20 years ago Far Cry was released

My memory of Far Cry was much earlier and less kind - there was a few people around the net at the time working for CryTek on several titles (I worked on Silent Space https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/02/10/crytek-to-bring-sile...)

The brothers went to E3 with a demo they were showing us all, but only some of us has the tech to fully run it (I had a GeForce256 I got for free from NVidia because of work I had done with the recently opened up Quake source code) - then things went crazy, they tried to get a bunch of us to move to Germany and put us up in hostels on very restrictive contracts (basically they'd move us then we'd be completely liable for our own costs)

Now, the X-Isle demo really did help push NVidia cards, but the company now had to ramp up quickly.

I heard that 'mafia' money was involved in making this happen (and they came calling for their interest a few years back which is why the company hasn't done so well) - it was odd that Cevat's first purchase was a Ferrari...

Anyway every other project got canned after this - a few of us went on to try set up our own studio, but that didn't pan our after a year.

I remember being a kid and wanting to play Far Cry in high quality when it came out. I did not have the money to buy the best graphics card to play it smoothly on high settings. So, I could either play it in low quality with something like 60 FPS or in high quality with something like 15 FPS. Of course, 15 FPS is not enough to play the game properly, but to capture all the beautiful details, I just went with the highest settings and very slowly explored the beach, astounded by all the details. Good memories.

I miss the days when the Internet just didn't have a long standing archive of reminders of how old I'm getting, every day.

And somehow I don't feel like anything, but the absolute obvious, is any better.

I met with my high-school friend and band buddy Thomas Bartchi in 2004 at a café in Copenhagen.

We were discussing this audio job he was applying to in Germany for a gaming company. He had an upcoming interview with them and we were brainstorming what new ways you could utilize audio engineering to write more interactive soundtracks.

The normal way was simply to change soundtrack when you went from normal mode to high action. But we started discussing a more interactive approach I had been playing around with in the CD-ROM lingo days and because Thomas was an excellent composer and understood audio engineering at a very deep level we came up with the idea of constructing a sound track in layers so that there would be some audio layer that were always there, but others would then be added or removed to provide a almost a gradient audio intensity experience.

The challenge was obviously to make it feel very different gradually even though you were mostly using many of the same elements and just layering them.

He went there and while there were other great candidates they gave him the job because of his way of thinking about music in games and the rest is history.

His successor for the next game was none other than Hans Zimmer.

He later went on to do music for Hitman.

Here is the FarCry soundtrack if you want to be taken back in time: https://soundcloud.com/j-wilhelm-139558882/far-cry-2004-main...

It's still a good multiplayer game. I used to play with my students on special occations in 2016 (teacher in an academic highschool) because FC runs on any hardware evenwithout dedicated GPUs.

I always told them I'd let them go 15 mins earlier if someone has more kills than me in deathmatch. Only got beaten once

https://twitter.com/VinciusMedeiro6/status/16748901398798458... Far cry src leaked recently

I remember building an Ahtlon 64 system with a GeForce 7900GTX at that time and I played with Far Cry everything maxed out. Half of the cost of that computer was the graphics card and it was the absolute highest end model that money could buy.

Recently I bought a graphics card for 600 when the prices came down, a 3070 RTX, a more conservative choice since the top models now go for 2k.

I never loved the original Far Cry as a player, but I did deeply appreciate it as a game designer.

I was working as a game programmer and technical designer on a big budget FPS back when the original Half-Life was released, and immediately "AI AI AI!!!!!" became a stifling buzzword and thought-terminating (ironically) slogan, heavily reorienting how people thought about shooter design and, essentially, ending boomer shooters as a thing for a good long while and ushering in the era of Halo, Call of Duty, cover-based shooters, and so on.

I happened to adore boomer shooters and have good taste for their rhythms and making them, so the transition is not one I personally enjoyed at all.

But worse in a way, Half-Life ALSO ushered in much more linearity in level design because of their awesome interactive set pieces and the particular interactive way they got across their story. Certainly that was the way its release was experienced in the studio I was in, anyway. Less sprawling, unfolding, and backtracking like in Doom (where the space unfolds over the course of a level in something like a fractal way), more following a string of pearls and hitting all the scripted events, like a haunted house ride. You didn't want the players getting lost, you didn't want them to get bored backtracking, and you didn't want them to miss any of the cool one-off scripted content you'd made for them.

