q11q222
01-21-2008, 01:47 AM
I found some scans from the Edge mag about FC2. They were not high quality so some words I couldn't decipher (indicated by [....] with a number). Other words which I think are right (judging by context and how it looks) but I'm not quite sure of are in the numbered sq brackets.
Maybe someone who has the mag can provide the words and point out any mistakes.
The blue skies and luxurious vegetation of tropical islands, but it still true to its mercenary-infested [ 1 foundation].
The expansive open world, comprising of savannah, desert and jungle, dustbowl [..2..] towns, corrugated iron shanties and Dogon villages, it continues with [..3..][..4..][..5..]surroundings.
It can be traversed by one of many vehicles, which include rustbucket hatchbacks, [..6..][..7..] buggies, the ever useful Land Rover, boats and a hang glider, and is fenced with a ring of impassable desert - venture in and your car will eventually overheat and you'll [ 8 fail/fall] from heat exhaustion.
Herd animals graze before fleeing at any disturbance, while grass, bushes and trees sway with the wind, which can boil up
into [ 9 dust/dark] squalls, sending leaves and branches flying and whipping the grass into waves [..10..][..11..][..12..] virtual worlds, this one looks and feels simply credible. [..13..] fronds of jungle undergrowth are translucent, with shadows from those above [ 14 showing] through, and [..15..] dust is thick in the late afternoon air.
The level of detail on the latest build is a good deal higher than that seen at Far Cry 2's original unveiling at Leipzig in August.
Great attention has also been paid to the people who live in the world. The story goes that the country's government has collapsed at the hands of a popular uprising, but the rebels have since split into two opposing forces, the [ 16 APR/ARP] and the [ 17 VRI/VPI/VPL/VPLI].
Heading each are warlords who profit from [ 18 ongoing/aggravating] conflict through the diamond trade and profiting from the warlords is an arms dealer, the assassination of whom is the games ultimate goal.
Pharand runs a demo that begins in a dusty town with a [..19..] running through it, one side of which is dominated by the strongly dug-in [ 16 APR], the other occupied by the [ 17 VPLI].
Chickens cluck amid a tense atmosphere as the player walks around. The [ 16 APR] mercenaries react to the player's presence, tolerating him but [ 20 ready], they raise their guns in [ 21 warning] if he stares at them for too long, but they're hesitant to begin firing. Their behaviour is the result of Far Cry 2's reputation system - act the badass by winning battles and being ruthless and you'll get [ 22 edgy] respect among the two groups, allowing you to rise up their command structures to close in on the arms dealer.
They won't tolerate him stealing their Land Rover though, and the clapped-out unguarded [ 23 Datsun] probably won't make it up the steep hill to the next mission objective.
Nipping in to take it sparks a quick [ 24 response], the town erupting in gunfire and shouts as the truce between the two sides breaks and members of the [ 16 APR] chase after the player.
Without [ 25 operative/comparable] vehicles, they quickly fall behind, and Pharand drives up a steep track to arrive at one of the game's many encampments. Here, 'buddies' - in this case a grimy, tattooed man called Marty - hang out, NPC's who will help the player if they should fall in battle nearby, carrying them to cover and providing support. There are 13 in total, and should they die helping you, they are gone from the game for good.
Camps also act as points where you can sleep to advance time. Because NPC's behave according to schedules, attacking at night might give an opportunity to catch them slumbering. The feature also shows off the Dunia engine's [ 26 suitable/stable] ability to render evocatively atmospheric vistas as time is sped up, showing [..27..] evening smoothly turning to blue night and into hazy pale morning. Animals, too, behave differently according to the time of day, an important detail given the fact that the enemy AI will be alerted if you inadvertently startle a nearby herd.
Near Marty's camp is a Dogon village, characterised by distinctive mud architecture clinging to a steep, rocky hillside. Its original inhabitants are gone and its now occupied by mercenaries.
Far Cry 2 doesn't have civilians that players can kill, a decision that Pharand says was a point of honour for the team.
"Our game is about hunting down a guy and being in the middle of a conflict. When you allow killing of civilians you're muddying your themes," says Hocking. As a result, the many towns that you [ 28 find] civilians, or other characters that you shouldn't kill, the game contrives to ensure your weapons are removed first.
The mercenaries in the village are tending a crop of [ 29 Artevisie armsia - or something] a plant that produces the anti-malaria drug [ 30 artesmian - yikes]. The developer is keen to [ 31 afford] Far Cry 2's world a convincing representation of life, with enemies conversing, working and sleeping, even if the engine currently renders them with a somewhat waxy sheen.
