GDC speakers received a special deck of cards with last year's "top rated" speakers on them. See who's in it. Read more...

No matter how hard I try to play a game perfectly, there's almost always a moment when I decide that life's too short. I allow sloppiness to seep in. Read more...

Everyone shoots at me in "Far Cry 2." That shouldn't feel unusual, but it does. I'm not sure if I should complain. Read more...

The open-world first-person-shooter "Far Cry 2" hits PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on October 22 and thanks to a promotional deal between MTV and the game's publisher, Ubisoft, we have an exclusive trailer to show you for the M-rated game.

You weren't thinking the game would be short on action, were you?

Explosions, enemies and zebras are all displayed under the bright, virtual African sun. The trailer also sheds just a bit more light on the population in this game, which is full of characters whom you can work for or against. How do you win? Looks like you need to be ruthless.

(Videos not viewable by users logging in from Canada or the U.K.)

Most of the attention on Ubisoft's ambitious African-based shooter "Far Cry 2" has been on its tech. underpinnings and open-ended single-player campaign.

Earlier this week, however, I sat down to play an hour of the game's multiplayer.

This was my first time playing any of "Far Cry 2." It's obvious Ubisoft's team has poured time into multiplayer, but I'm not sure it's a game that needed multiplayer.

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In this looming season of major video game releases it won't just be the big video games that impress people but also some details. It's a lock, for example, that gamers will be impressed with the menu screens of EA horror game "Dead Space" (trust me). Will you be wowed by "Far Cry 2"'s in-game map?

The screenshot above (click it to enlarge) barely does justice to the map in Ubisoft's fall open-world first-person shooter. The map manifests itself as a first-person-viewed piece of parchment, as you can see. A compass appears as well. But what you can't see from this still shot are two key features:

1) The map, which isn't a static image, dynamically displays points of interest.
2) When the player starts running while they have the map out, their character lowers the map a few inches so that only the top half is showing. Think about it like having a driver having a map unfolded across a steering wheel, with the view out of the windshield unobstructed.

Point #2 is key for any of us who have been reduced to staring at the corner of their TV or PC while navigating a game, ignoring the rest of the game's visuals because our eyes are fixed on a mini-map. In "Far Cry 2," players who like playing with a map handy will be able to watch the center of the game's action -- and just glance slightly down from there to check their location. Far less of the scenery will be missed by players who like using a map.

It's a small thing. It may make a big difference.

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‘Far Cry 2′ Designer: Easy Mode Of Our Game Should Be Playable One-Handed
An Evolution In Exploding Barrels, As Shown To Me By ‘Far Cry 2′ Designer Clint Hocking

A couple of weeks ago at a Ubisoft press event, I learned that "Far Cry 2" will have multiple difficulty levels. Big deal. But the man telling me this was Clint Hocking, the game's creative director. And Hocking always has an interesting way of putting things.

As Hocking prepared an Xbox 360 version of the game for a demonstration, he and I briefly chatted about the game's easy mode. "We have a tendency to make even the easiest difficulty levels disgustingly hard," he told me.

"Far Cry 2" will have an easy mode that will not disgust. How easy would it be?

Read more...

During my demo of "Far Cry 2" last week, I asked the game's creative director about a few things. I covered the exploding barrels part of the conversation. Later this week you'll read how we talked about death.

But today I want to share our chat about making a PC game at a time that high-end first-person shooters aren't selling the way people would expect.

The following exchange occurred as he demonstrated the game:

Multiplayer: What's it like making a PC game these days in light of the sales figures for "Unreal Tournament III" and "Crysis"?

Clint Hocking, creative director, "Far Cry 2": I don't know if you're aware, but we originally planned to make it as a PC game. We really wanted to tell the PC gaming crowd that "Far Cry" is a PC title and we're not going to screw up the whole brand by making a crappy console game. We want to make a PC title that is worthy of being called "Far Cry 2."

Multiplayer: Respect the complexity of it's PC heritage and all that…

Hocking But at the same time, you're right. We need to be profitable. We built the game we built it from scratch. And we built the engine from scratch as well. The engine team, their job was to port the engine over [to consoles.] Because they didn't have any data with which to figure out how to do it, they used our ["Far Cry 2" game] data. We didn't ever expect them to be able to put this thing on console.

The engine team got a console engine running using our data. We came back from Leipzig [Games Convention in August] after telling the world we were going to be PC exclusive. They said, "Look what we did." We said, "Holy f---, we just lied to a whole bunch of people by accident."

It turned out that they had the same game running on console.

Read more...

We said: "What the hell, we don't want exploding barrels, but we have to have them. How are we going to make them not suck?"

-- Clint Hocking To MTV Multiplayer, January 15, 2008

Behold, Multiplayer readers, "Far Cry 2"! It's coming later this year and has many notable features.

It's a PC first-person shooter from Ubisoft Montreal, a major game for the fall of 2008. It takes place across more than 50 square kilometers of African savanna and jungle. It's designed to be so open, you're only forced to accomplish one goal: kill the game's main bad guy, however you can possibly manage it. Much of the story is generated on the fly. Much of the game world is destructible and flammable. It's coming to consoles too.

And, as I learned when Ubisoft creative director and generally innovative game designer Clint Hocking showed me the game, it has… explosive barrels.

All that innovation and they still do the barrel thing?

As Hocking gave me a demo of the game last Tuesday hewalked the game's main character through a town full of wary rival soldiers, many of them resting next to piles of ammo or close to big red drums. I stopped Hocking in his tracks and said…

Read more...