations of classic maps from all across the magical gaming kingdom. Have a nice mid-morning gawk about each place after the break.
]]>Far Cry 3 has opened its komodo-dragon-like terror maw and consumed the entire RPS staff. We're now naught but moldy bones littering the dimmest corners of its lair, wobbling on excitedly about that time we saved all those turtles from an out-of-control, highly turtle-unfriendly fire we started. But it's definitely not perfect. Obnoxious pop-ups swarm constantly in a ceaseless cycle of useless reminders. John, noble lord of loathing, described it best when he said "Far Cry 3 does not, and it WILL NOT SHUT UP." Fortunately, Ubisoft has heard players' pleas, and now the pop-ups are going bye-bye.
]]>Yesterday I celebrated what is definitely a really fantastic game. A game that deserves celebration, a surprise treat from a series that never promised anything this involved, mad, and genre-busting. It is, overall, a very positive experience. And as I said yesterday, such experiences come at a price - when stuff is wrong, it looks very, very wrong. But in the case of Far Cry 3, this isn't about picking up on issues that would pass in a more mediocre game - this is about really wantonly stupid mistakes, issues that defy the belief that any human being can have played the game before it was released, further evidencing the theory that this was indeed a game coded by tigers.
]]>Far Cry 3 is a game of enormous juxtaposition. Overall it is undoubtedly an absolutely stunning game, ridiculously fun and utterly engrossing. And in there are some real extremes. I argue that Far Cry 3 contains some of the features for which we've spent our years screaming at the sky, a real understanding of why fun can be more worthwhile than realism, emergent play, and angry, angry tigers. And I also argue that Far Cry 3 contains some of the stupidest mistakes imaginable - in fact, beyond imaginable, because there's no understandable way they could reach the finished game unless it were in fact coded by angry, angry tigers. I argue the first half of this below, with the second half tomorrow.
]]>Update: Ubisoft have tweeted an apology, saying they're working as fast as they can to get the servers back online.
So, like many others, I'm very excited to play Far Cry 3. After Jim's review, and many similar elsewhere, I've been dying to play it and finally have the chance. Today is my day off, hooray! And so far I've been treated to a horrible, horrible time, and all at the hands of the technical mess that is Uplay and idiotic mechanical choices. And right now? Ubisoft's servers are down. On launch day. You can still play in offline mode, but ho boy, this isn't a good start.
]]>Scottish people are awfully sweary. "Fookin' shite" this and "wee bastard" that. I don't know. It must be all the batter. One of their potty-mouthed number narrates the Far Cry 3 co-op trailer, which is a grisly mix of explosions and neck stabs, narrated by a man who's angry with me for something I must have done.
]]>Do map editors normally have trailers nowadays? Far Cry 3's has one. I know that some trailers have trailers and it's only a matter of time until someone makes a trailer for a logo, so I guess something as functional as a map editor can appear in a video and say 'hello'. The most notable thing about the editor for Ubi's Jimpressing open island shooter is that it looks simple enough for an idiot like me to use. Terrain can be generated randomly, objects are dragged and dropped into position, and the whole thing can be populated with wildlife and AI baddies for solo play.
]]>What a difference words can make. If I'd seen this new Far Cry 3 video last week, my first reaction would probably have been to chortle about magical tattoo abilities. After reading Jim's thoughts on the game, I'm too giddily excited by watching those abilities in action to spend any time laughing at minor bits of silliness. Far Cry 2 was a mess but it still managed to produce some of the finest moments I've ever experienced in an FPS, so when I see the words "it has kept what was good...and builds on everything else", damn straight the lens through which I view the trailers changes. Very excited.
]]>The third game in the Far Cry series has arrived, bathed in sun, populated by sharks and murderers, driving too fast along a dirt track, with the grass on fire all around. But is this a holiday of a lifetime, or a trip to the wrong side of the tracks? I pulled on a scratched pair of aviators and scavenged a shotgun from the body of a fallen games journalist to tell you wot I think.
]]>In a fashion not entirely dissimilar from real-life games like croquet and sex, first-person shooters have recently started adding "multiple players" modes. Far Cry 3 - in spite of its focus on "singular players" and the islands who love them - is no different. But how does it even work? I mean, we know that its servers are of a fickle, wayward nature, but will it be worth the possible hassle in spite of that? Let's investigate. Machete your way through the break's overgrown jungles to see some footage. Oh, but do keep an eye out for wildlife. We don't have any tigers roaming these parts, but Alec is startled by sudden movements and has been known to attack.
