Far Cry 2: Exclusive dev team interview

Far Cry 2 dazzled eyes and blew mindswhen it was unveiledat the Leipzig Games Convention last year, and its blend of open world gameplay, stunning visuals and exciting new environmental mechanics have made it one to watch intently ever since.

Always ones to keep an eye on an exciting prospect, we've spoken to the game's development team and found out everything we can about how its malaria-ridden, sandbox FPS pyromania is going to work. Read on, as we interview Producer Louis-Pierre Pharand, Tech Director Dominic Guay and Creative Director Clint Hocking about why Africa is going to be the place to be later this year.

GamesRadar: While it shares a title with its predecessor, you've been very open about the fact that Far Cry 2 has nothing to do with it in theme or scenario. Why did you make the decision to go for a complete reboot while technically continuing the series?

Louis-Pierre Pharand: The original Far Cry was clearly a ground breaking game with it’s open feeling, exotic environment, cutting edge technical capabilities; not only on the graphics side… the AI is still considered one of the best.

While it was perceived extremely positive on these elements, the story and global experience was in our opinion in a great need of a renewal. We now have a fresh and never-been-seen setting where we have integrated a compelling story where the franchise can now grow properly for years to come. Add to that a completely open 50 square kilometre world with systemic AI living in it… it’s going to be action and combat like has never been seen before.

Gamers want that, they want something new and immersive. They will have it soon!

GR: Are we going to see any concessions made in the console versions, or are they going to be on a par with FC2 on optimal PC specs?

LP: It’s the same game. No compromises or concessions were made on the game, it's only visually that gamers will see a difference between high quality PC’s and consoles.

The console versions look and feel great. We will deliver a 50 square kilometre open world without loading at any time, except at game start. We take great pride on Far Cry 2 to deliver the same experience on all platforms; otherwise the title would not have seen the light of day.

GR: FC2 is obviously a very visually striking game with some impressive physics work. Last year we saw the processor-intensive Crysis make disappointing sales on the PC, an event which many attributed to Crytek specing their game out of the market. How careful have you had to be in making the FC2 experience accessible to a wide area of the PC market?

Dominic Guay: We have been very careful of that. While our system requirements are still in flux due to our ongoing focus on optimizations,I can say that we will have large support. The game runs on an almostfour year-old gaming PC. Of course it does not have all the bells and whistles that you can expect from a more recent gaming PC, but it is the same game with the same gameplay systems.

Many people do not upgrade their PC every year like used to be the case and it shouldn't be necessary to enjoy a game. If someone has a PC that ran Crysis it will certainly run FC2 well. And if someone has, say, a quad core system with a dual GPU setup, he will be very happy to see the extra performance and solid support he'll get. It's all a matter of being scalable, both ways.