Far Cry 2

Sep 24, 2008

At a Far Cry 2 multiplayer session this week, hosted by Ubisoft in downtown San Francisco, the scene was more or less one straight out of Xbox LIVE. Participants routinely eschewed the use of novel game mechanics (like the ability to heal fallen teammates after they're shot down) in favor of more running and more gunning. Game modes requiring precision teamwork to win resulted in down-to-the-wire stalemates, a consequence of poor intra-team communication. One journalist sitting at the demo station next to me was even treated to death-cam footage of his killer... well, you can probably guess which lewd gesture finishes that sentence.

But despite a collective unwillingness by many of the writers on hand to stray far from the familiar, we couldn't help but notice many of Far Cry 2's finer points: The way that fire behaves as a temporary, albeit deadly obstacle; the feeling of imminent obliteration that results when you mix nighttime maps with high explosives; the fleeting hope of getting off a crucial self-heal under heavy fire. A lot of what's in Far Cry 2 looks like it could make for some interesting FPS multiplayer.

Every map in Far Cry 2 has night and day versions, and the simple act of cutting the lights can have a radical affect on how you behave while playing on one. With no hazard suit-mounted flashlights or night vision goggles to guide you (as well as a HUD that's understated to begin with, let alone replete with features that pinpoint enemies at long range), playing on one of the darker nighttime maps encourages a tense and tentative approach. They amplify the "who sees who first" dynamic that often determines who triumphs in a given FPS encounter, not only through their limited visibility, but also by the pronounced role that physical obstacles play; try finding the entrance to a rickety corrugated steel shack with a window on each of side when your visibility is limited to three feet. It's also easier to rely on non-visual cues when the shadows are playing tricks; you learn to run quickly away from the sounds of exploding RPGs.

The game's use of fire as a dynamic obstacle and tool is also much more interesting in the darkness. When armed with a flame thrower, you can use fire to draw boundaries that your enemies will be hesitant to cross. And by firing at a stationary gas tank, you can use it to dispatch multiple enemies (and perhaps a couple of allies) if they're lumped too closely at precisely the wrong time. The fact that fire persists for a while means that it can close off paths for stretches of time, acting in a sense like a stationary turret would in other games. But since there's no way to extinguish fire apart from waiting it out, the act of scorching the earth carries with it some tactical gravity.

Even players who are fully and hopelessly immolated, however, have a "get-out-of-jail free" card they can use, provided they can stumble to someplace calm: Far Cry 2's self-healing mechanic. Using it treats you to a gruesome animation of your character using a survival knife and Leatherman tool to yank bullets out of his flesh (or in the case of players' characters caught on fire, an absurd one of them gently swatting the flame off as they would a patch of dandruff), restoring your health. While healing, you're out of the action for a good few seconds, leaving you a sitting duck. But given how plentiful cover appears to be in Far Cry 2, self-healing is perfectly viable, and an interesting counterpoint to the automatic health-regeneration mechanics that are becoming more and more common in shooters.

As mentioned, teammate revival went underutilized in our demo matches, part of the time admittedly because it simply didn't seem to work reliably. As designed, it would enable you to bring teammates back from the brink who've been "wounded" as opposed to killed. Wounded players will lie where they've been for about twenty seconds, and if a teammate can get to them in time, they'll be brought back to fighting shape, depriving the enemy team of a kill. Canny players, of course, can deliberately choose not to finish off a wounded enemy in the hopes of luring more targets to their vicinity. Meanwhile, wounded players can simply "give up" and begin their respawn timers.

But Far Cry 2 also seems to have the multiplayer basics down. In this post-Call of Duty 4 world, it's probably unreasonable to expect players to stick with a shooter if it doesn't have some kind of progression system in place, especially on consoles. Perhaps not surprisingly, Far Cry 2's is similar to CoD4's. You earn experience and levels in multiplayer by killing, completing objectives, healing teammates, and the like.

You also earn "diamonds" as you progress, which you use to upgrade the six classes, each of which has different weapons loadouts (the "rebel" uses RPGs and flamethrowers; the "saboteur" uses sniper rifles and IEDs). Diamond-granted boosts are persistent on your ranked profile, but disappear after you log out of unranked sessions. You can switch between classes after every spawn, and as you gain experience points while playing as a certain one, the individual weapons that comprise their loadouts become more effective -- they'll jam less frequently, become more accurate, and hold more ammo.

Far Cry 2 will ship with four modes -- team and free-for-all deathmatch, capture the flag (pardon, "Capture the Diamond"), and "Uprising." The latter is a take on the capture-point model: A random player is designated team captain and is required to capture all contestable nodes on the map. The first team to do so and kill the opposing captain wins the match. Perhaps unsurprisingly, our Uprising matches went on till the clock elapsed.

Early buzz suggests that Far Cry 2's single-player campaign is quite cool, which perhaps made it easy to write off the multiplayer game as a likely afterthought. But after yesterday's session, it's evident that the designers have at least given it an honest shot. We'll have more on Far Cry 2 leading up to the game's release on October 21.