FarCry Game
The farcry game franchise is a series of "first-person shooter" programs, which are oriented toward providing players the ability to experience combat enabled with guns and other kinds of firearms from a first person perspective, and have long been noted by the gaming industry to represent one of their most popular genres to produce games in. The farcry game series is, like much of the gaming world, the product of a cooperative creative effort that crosses international borders. The first game put out under the farcry imprimatur was developed by the video game firm Crytek, which is based in Germany and was founded by three Turkish brothers. When the time comes to put the games out on to the market for gamers to begin playing them, they are published by the large and respected French computer and video game development company Ubisoft, which today is regarded by observers of the gaming world and market as the third-largest independent video game publisher in Europe and the fourth largest such establishment in the United States. The series of video games was kicked off with the release of the firs farcry game in March 2004 for Microsoft Windows and then elevated to a new level with the release of farcry 2 in October 2008, which for the most garnered high critical praise and robust sales for the people involved in creating the game. Since the successful release of the first two installments in this series, it has been announced that farcry 3 is in the works, and as such it is being eagerly anticipated by video game enthusiasts and observers.
The history of the development of the farcry game franchise, which ultimately led up to the present day popularity of farcry 2 and the high levels of anticipation for farcry 3, can be pinpointed on the development of the game's original developer, Crytek, though the firm is no longer involved with the current incarnation of the series. The Crytek company was founded in 1999 in Germany and first made an impression on the computer and software worlds by making a case for itself at the 2000 meeting of the European Computer Trade Show, at which the three brothers who had set up Crytek showed up some early demos to prospective investors and clients at a trade booth and impressed figures in the gaming world with these initial efforts. Following the successful showing at the ECTS convention, the developers at Crytek maintained their visibility in the professional gaming world by releasing demos onto the marketplace, including of a nascent version of what would later become farcry entitled "X-Isle.' For the next few years, they concentrated at developing their programming capabilities and on working on the early versions of the farcry game. Three years later, at the 2003 ECTS convention, Crytek unveiled what they had come up with for the farcry game and were consequently awarded the recognition of having created the "Best PC Game" seen at that year's event.
The first farcry game set itself, per the original, working title of "X-Isle," on a mysterious archipelago in the Pacific which is landed on and explored by the protagonist through whose eyes the gamer experiences the world and action of the farcry game, a former U.S. Special Forces operative, whose plot goals during the game consists of navigating a wide array of physical environments and searching for a missing journalist who had been investigating secret genetic research taking place on the island. The Crytek developers offered players of the game the opportunity to move between three different modes of play, "Deathmatch," "Team Deathmatch," and "Assault," which can allow for farcry to be played individually by a single player or by a group of gamers. In order to enable the level of the graphics which are used in the game to be presented at what was then an impressive level of visual and interactive sophistication, the Crytek developers created a new game engine, which they referred to as "CryENGINE," which shared some features with another program in use at that time, "Operation Flashpoint," but differed from it in terms of quality by lieu of possessing a more advanced capability for creating images of vegetation in the world that the first-person protagonist moved through. Following the successful release of the first Farcry game, over the next few years Crytek released several sequels based directly off of the game's protagonist and format, including far cry Instincts, farcry: Evolution, which was the least successful program among the versions of the game that have been released, and farcry: Predator. With the next full fledged change of direction in the series, Crytek left the development effort for the farcry game series and was replaced by the Montreal video game development studio for the game's publisher, Ubisoft.
After the less successful showings for the sequels that had been released by the Crytek developers, Ubisoft took the strategy of presenting the program they chose to refer to as farcry 2 as the true sequel while largely setting out in a new gaming and thematic direction. Rather than the Micronesian island of the first farcry game, the new game was set in the locale of East Africa and populated with a new set of characters. The storyline of farcry 2 involved the gamer in a quest on the part of the first-person protagonist, an unnamed mercenary, to assassinate an evil arms dealer known only as "The Jackal." As such, it provided a far more expansive, open-ended experience than the first farcry game, allowing the player a considerable and unusual degree of leisure to explore a world of African savannas, jungles and deserts, from which the science fiction elements that had been employed as threats and novelties in the first game were excluded. The basic mode chosen for the experience to be provided through playing the game is referred to by developers and other professionals in the gaming world as the "sandbox" mode, in reference to the playfulness of a kind f game play in which the player can set his or her own time frame for the game without the artificial limitations established by the developer in other, more linear and clear cut games as the first farcry. The unnamed mercenary protagonist of farcry 2 carries with him a machete at all times as well as a wide array of weapons that are grouped into three categories, including primary weapons, which can be wielded with two hands, secondary weapons, which require only one hand to use them, and special weapons, which are considerably heavier and more powerful. Another interesting feature of the second farcry game in regards to its features concerning weapons is that these devices become less usable over time, becoming prone to jamming and being exposed to the weathering effects of nature.
Just as the first Farcry game had used the CryENGINE system to achieve the Crytek game developers' established goals for achieving the levels of visual sophistication which they desired, for farcry 2 the Montreal developers responsible for creating the game created a new program called the Dunia Engine, which is named after the word for "earth," "world" and "living" in Urdu and Arabic, as well as appearing widely as a loanword in other languages influenced by that culture, and allows for the enactment of interactive game elements such as a realistic time cycle of night and day, enemy combatants whose actions are unpredictable and unscripted, environments for game play that can be partly destroyed, and special effects such as realistic behavior for fire. Very little of the original program which was employed for the first farcry game is used in the functioning of the Dunia engine, which makes extensive use of multi-core processors and multiprocessors.
Another distinctive feature of farcry 2 which attracted praise for it from the gaming world consisted of its realism of setting, which had been achieved through the unusual degree of effort Ubisoft allowed its developers to invest in the development process. A team of game developers visited Africa for two weeks in order to study the settings they would be portraying in the game, staying in Kenya and camping out on the savanna. After this trip the farcry game developers realized, as one of the producers of the game put it, that they had gotten their initial design for farcry 2 "so wrong" that they would have to modify it in order to hew closer to the reality of the African environments they were attempting to portray. The game's immersive effect was enabled by the alteration of several of the game features already established that placed the game in closer relation to the physical reality of Africa. One noticeable feature of farcry 2 that was implemented by its creators for the sake of suggesting a greater sense of realism in the depiction of Africa consisted of the inclusion of a wide variety of animal life that is encountered by the protagonist during the game, though limited strictly to animals from herbivore species.