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Far Cry 2
Developer(s)	Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher(s)	Ubisoft
Designer(s)	Clint Hocking
Composer(s)	Marc Canham[4]
Series	Far Cry
Engine	Dunia
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
Genre(s)	Action, First-person shooter, Sandbox
Mode(s)	Single-player, Multiplayer

Far Cry 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America^[1] and on October 23, 2008 in Europe^[1] and Australia.^[3] Crytek, developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2. It was announced on January 3, 2008, that in addition to Microsoft Windows, Far Cry 2 would also be available on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.^[10]

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, but the sequel abandons the science fiction aspect of the previous games in the franchise. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that has been dubbed "more realistic". The game takes place in a fictional modern-day Central African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate "The Jackal," a notorious arms dealer. The game is unique in that it is a shooter taking place in an open world, in which the player can explore the region and undertake missions from various factions. On all platforms, Far Cry 2 received highly positive reviews from video game critics.

Gameplay is open-ended, with the player being able to ally with anyone he chooses and to progress through the game world and the missions as he sees fit, resulting in a sandbox style of gameplay that allows the story to progress at the speed and in the order the player chooses.^[11] The player can choose from a wide range of vehicles to make his way to the target, accommodating play styles ranging from head-on assaults to stealthy infiltrations. Instead of using individual maps, the game takes place in a sprawling African landscape, with terrain ranging from savannah to jungle.^[12] The gameplay area is 50km² (19.3 sq miles).

The player's actions may also have a lasting effect on the environment: for example, one of the missions shown by the developers had the player sabotage a pipeline owned by one of the factions that is pumping fresh water from a lake to a neighboring country, exchanging it for arms and munition. After the player destroys it, part of the surrounding area becomes flooded, including a mine where another mission may take place.^[13]

Various factions and vehicles are featured; enemies include human mercenaries, but sci-fi creatures such as the Trigens from Far Cry will not be featured.^[14] Furthermore, the player's feral abilities introduced in Far Cry Instincts and its expansions do not return in Far Cry 2. There is also a dynamic weather system that has a day-night cycle and different weather conditions such as storms and strong winds. The time of day also affects the AI by making them more alert and aggressive or more relaxed and benign. One minute real-time is equivalent to five minutes in-game.

The player also has access to a large arsenal of real world weapons, including assault rifles, sniper rifles, RPGs and light machine guns, among others.

A pre-alpha video of the game, showcasing visuals and 13 minutes of gameplay with developer commentary, was made available online in spring 2008.^{[citation needed]} The video showcased many dynamic gameplay features which included procedural breakage of vegetation, allowing players to shoot down trees and shoot branches and leaves off of trees, which can eventually re-grow. The developers also showcased dynamic propagation of fire, and volumetric wind effects capable of breaking vegetation and spreading fire. Man-made structures were also shown to be highly destructible.

File:Fc2 rl.jpg

The game has realistic features such as the player having to hold a physical map (which includes icons indicating the location of the player and other points of interest) and navigation system to get around, and the avatar having to dig bullets out of the body and pat himself down when on fire. Weapons wear down over time, adding a grimier look to them and eventually causing them to jam or explode. Several species of African wildlife can be encountered in the game, and are able to distract the enemy as well as make them aware of the players' presence.^[15] All the large animals in the game will be grazing herbivores, such as zebras, wildebeest, gazelle, buffalo, impala, and gemsbok.

The player is able to tag certain objects and locations such as cars, sniper towers, ammo pickups and buildings, so that they are able to monitor them on their map. The player also must deal with malaria. Every 30 to 40 minutes in real time, the player must take a pill in order to combat the effects of the illness. When the player runs out of medicine, he or she will have to do a simple mission in order to get more. The player's reputation comes into play as the more and more notorious the player becomes, the harder it will be to obtain the medication.

Multiplayer in Far Cry 2 attempts to include the dynamic elements of the singleplayer game (such as fire propagation) and to provide as accessible gameplay as possible so that it is available to all skill levels and so that players have specific gameplay aspects to keep in mind when designing their own maps in the map editor.^[16] It will also include a vast number of vehicles.^[17]

Online matches can be held for a maximum of 16 players, but there is no split-screen multiplayer available. Four modes are available with the shipping of the game, consisting of Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Diamond (a slight variation of the standard Capture the Flag), and Uprising. The Uprising mode provides a twist on a node-capture match by including a captain for each team. Only captains can capture the designated points across the map, and a team must assassinate the enemy captain after capturing all the points to win the round.