[ 32 Also/And] most people have malaria including the players character. In fact the game starts with him incapacitated by it, the arms dealer he's tasked to assassinate at his bedside mocking him for having failed at his task.
As such, the game has the player trying to procure anti-malaria [ 33 medicine] from an underground organisation of priests and doctors that is helping civilians escape the country.
This conceit introduces a way of structuring the increase [ 34 in/of] power the player character experiences over the games course; as he takes more medicine, he becomes [ 35 resistive/resistant] and can take more damage. Combined with a segmented health system which requires the use of [..36..] to replenish bars as they're depleted, it's also designed to cope with an open world in which encounters with any group of enemies should be challenging and interesting whether an isolated pair or whole encampments.
"We originally wanted a regeneration system like Halo, but we found that once you put it into the open world you'd have full health against two guys, or full health against 25. Because we'd need to make the health high enough to deal with 25 guys, two guys will never be a challenge." explains Hocking. A quick [can't read the line - background image...] bar or two.
To systematically increase the game's difficulty as it progresses, the design will manage access to weapons and health-giving systems, as well as enemy behaviour. "They will start being able to use grenades and flanking, cornering you in interiors because they know where the exits are," says technical director Dominic Guay.
Receiving major damage results in wounds, which will kill if not tended to in time, and if hit while fixing it up - with a graphic animation of wrenching out the bullet - you'll be killed instantly.
In comparison to older builds, such as the Leipzig demo, wounds are appearing a lot less often - on average 30 minutes, according to Hocking - to retain some of the
punch of seeing foreign bodies retrieved from the flesh between your virtual fingers.
It's still a little odd, however, that in the current build only your feet and hands appear to be susceptible to such trauma.
It does add, however, to the game's physicality. The movements of the firstperson view as the player is rescued by Marty during an intense battle among some rusty iron shacks conveys the sense of a heavy man being slung over a shoulder, and when getting in and out of a vehicle, or switching between a Land Rover's driver's seat and a gun mounted on the back, the player character's arms are seen swinging from overhead struts, but, though Far Cry 2 occasionally shows off the character's body during specific sequences, not even his feet are viewable during normal play.
"It was a [ 37 direction/decision] I gave very early on, that I didn't want to see the body unless its important," says Hocking. "If every time I look down and not see my legs perfectly animated when I rotate, I feel I have this fake body. So when you do see it, it's perfectly in tune with the environment, but when I don't need to be aware of my body and it's not expressing the themes, it's invisible."
Pharand runs two different attacks on the village; an all-out assault and a stealthy attempt - to demonstrate the variety of play styles the game supports. The small, [ 38 shoddy/dodgy] built Dogon huts provide lots of cover for the stealth approach, and he quickly guns down many of the soldiers in the village [..38..][..39..] with a silenced MP5 submachine gun. But he soon attracts the keen eye of a sniper on a ridge opposite the village and is pinned down, galvanising the rest of the brigade's attention on him.
It's at this [ 40 point] that it's clear guile is key; for there's no radar in Far Cry 2, just a detailed map that's brought up in the player character's hand which shows your location without pausing the action. The state of nearby enemies, whether at rest, alert or actively engaged in the attacking the player, is communicated through music.
The assault method seems to work a little better [ 41 toting/using - something ing] a powerful automatic shotgun, Pharand tears through many of the village's enemies, but with use the weapon begins to dull and show wear. It's one of Far Cry 2's features that emphasises the gritty representation of conflict that Hocking is after.
Depending on the model, the gun will fail under heavy use. An AK-47 will tend to last much longer, tallying with its real-world reputation for reliability, but a powerful weapon like the auto-shotgun will break down much more quickly. And apart from supporting the game's themes, it's also a subtle way of regulating the effectiveness of the player's arsenal.
Luckily, the gun doesn't jam, and Pharand finds [ 42 ammunition] at the ammo stores dotted around the village. Containing [can't decipher the rest of this paragraph - backround image again. I think its about shooting the ammo and then about taking on the sniper and the inaccuarcy of the selected gun at long range.]
After a scrappy exchange of shots the sniper eventually falls, and Pharand runs across a rope bridge to the ridge he occupied. There's an alternative route, a snaking, steep path that curves around the [..43..], and Pharand brings out his flamethrower to show off one of Far Cry 2's big features: fire. Flaming up the rope bridge will funnel pursuing enemies up
the path, affording him some control over the attack.
With much of Far Cry 2's world being composed of highly flammable scrub, fire is more than a gimmick; it can be used to flush enemies out of cover or cut off flanking manoeuvres - and it can easily back fire [no pun intended, they neglected to add... http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif].