]]>I wanted to make a picture of one of Far Cry 3's tigers crying gigantic crocodile tears (or maybe one of its crocodiles crying tiger tears - or just tigers) for this post, but I'm rubbish at Photoshop. So, um, use your imagination. Awww, isn't that sad? That tiger - in addition to the fact that a gun-toting madman is cavorting about his island home and burning everything to the ground - now has to worry about inconsistent connection speeds and host disconnects. Truly, there is no worse fate. But perhaps there's hope? While Ubisoft tied cinder blocks to dedicated servers' shoes and hurled them into the ocean, it was fairly upfront about why it thinks its alternative solution will be just as good.
]]>Admittedly, Jason does other things in Far Cry 3's new story trailer aside from punching a shark. But really, is there any tale more gripping or universal than that of one dude, one shark, and one fist? The biting, the panicking, the punching as beady little eyes register no pain. In that moment, we find the truest definition of the human condition: not shark. And then, after that brief spasm of profundity, we get Jason talking about his captive friends and such. He speaks with conviction, too, but I think we all know what's swimming around in the back of his mind: he punched a shark, and he liked it.
]]>Yes, jumping puzzles. Far Cry 3 has them. Apparently as something you can do fairly often, no less. That's one of the many revelations that spring up while two of the shooter/arrower/shanker/lawnmower's leads play 14 minutes of their game and chit-chat. It's an impressively illuminating look at many of Far Cry 3's open-world aspects, including base capture and crafting. A lot of it reminds me of Assassin's Creed, oddly enough. I mean, there's jumping. And bears! That's pretty much all of Assassin's Creed III, guys.
]]>Block by block, like an insidious cubist curse, Minecraft is taking over the gaming world. World of Warcraft was the most recent game to suffer assimilation, in a frightening 1-1 recreation. Usually this sort of labour of love is made by the fans, but Ubisoft are cutting out the post-launch months of people on forums suggesting that someone does it. They've hired Far Cry 3 Minecraft modder Michael Lambert to build it for them, creating a free map and texture pack that will be out before the game it's based on.
]]>Brendan did a spot of de-scaling when he murdered his way through the opening hours of Far Cry 3. Providing a side dish to his words, Ubisoft have released four videos that show how the journey from holidaymaker to hardened warrior begins. It's more tell than show, actually, with producer Dan Hay describing what the scenes are intended to do. The first couple are character-based and don't contain a great deal of running and shooting, the third documents the takedown of an outpost and the fourth is the burning hotel setpiece which we've seen before.
]]>We sent Brendan to play Far Cry 3's single-player. Here's his report.
I’m halfway through skinning a dead Komodo dragon when all my suspicions about Far Cry 3 come to a head. I’m standing on the overhang of a massive cliff, just going to town on this corpse. Bunching its bloodied hide into a bundle like a supersize tortilla wrap drenched in red chilli sauce. And I’m thinking: ‘Man, that was one grumpy lizard. But it’s okay. I’m safe.’
]]>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.
]]>Far Cry 3's villains sure do like to talk. It seems to be something of a pattern: you fight, they tweak their mustaches and monologue ominously, and then you end up tied to a sinking cinder block or on fire or something along those lines. Yet you always live to fight another day and begin the cycle anew. It forces me to wonder: is it all intentional? Maybe Vaas and his strappingly Saxton-Hale-esque pal Buck just want someone to talk to. Or perhaps they just need someone to listen. Can you be that person? Can you give them the verbal hug their parents never did and then verbally attend their piano recital and play catch with them in the park? If not, Far Cry 3's third villain - every tiger in the entire jungle - won't talk, but will still try to kill you. So there's something for everybody. Observe after the break.
]]>Far Cry 3 continues to have trailers full of enjoyable activities, like shark-punching and diving out of jeeps just as they explode. It also continues to have trailers with voiceovers that say very silly things. Example: "His privateer army can do a lot more than walk and chew gum at the same time. They've been trained to kill!" Most armies are like the Terminator under the control of a Furlong on the cusp of puberty, of course, explicitly commanded not to kill under any circumstances. "This is the jungle. It gets under your skin. Your blood makes it grow." I guess that probably might be true. Hear those lines and more below.
]]>OK, so I'm starting to warm up to this "Agent Huntley" narrator guy Ubisoft's got talking us through the most recent Far Cry 3 videos. He's basically a more tropical Max Payne - which, given recent events in Max Payne's life, means he's basically just Max Payne. The above headline, for instance, is all Huntley - so strong is my love for his vaguely coherent, gleefully grim ruminations. If ever I have a child, they will be raised from day one on a steady diet of these slurry linguistic soups, such that they may one day have full command of their nonsensically noir-ish powers. But until then, let's talking about Far Cry! There's tons to do, as you'll see below - including hallucinogenic drugs, gambling, and wildlife-slaying. This will be the first game I present to my hypothetical incoherent noir children, I think.