Multiplayer gameplay is class based, with six classes available. The Commando is the standard grunt; the Sharpshooter specializes in long range; the Guerrilla excels in close combat and ambush; the Rebel uses explosives and fire; the Gunner provides heavy firepower; and the Saboteur uses stealth and silenced weapons. Each class can choose an appropriate primary weapon and a side arm, as well as explosives such as frag grenades or Molotov cocktails. Players are able to unlock more powerful weapons within each class by spending up to three "blood diamonds" on a class; the diamonds are earned through the experience points from killing other players and completing objectives. Potential upgrades for individual weapons within a class include operation manuals, maintenance manuals, and bandoliers.

Far Cry 2 abandons the science fiction aspects of its predecessor in favor of a more realistic setting. The game takes place in late September 2008 in a small, fictional, failed Central African state, never named, currently embroiled in a civil war. The government has recently collapsed, leaving two factions vying for control. At war are the United Front for Liberation and Labour (UFLL, led by Addi Mbantuwe, a former opposition leader) and the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR, led by Oliver Tambossa, Chief of Staff for the former government). Both factions have claimed to have the people's interests at heart, but both have shown ruthlessness, warmongering, greed, and a general disregard for the well-being of the people. Both sides have hired many foreign mercenaries to bolster their strength over the course of the conflict. The recent exhaustion of the nation's diamond mines has thrown the nation into further turmoil, leaving many foreign mercenaries without payment and no way out.

The goal of the player's character is to find and assassinate the Jackal, an arms-dealer who has been selling weapons to both sides of the conflict. The player must accomplish this goal by whatever means necessary, even if he has to reach the level of immorality employed by the warring factions and the Jackal himself.

The Dunia Engine allows incredibly complex sequences and runevents. The result is a diverse and accurate African environment that is largely destructible. The game also features a real time day and night cycle, as well as tree and vegetation regeneration. The behavior of fire is dependent on factors such wind speed, wind direction, and vegetation type.

File:Far Cry 2.jpg

The protagonist of previous Far Cry games, Jack Carver, is not featured in this game. When Ubisoft interviewed players about the original Far Cry in their research for this game, the interviewees didn't find the character very memorable or likable. As a result, in the sequel the player chooses from nine different characters to play, each with a unique look and back story.^[18] All of the playable characters will be different types of mercenaries. The playable characters the player does not choose to play become non-player characters who are friends of the player's character and who can be found around the in-game nation.^[12] These friends are called Buddies and they can be used to complete some missions; for instance, bringing a container of defoliant to one Buddy who has access to a plane will allow her to deprive the enemy of cover when the player assaults a plantation. In addition, when a player and a Buddy have a good enough relationship, the Buddy will come to the player's aid, to revive him when downed and to help fight off the remaining enemies. Similarly, the player may be called upon to aid wounded Buddies, and may have to euthanize them if they are unable to provide adequate first aid.

Act I

The player's character lands in the northern territory of Leboa-Sako and is introduced to the harsh reality of life in the country. On the way to the town of Pala in a cab, the player character begins to suffer from the effects of malaria and passes out. He awakes inside the hotel and finds the Jackal standing over him. With the player incapacitated by illness, the Jackal briefly offers some insight into his philosophy, quoting from Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil about the will to power. He threatens to kill the player character, but ultimately chooses to spare his life and leaves without his weapons.

Meanwhile, the ceasefire in Pala has collapsed and the UFLL and APR are engaged in open fighting. The player either passes out with malaria after managing to escape or is severely wounded before he can escape. The player is revived in the camp of one of the faction lieutenants in the area. In return for saving the player's life, the lieutenant orders the player to conduct basic errands. The player meets a journalist named Reuben Oluwagembi, who is writing a story about the conflict and the Jackal's part in it. He requests that the player find the tapes of his interview with the Jackal, scattered over the region. Once the player has acquired some malaria medicine from a priest who is helping civilians escape the violence, the player is given the freedom to choose their next mission. In addition to the hunt for the Jackal, the player can provide the Underground with stamped travel documents for refugees in exchange for anti-malarial drugs, ambush convoys of weapon shipments in order to gain access to a greater variety of weapons and equipment from arms dealers, and assassinate targets acquired by intercepting signals from various cell-phone towers in the area.

The player is forced to work with both the UFLL and the APR in Leboa-Sako, each using the player as a deniable agent in order to avoid a full-scale war. After many successful missions, a faction captain contracts the player to assassinate the other faction's captain. Once the assassination is complete, however, the player is betrayed and ambushed by the contractor and his troops. The player escapes, but in the chaos, he is forced to choose either to defend the priest and the civilians under his care, or to aid fellow mercenaries. The player's character eventually falls in combat, and awakes in the back of a truck filled with bodies. He escapes into the desert and collapses in the following sandstorm. The Jackal appears and takes the unconscious player to safety, but is then forced to flee when retreating troops of the other faction, now without a captain, arrive. A lieutenant from this faction offers the player a chance to redeem himself by assassinating the faction captain who betrayed the player. The player assassinates the target at a troop rally and escapes south, to the province of Bowa-Seko.