As fire will spread according to the wind, it's important to use the game's eyeglass, which apart from acting as binoculars, includes a wind direction indicator. The most [ 44 effective] way of starting fires is, naturally, with the flamethrower [..45..][..46..][..47..] also be set off by explosions.
The strength of the conflagration depends on several factors: [48 if it originates] as the result of a sustained burst from the flamethrower it'll burn strongly; if from the detonation of a grenade it won't - and the flammability of material on which it begins, in other words, fires are not endless.
With Pharand on the [ 49 ridge], he takes the sniper's rifle and shoots a mercenary in the leg. He falls to the ground, and soon another comes out from cover to carry him to safety, despite the danger of him becoming a target, too.
It's here that the Heart Of Darkness theme falls into better focus. With an entire country pitted against players, they're going to have to use nasty tactics to get their way. As the anti-malaria drugs increase their health, so too will their reputation for being ruthless; [ 50 incinerating] enemies, wounding them to draw out their comrades.
"What happens is dependant on how each player approaches it, but somewhere in the second act you become so notorious and feared that the underground (of medics and priests) says that you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and stops giving you medicine," says Hocking. The result is a twist on, or a reversal of, Far Cry Instincts' feral abilities.
"As medicine is cut off you become sickly and grotesque, but still more notorious," Hocking [ 51 continues]. "You transform from being this healthy guy that might occasionally shoot someone in the knee to somebody that's literally dependant on being cruel and vicious, twisted and deformed and vomiting all the time. You [ 52 invert] your relationship with your own power - from being powerful because you're healthy to powerful because you're crueler than the enemy."
It's the core theme of the game, making players realise by the end of the game that the way they got to where they have is through being a scumbag, and possibly worse than the person they've been sent to kill.
Though it's broadly similar to BioShock's opposing of personal choice against narrative destiny, again told against the
backdrop of an assassination, here the [ 53 tension] is a direct product of game mechanics, rather than BioShock's immutable, scripted plotting, and it has the potential to be all the more powerful for it.
Ubisoft's Montreal is applying this organic approach to game building to every part of Far Cry 2. The result so far, looks
coherent and convincing. Every mechanic has a tactical purpose and sits in the world [ 54 consistently/considerably], fleshing out a plausible and absorbing environments.
What remains to be seen is how they will balance each other out, and whether the open world will provide enough direction and motivation to fully engage players. But the conviction with which the team presents it suggests that they believe they have the solution to this dark alchemy of [ 55 grease], sweat and mental uncertainty.
Maybe someone who has the mag can provide the words and point out any mistakes.
The blue skies and luxurious vegetation of tropical islands, but it still true to its mercenary-infested [ 1 foundation].
The expansive open world, comprising of savannah, desert and jungle, dustbowl [..2..] towns, corrugated iron shanties and Dogon villages, it continues with [..3..][..4..][..5..]surroundings.
It can be traversed by one of many vehicles, which include rustbucket hatchbacks, [..6..][..7..] buggies, the ever useful Land Rover, boats and a hang glider, and is fenced with a ring of impassable desert - venture in and your car will eventually overheat and you'll [ 8 fail/fall] from heat exhaustion.
Herd animals graze before fleeing at any disturbance, while grass, bushes and trees sway with the wind, which can boil up
into [ 9 dust/dark] squalls, sending leaves and branches flying and whipping the grass into waves [..10..][..11..][..12..] virtual worlds, this one looks and feels simply credible. [..13..] fronds of jungle undergrowth are translucent, with shadows from those above [ 14 showing] through, and [..15..] dust is thick in the late afternoon air.
The level of detail on the latest build is a good deal higher than that seen at Far Cry 2's original unveiling at Leipzig in August.
Great attention has also been paid to the people who live in the world. The story goes that the country's government has collapsed at the hands of a popular uprising, but the rebels have since split into two opposing forces, the [ 16 APR/ARP] and the [ 17 VRI/VPI/VPL/VPLI].
Heading each are warlords who profit from [ 18 ongoing/aggravating] conflict through the diamond trade and profiting from the warlords is an arms dealer, the assassination of whom is the games ultimate goal.
Pharand runs a demo that begins in a dusty town with a [..19..] running through it, one side of which is dominated by the strongly dug-in [ 16 APR], the other occupied by the [ 17 VPLI].
Chickens cluck amid a tense atmosphere as the player walks around. The [ 16 APR] mercenaries react to the player's presence, tolerating him but [ 20 ready], they raise their guns in [ 21 warning] if he stares at them for too long, but they're hesitant to begin firing. Their behaviour is the result of Far Cry 2's reputation system - act the badass by winning battles and being ruthless and you'll get [ 22 edgy] respect among the two groups, allowing you to rise up their command structures to close in on the arms dealer.
