PC mega-FPS Crysis wasn't the benchmark for Far Cry 2, developer Ubisoft Montreal told us.

In case you're not aware, Crysis is the latest work from Crytek, which was the original developer of Far Cry before development duties were handed to Ubisoft Montreal.

"Crysis wasn't our benchmark, we were our own benchmark," art director Alex Amancio said at UbiDays yesterday. "But we think that Crysis is a fantastic game, the entire team respects what they're doing.

"Obviously we knew [that people were going to compare the two] because of the history. But the games are so different there really is no comparison point," he said. FPS; check, jungles; check, open-world; check...

"Very early on we knew that we wanted to go a completely different direction. Instead of going for the tropical island and trying to go for hyper realism, we changed the setting. First of all we wanted to have a really, really credible environment, but we didn't want to replicate anybody's vacation photos.

"Yeah, we want to have destructible elements like destructible vegetation, but it's not because of Crysis, it's because we feel it's the next logical step," Amancio continued, showing off Far Cry 2's own falling trees.

Would it be fair to say Ubisoft is advancing on the technology in Crysis, though? "Yeah. That was our goal basically, to keep moving forward".

Look for the full interview with Far Cry 2's art director soon.

Courtesy of CVG.

May 30, 2008