FarCry Demo - First Impression (1 Viewer)

[Scott Bourden]

I recently downloaded the FarCry demo for PC, and have given about 5 hours of gameplay. It's quickly recieved a reputation as being the next "big" FPS in some circles, but I have my doubts to that.

It is developed by Crytek and published by UBI, and uses the "Crytek" engine (Edit: Not used in Serious Sam, my mistake, thanks Romier)

It is a secret agent / covert ops feeling demo, you are a lone man sent in to disable a satellite, while avoiding (or just slaughtering) all the opposing forces. There are a couple vehicles I've found so far, various boats (with and without mounted guns), stationary gun turrets, and, best of all, a jeep with a machine gun mounted on top.

I can say from my playing so far, that while it is fun, don't expect the "next big thing', as you will be disappointed. The AI, simple put, are untrained monkeys put in cammo and handed a gun. Shoot wildly, they run around like chickens with their heads cut off, with no order or plan other then hiding behind random boxes on occasion.

The graphics are a throw up. The water details and textures are the best I've seen in a game, bar none. Unfortunately, the foliage is not so hot, and while the colors are crisp and bright, the game craps out once you try to enable AntiAlaising, to get rid of the jagged edges on "straight lines", simply put. It will crash to desktop, hard freeze, among other things when enabled. It also slows down even the best of systems, on my 2.3 ghz Athlon XP with a Radeon 9700 Pro and 1 gig of PC3500 ram at 1024 X 768 full details, my frame rate dipped into the low 30's more the a few times, which is less then equally visually impressive games have done at higher resolutions with AA enabled!

Hopefully they will work these bugs out, and perhaps improve the AI, because this game certainly has potential, minus some glairing issue's.

You can download it without registration here:
http://www.3dgamers.com/games/farcry/

I attached a couple pictures so people can get an idea of how it looks, I linked most to spare your bandwidth

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry0.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry1.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry2.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry3.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry4.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry5.jpg

http://www.newfoundwang.com/pics/FarCry6.jpg

 

[Romier S]

Where exactly did you see this? Last I checked Serious Sam was developed by Croteam and used thier own proprietary engine dubbed the "Serious Engine".

The "CryEngine" originally began life as a Geforce 3 demo and then later advanced into a full on game called X-isle: Dinosaur Island. Later the concept was abandoned, the dinosaurs were removed and replaced with soldiers and guns. The engine was updated with the latest and greatest technology and has now become Far Cry...

 

[Scott Bourden]

You are correct, my mistake, I edited my original post to correct it.

I'm not sure why that was in my head, but since I wrote this "off-the cuff", I didn't go and check my data. Seems, now, that perhaps I should have :b

 

[Romier S]

Oh its not a biggie man. I was just curious if you read that somewhere cause it kind of intrigued me for a moment. It was the first I heard of it.

Good impressions by the way.

 

[Dean Martin]

Thanks for the impressions, Scott. I too had heard this was the next big FPS, but id doesn't sound like it. The next staep is to DL the demo and check it out.

 

[Scott L]

mm I love the beach scenes, haven't seen anything else that vivid in a FPS. Thanks for the impression Scott. This game is plastered on the main page of Gamespy Arcade but I guess there's no rush to download the demo until I get bored with my current games.

 

[Jay Mitchosky]

You're killing me Smalls (from The Sandlot). That one picture was 210MB, embedded limit is 40. Changed to URL.

 

[Scott Bourden]

A 210 meg picture? I was really killing my bandwidth!! I kid, I kid

On a serious note, I didn't realize the embedded limit was 40, I'll keep it in mind for future posts.

 

[Scott L]

A moderator PM'ed me a while ago stating 100kb was the limit. I guess it went down more.

 

[Travis Olson]

This game just came out of nowhere it seems. Gamespot and a few other sites had some previews for it, but that's about it. There certainly wasn't much hype surrounding it. It was a smart move to get a demo out because now I bet most who have played it will be buying it.

I really love the draw distance. They seemed to have found a way to allow an incredible viewable distance while not compromising performance or image quality.

The DX9 features really opened my eyes too. And being the first game to really incorporate them is something special by itself.

I wasn't planning on getting it when I heard about it way back when, but now it's a must buy. Can't wait.

 

[Jeff Holton]

I wonder if I got a more recent version of the Demo... I cranked up the resolution and details on my PC... and it was quite frankly the best looking game I have ever seen...

The foliage looked incredible to me...

... and the framerate was very steady, and no crashes to desktop.

I would also say the AI is significantly better then monkeys. The way the bad guys call for backup, and then the backup has to arrive from pre-existing locations (not randomly spawned) was great.

And the use of the binoculars was really different and fun...

I think I have a little more confidence that this very well may be the "next big thing"...

 

[JustinCleveland]

It might look great, but it wouldn't play on my P4 2.4ghz machine, with 512 and a Geforce 4. I'll just go back to Jedi Outcast and Max Payne 2.

 

[Jeff Holton]

The one thing I did have to do to get it to run well on my machine was go out and make sure I had all the latest and greatest drivers (Dell, Microsoft, Radeon, DirectX9, etc....)

 

[Scott Bourden]

An interesting story reguarding the developers of FarCry, whether it's true or not is another story.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/30364

 

[AaronMg]

It appears that most of those pics were taken with most of the graphical enhancments set to low or medium. It looks a lot better when everything is set to high/very high.

 

[Shane Martin]

That's odd. My machine is a 1.33mhz amd with 768 ram and a geforce 3 and I played it just fine. My drivers are all updated however so that might be the trick.

 

[BrianShort]

I'm quite sure this wont run on my current rig, but I'm planning on upgrading soon - Athlon XP 2600+ (from a 1700+), Radeon 9600 (or 9700 or 9800, haven't decided) Pro 128 meg (from GeForce 2 GTS 32 meg), and 512 megs of ram (from 256).
After watching some of the videos and looking at the screens, I'd have to say this game looks amazing. The huge landscape is very impressive. How anyone can knock the graphics is beyond me...

Brian