They won't tolerate him stealing their Land Rover though, and the clapped-out unguarded [ 23 Datsun] probably won't make it up the steep hill to the next mission objective.
Nipping in to take it sparks a quick [ 24 response], the town erupting in gunfire and shouts as the truce between the two sides breaks and members of the [ 16 APR] chase after the player.
Without [ 25 operative/comparable] vehicles, they quickly fall behind, and Pharand drives up a steep track to arrive at one of the game's many encampments. Here, 'buddies' - in this case a grimy, tattooed man called Marty - hang out, NPC's who will help the player if they should fall in battle nearby, carrying them to cover and providing support. There are 13 in total, and should they die helping you, they are gone from the game for good.
Camps also act as points where you can sleep to advance time. Because NPC's behave according to schedules, attacking at night might give an opportunity to catch them slumbering. The feature also shows off the Dunia engine's [ 26 suitable/stable] ability to render evocatively atmospheric vistas as time is sped up, showing [..27..] evening smoothly turning to blue night and into hazy pale morning. Animals, too, behave differently according to the time of day, an important detail given the fact that the enemy AI will be alerted if you inadvertently startle a nearby herd.
Near Marty's camp is a Dogon village, characterised by distinctive mud architecture clinging to a steep, rocky hillside. Its original inhabitants are gone and its now occupied by mercenaries.
Far Cry 2 doesn't have civilians that players can kill, a decision that Pharand says was a point of honour for the team.
"Our game is about hunting down a guy and being in the middle of a conflict. When you allow killing of civilians you're muddying your themes," says Hocking. As a result, the many towns that you [ 28 find] civilians, or other characters that you shouldn't kill, the game contrives to ensure your weapons are removed first.
The mercenaries in the village are tending a crop of [ 29 Artevisie armsia - or something] a plant that produces the anti-malaria drug [ 30 artesmian - yikes]. The developer is keen to [ 31 afford] Far Cry 2's world a convincing representation of life, with enemies conversing, working and sleeping, even if the engine currently renders them with a somewhat waxy sheen.
[ 32 Also/And] most people have malaria including the players character. In fact the game starts with him incapacitated by it, the arms dealer he's tasked to assassinate at his bedside mocking him for having failed at his task.
As such, the game has the player trying to procure anti-malaria [ 33 medicine] from an underground organisation of priests and doctors that is helping civilians escape the country.
This conceit introduces a way of structuring the increase [ 34 in/of] power the player character experiences over the games course; as he takes more medicine, he becomes [ 35 resistive/resistant] and can take more damage. Combined with a segmented health system which requires the use of [..36..] to replenish bars as they're depleted, it's also designed to cope with an open world in which encounters with any group of enemies should be challenging and interesting whether an isolated pair or whole encampments.
"We originally wanted a regeneration system like Halo, but we found that once you put it into the open world you'd have full health against two guys, or full health against 25. Because we'd need to make the health high enough to deal with 25 guys, two guys will never be a challenge." explains Hocking. A quick [can't read the line - background image...] bar or two.
To systematically increase the game's difficulty as it progresses, the design will manage access to weapons and health-giving systems, as well as enemy behaviour. "They will start being able to use grenades and flanking, cornering you in interiors because they know where the exits are," says technical director Dominic Guay.
Receiving major damage results in wounds, which will kill if not tended to in time, and if hit while fixing it up - with a graphic animation of wrenching out the bullet - you'll be killed instantly.
In comparison to older builds, such as the Leipzig demo, wounds are appearing a lot less often - on average 30 minutes, according to Hocking - to retain some of the
punch of seeing foreign bodies retrieved from the flesh between your virtual fingers.
It's still a little odd, however, that in the current build only your feet and hands appear to be susceptible to such trauma.
It does add, however, to the game's physicality. The movements of the firstperson view as the player is rescued by Marty during an intense battle among some rusty iron shacks conveys the sense of a heavy man being slung over a shoulder, and when getting in and out of a vehicle, or switching between a Land Rover's driver's seat and a gun mounted on the back, the player character's arms are seen swinging from overhead struts, but, though Far Cry 2 occasionally shows off the character's body during specific sequences, not even his feet are viewable during normal play.
"It was a [ 37 direction/decision] I gave very early on, that I didn't want to see the body unless its important," says Hocking. "If every time I look down and not see my legs perfectly animated when I rotate, I feel I have this fake body. So when you do see it, it's perfectly in tune with the environment, but when I don't need to be aware of my body and it's not expressing the themes, it's invisible."
