... and GTA IV and The Edler Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
"Why?" you may ask. Well, I heard, or rather read, so many arguments on what's better; Crysis or Far Cry 2. But I also feel that the new Far Cry is so comparable to the two main open-world games out there: GTA and Oblivion. So let's get started (I'll warn ye of a big ol' read comin up):
Graphics:
"Crysis, obviously" one might say. I argue otherwise however. Quite clearly, GTA and Oblivion arn't really in the running for this prize so I'll focus on the two main competitors. Crysis looks good. In fact, Crysis looks quite spectacular and while Far Cry 2 doesn't look quite as good, it does look a sight more real. When I played Crysis I felt the graphics were so very fabricated, fake, plushy and tried to hard. They also never gave me the sense of being on a tropical island. While it did look good, it never game me the impression of environmental factors that one should feel while being in such a place; heat and humidity to name the big two.
Far Cry 2 however, makes a much better job of conveying the feel of the location your'e in, namely the many climates of Africa wrapped into one fictional country. The deserts feel dry and barren, the jungles feel wet and the swamp land feels murky and dirty.
For this reason, I give Far Cry 2 the title of best graphics between these four titles.
Open World:
FC2, as the developers would like to tell you as much as possible, gives you fifty square kilometers of open world to explore, split into two 25km-square maps, with no loading times between them. Sounds pretty big right? Yes. But I'm sure Oblivion is much bigger. Though you might not remember it, thanks to the pointlessly easy fast-travel system implemented in the game, Oblivion was a huge game world. Albeit it has not nearly as much detail in it as Far Cry, it was much bigger if you bothered to travel it properly. It also had the nice feature of it actually being open.
While Far Cry 2 is pretty huge in its own right, much of the jungle and mountain areas are very restricted in their cliff patterns that almost follow the roads perfectly. Though these offer less of a trouble for one travelling on foot, if you're in a car you won't find much in the way of freedom unless you get out into the great plains and deserts.
Even the great and famous (or infamous) GTA IV, and even San Andreas, pale in comparrison to Oblivion and Far Cry in size.
So, although it isn't as detailed as GTA or Far Cry, Oblivion must win the award for ultra-massive-super-huge game world.
Sound:
Oblivion was rightly noted for its sound design when it first came out with its clever ambient effects, but its time has passed now. Far Cry 2 has awesome weapon sound effects and realistic sound design where voices are hardly audible above gunfire and cars can be heard from a few hundred meters away at the dead of night. Crysis, on the other hand, had fairly mediocre sound design. Cars couldn't be heard until they were right on top of you, enemy Koreans' voices could be heard from rediculously far away in even the most intense gun battles and the only thing that would even measure a decibel was the giant metal alien thing at the end (oh yeah, sorry if I ruined the amazing storyline for you there).
I'm quite confident though, that GTA IV wins the title of 'best sound-design' out of these four games by far. I remember certain aspects of sound playing such a large part in games online with my brother and other friends. The gentle thud-thud of a distant helicopter prowling the skies over Liberty City in search of my car in our game of cat-and-mouse. The gunfire and screams being heard from across a silent town as me and Joe messed with each other's minds in another, slightly less vehicular, game of cat-and-mouse. Truely awesome.
Optimization
Crysis. You loose. Straight away. People say things like "yeah, you just need a better graphics card" to those that complain but the problem is Crysis isn't optimized for ANYTHING. To quote a wise, wise man: "Crysis has been made for some sort of hypothetical super-computer from the future". And it was. A year after its release and no feasable home-computing system under the price of thousands of pounds can run Crysis at the highest settings at a high monitor resolution - and that's just rediculous (especially when you take into account that they said Warhead, the expansion pack, was supposed to help massively).
Oblivion is optimized quite well, but not great. Despite its now shoddy graphics, a good PC will get far more frames out of Bioshock on DirectX10 than it will on Dx9 Oblivion.
The expected system requirements for the PC version of GTA IV have been recently released and they bode well. Recommended system spec is around the same as the recommended for FC2, albeit with even more harddrive space (and FC2 is a whopping 12GB of game!). Here's to hoping that GTA IV runs well, and it should, as those fellas at Rockstar North showed us they're more than capable of making PC ports with San Andreas.
Far Cry 2 then, must clinche the award for best optimization. I can run it with the settings entirely maxed out and even as I drive away from a base engulfed in a raging inferno that's spreading into the savannah, dust being kicked up from behind my JEEP (yes there's product placement) and then swept away in gentle wind and ahead of me a lake glistens with red sunset light (that's how you get an A* in GCSE English, by the way) the framerate still fails to drop - now THAT's how to make a good-looking game Crytek, not your sham of a horrible experiment gone wrong.
Bugs and Glitches
The bane of all open-world games: bugs. They appear so great as first but then their sheer size and innability to be tested lets us down. I couldn't possibly go through ever bug in GTA, Oblivion and Far Cry in this blog (not using Crysis as an example here - it might be full of bugs but it's not open-world enough to count here). AI bugs are the worst for these games. While Half-Life 2 and Halo 3 might get along fine with their AI and people don't complain, that's because they're doing something so so simple. All they can comprehend is; "spoted enemy, moving towards enemy, shooting...ow I've been shot, moving away from enemy, walking behind something...waiting....waiting...wait time over, repeating pattern" (yeah I wish programming was as simple as that but you get my point). Games like Far Cry 2 and GTA have much much more to think about. The world moves constantly, changes constantly and the AI must think and react to increasingly complicated and random circumstances. So many people complain about the AI in these games but really, they should be cut some slack - it's a hard job for those dumb goblins/policemen/militia.
I couldn't possibly say which game has the least bugs and the better patches because it's just far too hard to work out (and not to mention that FC2 doesn't have any patches yet).
Also, I can't really say which is the best game out of these four as they're all so different. If I had to choose based on the first time I played them I'd say Oblivion for sure - I was hooked on that madly for so long. If I had to choose based on my feelings now, and not taking into acount the age of the games, I'd say Far Cry 2. For online I'd say GTA IV...no I've not played the proper game modes, I just dicked about on Free-Mode!
Yeah...so sorry Crysis. You might look damn nice but you're a damned shit game.
So my first impression of Far Cry 2? Good, very good, but by no means perfect.
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