]]>Far Cry 3 definitely isn't the second coming of Far Cry 2, but the more I see of it, the more I'm actually pretty OK with that. It's big, loud, and over-the-top, but - to hear its lead writer tell it - with a nicely subversive point. Also, there are tigers. Last time I played a demo, I tried to turn them on my enemies, but instead, they traded our five-second-long allegiance for my jugular. Then I caught on fire and died. Which is a long-winded way of saying combat seems nicely open, and - if a new trailer's any indication - the world itself will have a breadth of options to match.
]]>Far Cry 3 was shown in detail at the exciting E3 computer games fair in Los Angeles, back in June, and the focus of the attention there was the co-op aspect of the game: four folks fighting their way across a jungle island in search of revenge. The video of the E3 demo, which has been narrated by a helpful Ubisoftian, can be seen below, where it details some of the ways in which the four revengers can work together to defeat their greatest foe: other dudes.
]]>Not that it will be a surprise to Rock, Paper, Shotgun readers, all familiar with my legacy, the Walker Principal*, but the release date for Far Cry 3 has just slipped by almost three months. It's now at the end of November. Perhaps a touch ironic, after Nathan recently reported for us that the PC version would be launched alongside the consoles. It turns out what they meant by that was, "not at all, for a bit."
]]>One of the most striking scenes of yesterday's E3 press conference gauntlet didn't take place on a stage or a screen. It wasn't rehearsed or pre-planned, and it most certainly wasn't expected. I sat in a jam-packed arena-sized auditorium and watched a game demo unfold on a screen bigger than my hometown. OK, that wasn't the surprising part. I'd been doing that all day. This one, though, came to a rather abrupt halt when - mere inches away from the camera - a man's head erupted into a volcano of hyper-detailed gore after a point-blank shotgun blast. And then: deafening applause from hundreds of people.
This was the blaring exclamation point on the end of a day of gleefully grotesque neck-shanking, leg-severing, and - of course - man-shooting. I can honestly think of maybe five games - in four multiple-hour press conferences - that didn't feature some sort of lovingly rendered death-dealing mechanic. And oh how show-goers cheered. So then, have we all become brainless barbarians with a lust for blood bordering on fetishistic? Hardly. That'd be a simple black-or-white (or, I suppose, red) answer, and this issue's a whole lot messier than that.
]]>Good things come to those who wait. And admittedly, Assassin's Creed II (and its assorted pseudo-sequels), Driver: San Francisco, and - based on what I'm hearing - Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are pretty solid, but were they worth the long, cold nights we endured in anticipation of their arrival? OK, yeah, probably. But the time-honored tradition that is the Ubidelay arguably serves little-to-no purpose, and much like its nearest cousin - an inflamed, seconds-from-bursting appendix - it's a vestigial pain that needs to go. Fortunately, Far Cry 3 - at the very least - appears refreshingly willing to show it the door.
]]>And most of the rest of a tiger too! Yes, it's Far Cry 3 footage time, in an excitable and heavily stylised trailer that offers snatches of what to expect on this new island other than shooting dudes. Includes a large tribe of angry-lookin' natives, Indiana Jones-style temples, swearing, flamethrowers, a lady with a chin tattoo that looks like a beard, boats, more swearing and A TIGER.
]]>I was comfortable in being incorrect in my predictions that Far Cry 3 would involve some form of free roaming excellence coupled with a thousand irritations, like a sleek engine attached to a ship of fools, grinding down the tracks, lopsided and soon to be derailed. What I didn't expect was quite so much railroading in the game, or at least in this segment of the game. In a clip found over at Gametrailers, a man named Jason rescues a lady from a burning building in a scene that resembles a section of Uncharted 3 taking place in first person far more than it resembles any of my predictions regarding the eventual shape of Far Cry 3.
]]>RPS hugbuddy Will Porter is giggling beside me. ("Hugbuddy"? - Incredulous Ed.) The guilt at what I was doing was not stopping me from doing it: I am a bad bad man and Will’s laughter drove me on. While we were waiting in the Far Cry 3 multiplayer lobby, I experimentally clicked the two thumbsticks down (the game was on PC, but it’s currently only tuned for joypad) and was informed I’d levelled up, and it showed me the new weapon I now had access to. Like the other people at this press event, I’d never before had the chance to plunge into the team-focused multiplayer, but with every guilty click I was giving myself an advantage. Click. Click. Click. I looked at the other screens and no-one was pulling the same trick. This was going to be easy.
