Hagionaut: Far Cry & Crysis
Back in 2004, an unknown German developer exploded onto the gaming scene with a 3D engine that could finally challenge Epic and ID. The result was Far Cry, a game that spawned two very different, yet inextricably linked, franchises. A family, if you like, with two branches, one of which went on to conquer the gaming world, and another which ended not with a bang, but a whimper. FAR CRY SERIES / CRYSIS SERIES
DEVELOPERS UBISOFT MONTREAL / CRYTEK
PERSONALITIES CEVAT YERLI, ANVI YERLI, FARUK YERLI, TURKO- GERMAN GAME DEVELOPERS GENERALLY, UBISOFT AS A GESTALT RELEASED FAR CRY: 2004-2018 / CRYSIS: 2007-2013 NUTSHELL OPEN WORLD SHOOTERS THAT INITIALLY PUSHED HARDWARE TO THE LIMIT AND SHOWED US WHAT A TRUE “NEXT GENERATION” PC GAME COULD BE, BUT WERE PROGRESSIVELY DUMBED- DOWN TO MAKE BIGGER BUCKS FROM THE CONSOLE MARKETS.
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the early 2000s, PCs had finally reached a point where gamers could expect truly huge worlds in their games. Morrowind came out in 2002. So did Grand Theft Auto III. World of Warcraft was 2004.
But these games had a very particular graphical limitation: their engines could only really render an area close around the player. The worlds were perpetually shrouded in fog. There was no “far green country under a swift sunrise” as some old wizard might have said. GTA3 actually did a pretty good job of things by limiting the amount of places the player could even see that far, but when you hit the water and stole a police boat out by the pier on Staunton Island, the hills in the far distance were little more than grey triangles.
Far Cry not only rendered amazing detail at far distances (get it now?), it had dynamic level-of-detail capabilities that allowed the player to use binoculars or the scope on a sniper rifle to clear out an enemy encampment from the next hill.
That might not sound particularly amazing in 2019, but in 2004 it was a revelation. The euphoria of which was blunted somewhat by the subsequent revelation that Far Cry wasn’t that good a game.
To be fair to Crytek, Far Cry was born from a tech demo they’d made called X-Isle: Dinosaur Island, and (though they’ve never confirmed this) the idea seemed to be that Crytek and its CryEngine would be, much like Epic was for some years, first and foremost a middleware developer.
And indeed the company has gone on to be just that. After Far Cry, CryEngines 2, 3, 4, CryEngine (sic), and CryEngine V (also sic) have been licensed to create games you’ve heard of like Prey, and a lot of games you probably haven’t heard of like Winning Putt, Robinson: The Journey, and a bunch of titles whose websites don’t even work.
But back in 2004, or I suppose a year or so earlier, Ubisoft took one look at that X-Isle demo and said “Yes please! Can you make, like, a whole game from this?”
And the team at Crytek looked at each other and shrugged. Sure they could make a whole game from their tech demo. What do gamers like? Hot chicks who turn out to be CIA agents, a badass dude “hiding” in the jungle while wearing a bright-red Hawaiian shirt, and abandoning the whole stealthoptional mercenary hunting framework for blasting away at mutant gorillas towards the end of the game. Right?
Perhaps most oddly, the game’s weapons were intricately rendered (by 2004 standards) with full details like iron sights, but the actual game didn’t let you hold the weapon up in a way to let you use those iron sights. That was added later by modders.
But come on. So what if Far Cry wasn’t the greatest open world shooter ever? It showed amazing promise, and at the time we couldn’t wait to see what Ubisoft and Crytek would do next.
CHICKEN TO THE FACE
And so of course the two companies immediately parted ways. Crytek went off to crunch literally a million lines of code into Crysis, and Ubisoft was left with a licensed version of the original engine - now called Dunia - and the Far Cry IP.
Now the world had two “Far Cry engine” developers, in direct competition, and we waited to see what would happen with bated breath (actually, TBH at the time I didn’t even realise this had happened, I left all the Far Cry super-fanboy-ism to David Wildgoose).
First out of the gate was Crytek’s Crysis. The name was a compromise because they didn’t own Far Cry anymore, but the game, which dropped in late 2007, was... something else. The CryEngine 2 on which it ran was compiled from literally a million lines of code, and had texture data measured in the gigabytes. All perfectly normal... for a game released ten years later.