Pharand runs two different attacks on the village; an all-out assault and a stealthy attempt - to demonstrate the variety of play styles the game supports. The small, [ 38 shoddy/dodgy] built Dogon huts provide lots of cover for the stealth approach, and he quickly guns down many of the soldiers in the village [..38..][..39..] with a silenced MP5 submachine gun. But he soon attracts the keen eye of a sniper on a ridge opposite the village and is pinned down, galvanising the rest of the brigade's attention on him.
It's at this [ 40 point] that it's clear guile is key; for there's no radar in Far Cry 2, just a detailed map that's brought up in the player character's hand which shows your location without pausing the action. The state of nearby enemies, whether at rest, alert or actively engaged in the attacking the player, is communicated through music.
The assault method seems to work a little better [ 41 toting/using - something ing] a powerful automatic shotgun, Pharand tears through many of the village's enemies, but with use the weapon begins to dull and show wear. It's one of Far Cry 2's features that emphasises the gritty representation of conflict that Hocking is after.
Depending on the model, the gun will fail under heavy use. An AK-47 will tend to last much longer, tallying with its real-world reputation for reliability, but a powerful weapon like the auto-shotgun will break down much more quickly. And apart from supporting the game's themes, it's also a subtle way of regulating the effectiveness of the player's arsenal.
Luckily, the gun doesn't jam, and Pharand finds [ 42 ammunition] at the ammo stores dotted around the village. Containing [can't decipher the rest of this paragraph - backround image again. I think its about shooting the ammo and then about taking on the sniper and the inaccuarcy of the selected gun at long range.]
After a scrappy exchange of shots the sniper eventually falls, and Pharand runs across a rope bridge to the ridge he occupied. There's an alternative route, a snaking, steep path that curves around the [..43..], and Pharand brings out his flamethrower to show off one of Far Cry 2's big features: fire. Flaming up the rope bridge will funnel pursuing enemies up
the path, affording him some control over the attack.
With much of Far Cry 2's world being composed of highly flammable scrub, fire is more than a gimmick; it can be used to flush enemies out of cover or cut off flanking manoeuvres - and it can easily back fire [no pun intended, they neglected to add... http://forums.ubi.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif].
As fire will spread according to the wind, it's important to use the game's eyeglass, which apart from acting as binoculars, includes a wind direction indicator. The most [ 44 effective] way of starting fires is, naturally, with the flamethrower [..45..][..46..][..47..] also be set off by explosions.
The strength of the conflagration depends on several factors: [48 if it originates] as the result of a sustained burst from the flamethrower it'll burn strongly; if from the detonation of a grenade it won't - and the flammability of material on which it begins, in other words, fires are not endless.
With Pharand on the [ 49 ridge], he takes the sniper's rifle and shoots a mercenary in the leg. He falls to the ground, and soon another comes out from cover to carry him to safety, despite the danger of him becoming a target, too.
It's here that the Heart Of Darkness theme falls into better focus. With an entire country pitted against players, they're going to have to use nasty tactics to get their way. As the anti-malaria drugs increase their health, so too will their reputation for being ruthless; [ 50 incinerating] enemies, wounding them to draw out their comrades.
"What happens is dependant on how each player approaches it, but somewhere in the second act you become so notorious and feared that the underground (of medics and priests) says that you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and stops giving you medicine," says Hocking. The result is a twist on, or a reversal of, Far Cry Instincts' feral abilities.
"As medicine is cut off you become sickly and grotesque, but still more notorious," Hocking [ 51 continues]. "You transform from being this healthy guy that might occasionally shoot someone in the knee to somebody that's literally dependant on being cruel and vicious, twisted and deformed and vomiting all the time. You [ 52 invert] your relationship with your own power - from being powerful because you're healthy to powerful because you're crueler than the enemy."
It's the core theme of the game, making players realise by the end of the game that the way they got to where they have is through being a scumbag, and possibly worse than the person they've been sent to kill.
Though it's broadly similar to BioShock's opposing of personal choice against narrative destiny, again told against the
backdrop of an assassination, here the [ 53 tension] is a direct product of game mechanics, rather than BioShock's immutable, scripted plotting, and it has the potential to be all the more powerful for it.
Ubisoft's Montreal is applying this organic approach to game building to every part of Far Cry 2. The result so far, looks
coherent and convincing. Every mechanic has a tactical purpose and sits in the world [ 54 consistently/considerably], fleshing out a plausible and absorbing environments.
What remains to be seen is how they will balance each other out, and whether the open world will provide enough direction and motivation to fully engage players. But the conviction with which the team presents it suggests that they believe they have the solution to this dark alchemy of [ 55 grease], sweat and mental uncertainty.