]]>Far Cry 2 was, you will recall, the game with the most individual trailers ever released. There was one a week for seventeen years before its launch, and by the end of them we were exhausted. EXHAUSTED. The same looks to be true for the third game, which brings us another trailer: here, NOW. And probably the same time next week. We shall see. That said, you can't argue they're not putting the effort in on these trailers, there's really a lot to be said for the footage in this one, including the hang-glider, sharks, and drugs, Drugs! DRUGS!
Watch it below, by the news-horn of VG247.
]]>Yup, that Massive: the Ground Control and World in Conflict devs have been disarmingly silent of late. But according to reports from the Ubisoft GDC event, they're helping to create the Far Cry 3 multiplayer. "Huh?", you might think, but hold that back for a moment - I have more. According to Vox Game's Brian Crecente
In working on Far Cry 3's "online universe" Ubisoft Massive is adding elements from the indie scene and social games, they say
Go on let it out now. I'll join you.
]]>Nearly six minutes of the stuff! As you might expect, it shows dudes being shot with pistols and assault rifles, but there's a bit hallucinating on drugs, too, which is slightly less common in these sorts of videos. It's clearly using a lot of the Far Cry 2 tech, as you'd expect, and I don't think it'll actually fall too far from that tree. It's 360 footage, by the way. Obviously.
]]>Listen, that trailer might have been a bit eyebrow-angling, but let's just be careful with our expectations. They're very delicate. The Far Cry games, while each not to everyone's personal standards, have always been interesting. I don't think the third one is going to fail on that count, either. Hell, if it's open world enough it'll make me happy. The images, too, cheer me up. I like a tropical island in my computer game, and this is looking far more vibrant than FC2's surprisingly dreary Africa. Ten new images below. Actually nine. The one above makes ten, though.
You can click 'em for full size.
]]>This is the 'official' version of the Far Cry 3 trailer, which is almost exactly the same as the one that leaked earlier on today. I actually felt bad about linking to that one, but we're all about disclosure here at RPS: whether you're Ubisoft or John Walker, we'll get to the heart of the story, no matter what. So, tell us Ubisoft: why did the leaked trailer have a Sept 6 release date when this one says Sept the 7th?
]]>This feels dirty: the Far Cry 3 trailer has leaked a day early, a CGI introduction to the lead character's holiday going stinky. I have just watched it and can confirm there's bad language, a boat, guns, and a man not shooting someone when he really, really should have. It also confirms the release date as September 6th, and has dubstep. If you want to watch it, the link's there, although there's every chance it'll be pulled by legal ninjas. In that case, there's a teaser trailer below.
]]>We caught a dose of Far Cry 3 at E3. But what were the side effects?
Beyond being a FPS, Far Cry 2 didn’t really have anything to do with Far Cry at all. Where the first game was lush islands, the second was arid central African scrub. Where the first game was lonely, the second had AI companions, conversations, and expensive Jeeps. Where the first had giant unkillable mutants with rocket launcher arms, the second had... wildebeest. Where the first developer was Crytek, the second was one of Ubisoft’s monolithic internal studios. Plotwise, the first game was Moreau, the second is Heart of Darkness. So what is 3?
]]>A body of Far Cry 3 details and footage has come bubbling to the surface of E3 like a bullet-riddled corpse in a greasy river. Since I was encouraging you lot to buy Far Cry 2 not two weeks ago, you'd think I'd be pumped as hard and tight as a tire about Far Cry 3. But I'm not, really. Come take a look for yourself. It looks great, but it doesn't look like it has the same will to break new ground.
]]>Far Cry 3 has been confirmed for release in 2012. The game returns to the original Far Cry's jungle island setting, but nevertheless producer Dan Hay promises "something new and unexpected" for the game. Ubisoft says: "With Far Cry 3, players step into the shoes of Jason Brody, a man alone at the edge of the world, stranded on a mysterious tropical island. In this savage paradise, where lawlessness and violence are the only sure thing, players dictate how the story unfolds, from the battles they choose to fight to the allies or enemies they make along the way. As Jason Brody, players will slash, sneak and shoot their way across the island in a world that has lost all sense of morality."
]]>The guys over at VG247 have come up with a bunch of references to the as-yet-unannounced-but-nonetheless-likely third (or fourth, really) instance of the Far Cry series. It seems the game is definitely happening, despite Ubi's lack of noise on the title. Also it's worth noting that the key reference made by a developer working on the game says that the game will be a console shooter, but I would be profoundly surprised if it did not receive a Windows variant, too.
]]>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:
]]>
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "שחרורו של Assassin's Creed Shadows נדחה למרץ כאשר מועצת המנהלים של Ubisoft שוקל מכירת חברה")