Hilariously, Crysis suffered from almost exactly the same problems as Far Cry: the first two thirds of the game were an amazing open FPS, where you could approach each target from any of a dozen different ways. This was mostly thanks to the player’s Nanosuit, which had “modes” like stealth, power-up, high jump etc that could be selected with a hotkey and flick of the mouse.
When we got the review code in the PCPP offices, then-art-director Glen Downey played the opening level, “Contact”, about ten times, just seeing all the different ways he could take down the soldiers camping on the beach. Yes,
chickens and crabs were eventually hurled.
And yet the back third of the game was rubbish. Aliens, corridor shooting, no options or freedom, terrible frame-rates due to object complexity, and a by-the-numbers big boss fight right at the end. Oh well, at least the graphics were still awesome.
IT BEGAN IN AFRICA-CA-CA-CA...
Meanwhile, obviously, Ubisoft couldn’t possibly create a game even as good as Far Cry - let alone Crysis - without the coding genius of Cevat Yerli and his brothers(?), and their Teutonic work ethic.
Which is why in 2008, Far Cry 2 turned out to be... um, kind of brilliant?
It was set in Africa, the map was huge, and the world did real stuff. Set fire to a tree and it would burn into a blackened skeleton, while the fire spread through the dry grass around it. Firing a rocket launcher with a bunch of dry grass behind you would set YOU on fire. Enemy soldiers would apply first aid to their injured comrades, or try to carry them off the battlefield. You could shoot people through flimsy corrugated iron shacks. You could shoot branches off trees.
Far Cry 2 was in many ways as much of a tech demo as Far Cry. The team at Ubisoft Montreal almost seemed to take Crysis as a challenge. Okay sure, maybe their game didn’t LOOK as amazing, but they made it do way more stuff.
And the story was like almost nothing we’ve seen since. You’re sent in to a Central African nation with a simple mission: kill the terrorist known as the Jackal. What follows is basically a potboiler espionage novel (with brains) that follows the collapse of a country from “unrest” into “civil war” and eventually “pure anarchy”.
It seems hard to imagine that Far Cry 2 could get made today. The game was more ARMA than Call of Duty. You had to drive around a lot. The interface was in the world - to examine a map, you literally pull a map out of your pocket.
Shot? Dig a knife into the would to extract the bullet. Bit by a snake? Uh... dig a knife into the wound to extract the bullet. Need to heal fall damage? Dig a knife into... well you get the point. It wasn’t perfect.
But Far Cry 2 was amazing and we couldn’t wait to see what Far Cry 3 would bring. Oh.
WELCOME TO THE MAINSTREAM
So what happened of course, to both the Far Cry and Crysis franchises, was console sales. Consoles in the early 2010s didn’t have the power to procedurally burn trees that you could also shoot branches off. And console players — no disrespect — didn’t want a “thinking man’s shooter”. For the growing console user base, a shooter was something to do at the end of the day, to unwind after
a crushing ten hours in corporate whatever. BLAM BLAM BLAM. Don’t ask them to think about it, to plan a stealthy approach, to modify weapons, or - least of all - tolerate realistic gun jamming like in Far Cry 2.
The accusation “dumbed down for console” is made with fairly reckless abandon but it really does stick to Far Cries 3, 4, and 5 and Cryses 2 and 3.
Probably, Far Cry did the better job of it. Far Cry 3 is not as smart or complex as Far Cry 2, but it’s still a fairly sophisticated open world shooter. Far Cry 4 has some interesting story beats, and both it and Far Cry 5 have wink-tothe-open-world-superfans secret endings you get right at the beginning by doing... nothing. Seriously, if you just stand there for a few minutes, the game ends.
Crytek approached its two final Crysis games with a truly bizarre mission statement: they would leave behind the “literal jungle” setting of Far Cry and Crysis, and instead
focus on the super-original “concrete jungle” setting of... bloody Manhattan again.
And in Crysis 3, because aliens, New York had also become sort of half a literal jungle, too.
The last two Crysis games again did significant things for the advancement of FPS engine tech. They run fast and look good, and are much less punishing than the original.
But they aren’t great games.
YOU CAN LEAD A GAMER TO CRYSIS...
Maybe Crytek was never that good at actual game design. But with Far Cry 2 in its back catalogue, Ubisoft has no similar excuse.