(I love Half-Life, so I don't blame it for any of this - it's a vastly more interesting game than many of the games it inspired, which I think is typical of highly innovative games)

At the time, I wasn't quite yet a thoughtful enough, perceptive enough game designer to recognize how deeply in tension those two changes ended up being with each other. And so I spent a miserable year of eventual burnout trying to make "good enemy AI that players actively notice" as a programmer for a game whose levels kept getting progressively tighter, more linear, and more constrained to support the haunted house ride of scripted events.

As a point of contrast, games like Thief and Thief 2 were magnificently structured for good, cool AI that players could notice, and it was specifically because of the non-linear ways the levels were built, the slow speed of the game, the focus on overtly drawing attention to both player and enemy sense information, and the relationship between the amount of space available to players at any given point to the amount of enemies they faced, as well as the often longer length of time players engaged with any particular set of enemies... and of course, despite all these cool features, poor, poor Thief was released to store shelves just 11 or 12 days after the original Half-Life. Business advice 101 is don't release your first person game 11 or 12 days after Half-Life.

Anyway, that all leads in to my admiration for Far Cry's design. Their outdoor levels actually steered their game design in a direction that could let enemy AI breathe and be an interesting feature of their design, in turn giving players higher level choices about when, where, and how to make initiate fights. In that sense, it reminded me of where Thief had already gone previously, but in the context of a high profile shooter. But doing that required actively relinquishing the control of the haunted house ride-style of pacing, which I think was kind of brave at the time.

This was the most amazing game for me at that time but when Company of Heroes was released COH became my favorite. The graphics and specially the sound. The open game play that rivals GTA series.

Oh I Still didn’t get around to play Far Cry, it’s not been out for thaat long. It’s in the Steam Library waiting for when I have a couple hours for playing a video game.

Just reading the title unlocked memories for me. Far cry came out in my life at the peak of local competitive counter strike, 1.6 at the time... CS was everything to me at that point and I hated the people coming to the lan house to play far cry instead of being on the cs servers... I remember it looking great tho I never played it.

At the time I installed Windows on a free partition on my desktop PC for the sole purpose of playing FarCry. It was great fun. The graphics blew me away.

I watched the movie a few years later, it was ... not as good as the game. But movie adaptations of video games almost never are, Postal being a notable exception.

I loved the way this game allowed for very different tactics (go all guns blazing or go stealth).

In before, “Hey you, in the shirt!”

One thing which struck me at the time was the fierce competition between ATI and NVIDIA … Squinting at side by side aliasing comparisons in Far Cry and Doom 3. Now it doesn’t feel so competitive.

Feels bad for NVIDIA to have this same kind of ridiculous clause in the AI EULA, “ 9.12 Customer may not use the AI Products for the purpose of developing competing products or technologies or assisting a third party in such activities.” as OpenAI shamefully writes, and Anthropic. And Microsoft. And Inflection. And Google. If you can’t enforce a noncompete on your own employees, then it makes no sense to try to pull that stuff on customers. “Not for resale” is one thing, but “no competitive work based on this” is appallingly beyond. Literally only Mistral AI fixed the issue so far!

Name one great athlete who would have been equally skilled in a world with no competitors.

I wish CryEngine was more of a thing. I think we need more engines from companies that actually make games with them

FarCry is running with highest graphics settings in a WinDOS VM on my Intel Mac, and it works astonishingly well. I still immensely enjoy playing it.

I was 15, I have an older brother. He had the game, but of course it being CD and protection, I couldn't play it. He had one of his college mates round and I had just got FarCry working with some no-cd patch I found on some 47th page of Google from some moonspeak forum.

As my bro was heading to go out; I showed it to both of them as they were passing by.

I received kudos of coolness, and because I normally have music playing in the background, Gary Jules - Mad World started playing next in the playlist. Only for my brothers mate to go "Woah, I was just thinking about that song".

And that's my memory of FarCry.

My only memory of playing Far Cry was struggling to get the demo to run at all.

The water was wet in that game. Absurdly amazing graphics for the time.