Act 2

In Bowa-Seko, the player and a Buddy follows the lieutenant's orders to destabilize the area and reignite the conflict by conducting a false flag operation in Port Selao. Following this, both factions are now at war in the new province as well, opening up a variety of work from both sides. Eventually, the player is hired by the one of the leaders, either Oliver Tambossa or Addi Mbantuwe, to deliver diamonds to the opposite faction, for a peace settlement between the factions. When the player arrives at the location, however, he finds the area devastated and the faction leader dead. The Jackal appears and explains that he wants the conflict to continue, since the warlords want peace only to conduct their crimes outside the world's attention. He then seizes the diamonds and knocks the player character unconscious.

Act 3

The player awakes imprisoned in an old slave outpost, and discovers that he has been used as a scapegoat, blamed for murdering a faction leader and disrupting the peace settlement. The player escapes and continues his search for the Jackal. In the process, he performs a series of missions, consisting of assassinating Mr. Greaves and Hector Voorhes, the new warlords of the APR and UFLL respectively. However, the player can choose to kill his contractors instead after meeting with Greaves and Voorhes. Reuben then calls the player for help, fearing that he and some other journalists are either going to get deported or shot at the airfield. The player fights off the militia and rescues the journalists.

With Reuben's help, the player finally tracks down and meets with the Jackal, who reveals his intentions to help the civilian population escape the war-torn country. Although he must eventually kill the Jackal, the player character agrees to help. The Jackal's plan is for the player to assassinate the two remaining faction leaders and take a case of diamonds to bribe the border guards. After finding the diamonds, however, the player must fight his fellow mercenaries and friends, as they want the diamonds for themselves to escape the country.

With both faction leaders dead and the diamonds in hand, the player meets the Jackal at a hut near the border (named 'The Heart of Darkness'). The Jackal plans to dynamite the valley leading to the border, in order to prevent the militia from following the evacuating civilians. However, the detonating cord has malfunctioned, and the explosives must be short-circuited with a car battery at the site, leading to the detonator's certain death. The Jackal offers the player a choice; he can detonate the explosives, or take the diamonds, ensure the civilians' escape, and shoot himself upon leaving the country. The game ends with Reuben Oluwagembi witnessing the explosion, then turning to take a picture of the massed crowd of refugees crossing the border. One of the border guards is seen holding the case of diamonds.

The Aftermath

The APR and UFLL warlords have attempted to end hostilities, but the violence continues. Reuben's story was ignored by the international press, and he is supposedly publishing it on his personal blog. The civilian population largely escaped, and NGOs credited the low casualty rate to the work of the country's Underground. The Jackal has since disappeared, and world governments insist that he died in the conflict, although no body has ever been found. In addition, the player's exact fate remains unknown - for instance, if the player chose to take the diamond case, it is not shown whether he honored his agreement with the Jackal to shoot himself.

System Requirements^[19]

	Minimum	Recommended
Microsoft Windows
Operating system	Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
CPU	Pentium 4 3.2 GHz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better	Intel Core 2 Duo Family, AMD 64 X2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better
Memory	1 GB	2 GB
Free space	6 GB of free space
Graphics hardware	NVidia 6800 or ATI X1650 or better; must support Pixel Shader 3.0,	NVidia 8600 GTS or better, ATI X1900 or better

The unveiling of Far Cry 2 took place on July 19, 2007 in Paris, France,^[20] by head company Ubisoft. Ubisoft stated that the game had been in development by the Ubisoft Montreal team, and would be released on October 23, 2008.

The game's producer, Louis-Pierre Pharand, said that the single-player game will "potentially have close to 50 hours of game play."^[21][22] Lead designer Clint Hocking stated that at least 100 hours are needed to experience all of the game's content.^[23]

In July 2007, Ubisoft sent a team of the game's developers to Africa to carry out research for the game. They reportedly spent two weeks traveling around Kenya and camping out on the savannah. The game's producer, Louis-Pierre Pharand said that following the trip they realized they had gotten the design of the game "so wrong" and made several changes to "make the game feel like you were really there".^[24] Some African wildlife are featured in the game world, but herbivores only; according to the developers, predators without careful control would have eaten all the herbivores and starved to death.^[15]

Far Cry 2's map editor has been designed specifically for ease of use. It includes features such as easily raising/lowering terrain and applying textures. A video was shown showcasing the editor, including an Eiffel Tower made completely from in-game pieces.^[25][26]

The map editor will feature thousands of objects found in the single player game including vehicles, buildings, bridges and more. However, weapons cannot be placed on maps to support the game's class-based gameplay. The objects in the player made maps, such as buildings and structures are prefabricated from the game, making the map files smaller. This means that uploading and downloading maps will be quick and easy. It was announced at the GC 2008 that there will be a memory space limit for each map.

Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2, called Dunia, meaning "world", "earth" or "living" in Arabic but also used in many languages including Sanskrit, Bengali, Parsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili^[27]

The Dunia Engine was built specifically for Far Cry 2 by Ubisoft Montreal development team. It delivers realistic destructible environments, special effects such as dynamic fire propagation ^[28] and storm effects, real-time night-and-day cycle, dynamic music system and non-scripted enemy A.I.

The engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10.^[29] Only 2 or 3 percent of the original CryEngine code is re-used, according to Michiel Verheijdt, Senior Product Manager for Ubisoft Netherlands. Additionally, the engine is less hardware-demanding than CryEngine 2, the engine used in Crysis.^[30]

Far Cry 2 also supports the amBX technology from Philips. With the proper hardware, this adds effects like vibrations, ambient colored lights, and fans that generate wind effects.

During Ubisoft's Ubidays, held in Paris, France on May 28 - 29, 2008, Ubisoft revealed brand new video footage for Far Cry 2.^[31] Along with the new footage, Ubisoft displayed in-game screenshots showing off the visuals rendered by Ubisoft's Dunia Engine (see engine). A video of Ubisoft Montreal's developers talking about the upcoming game's features can be seen on G4TV's website.^[32]

Additional content is available to those who pre-order it at GameStop. Dubbed the GameStop Exclusive Pre-Order Edition, the package sells at the same price point as the regular SKU, and includes bonus missions, a fold out map and different packaging.^[33]

Shortly after release, members of the UBI forum posted that the game crops the viewable area when played on a widescreen display. This story was then picked up by several gaming news sites.^[34] Those who complained said that games played on widescreen displays should present a wider field of view (FoV) than on the older standard 4:3 aspect ratio displays.^[35]

It is rumored that like Bioshock, the game was originally designed for the field of view currently seen in the widescreen versions, which some say is the original intended amount. Far Cry 2 developers added field of view on top and bottom of this 'original' (widescreen) version for 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratio monitors ('Fullscreen'), to maintain horizontal FoV to ensure that neither parties get a significant advantage in both singleplayer and multiplayer. This may be due to the fact that the majority of enemy characters and players would be on the horizontal plane, instead of the vertical, giving those with fullscreen aspect ratio monitors 'no real advantage' over widescreen monitors (which would not be the case if the widescreen version showed more FoV than on fullscreens, as the fullscreen versions would have the sides of the FoV cut out, making it less likely for the player to detect enemies to the sides).

Another complaint about the widescreen version is that users find it difficult to view the map properly in vehicles, and that tilting the camera view is necessary.

A temporary, community-generated fix for this problem has been released and can be found on the WidescreenGaming forum. The fix was developed by Racer_S, the same person that released the first similar fix for Bioshock. It should be noted that applying this fix is a breach of the EULA and that anyone caught using this online may be kicked or permanently banned from official servers, therefore this 'fix' is both officially and widely not recommended, and is to be used at the users own risk of losing online playability.

Far Cry 2 has so far received positive reviews from game critics. The graphics and open-world design in the African setting were universally praised. Critics also praised the intelligent enemies who actively hunt for the player, but noted the sometimes unresponsive AI. The main criticisms of the game were the long time it took to travel from one objective to another, the lack of information within the plot, and the not-so-compelling storyline. The IGN review pointed out another minor issue, with the difference in the save system: the PC version allows players to save at any time, while the console versions only allow players to save at certain points.^[41] Game Informer gave praise to the console save system because it gives a sense of realism in the game also seen in "Dead Rising" which makes you go to sleep in a bed as an affective way to give a realistic feeling which makes the player feel like they are in the game. While IGN criticized this, GameSpot noted that the console version's save system gave the player more of a sense of urgency as it made death seem more consequential.^[39] GamePro praises Far Cry 2 for "Its detailed presentation, feature-rich gameplay, and palpable sense of placing players in another world yield a bar-raising effort."^[38] On the 28th of October, 2008, out of 87 reviews, the average rating stood at 2 stars from Amazon user ratings, due largely to complaints over the copyright protection system implemented within the game.^[52] OXM Australia gave Far Cry 2 10/10 stating that it is "a true, open-ended FPS."

Customer reviews on Amazon seem to show that consumers are unhappy withFar Cry 2, owing to Ubisoft's use of the SecuROM copyright protection system. Similar to Spore, a single copy of Far Cry 2 can only be installed ('activated') on three separate hardware configurations at any one time, although the uninstaller is able to 'revoke' the installation, thus freeing up one of the hardware configuration activations (while the system is in a usable state).^[53]

• Official website