Far Cry was one of the games I really wanted to see at ECTS this year, so as soon as I got in, I ran to the Ubisoft booth an interviewed one of the developers of the game.

You start out as Jack Carver, a mysterious guy who runs a charter boat business in the South Pacific. He is hired by a beautifull journalist to take her to an uncharted island without being seen but Jack's boat is destroyed by mercenaries and he gets stranded on the island. This is where the game starts, your mission is to find the beautifull young journalist and save her from the hands of those awfull mercenaries.

Agreed, the storyline isn't a work of art... But the engine of the game is. It makes use of dynamic lightning, first shown in the early doom3-movies. If you shoot against a light, it will start to move, and the light is moving accordingly. This is only a small example of dynamic lightning offcourse. The graphics are absolutely gorgeous. The whole game is set on a beautifull island in Micronesia with a fully dynamic environment, showing some impressive scenery. To display all this eye candy you'll need at least a GeForce 3, but something better like a GeForce 4 or one of the recent Radeons are recommended.

The game is divived into 16 different missions in which you control vehicles like a buggy, a chopper, a boat, a hovercraft, ... even a paraglider. A lot of effort was put into the AI of the game, as many developers try to do in FPS games nowadays. Your enemies can either hear you, see you or even know you're there by noticing changes in the environment. None of the AI is scripted which makes the enemies you're facing unpredictable. They also have different moods, some are agressive, others are not. When they can't take you on alone, they will run and get help, so they can return and kill your sorry ass.

Now anyone saw the movie 'Saving Private Ryan'? I suppose most of you already saw it, otherwise you certainly deserve a severe spanking. But anyway, when Tom Hanks encounters a near-miss of a grenade, he becomes deaf for a moment, his mind is blurry, he can't see all too good and stuff like that. Well, this effect has been built into Far Cry aswell. When you get a near-miss, you'll experience almost the same effects as Tom Hanks did. You'll become deaf, see blurry and have a red glow on your screen. All for a limited amount of time of course, you will return to your normal state of mind in a couple of seconds.

The game is almost finished. It's done for 85%. Since they have been concentrating on the AI for the last few weeks, they just need to polish a bit so they will be able to release a demo somewhere in mid september. An interesting extra: They will release a toolkits for the mod community.

Oh yes, they aren't thinking of releasing a Linux version of the game for now.