Some of you might recall a 1998 experiment called Trespasser, a Jurassic Park–licensed first-person adventure for PC that pitted a stranded woman against the dinosaurs of Isla Sorna. (It was created by Seamus Blackley, who went on to become one of the Xbox’s founding fathers.) Though its gameplay was entirely forgettable, it was an interesting attempt at creating a living world, presenting one large “level,” an intricate physics system you could use to solve puzzles, and dinosaur A.I. that interacted realistically within the game’s ecosystem.

Ten years later, Far Cry 2 appears to be the total-package “fun-ified” realization of that prototype, emphasizing open-world freedom, multiple-solution combat scenarios, and realistic, intelligent enemy A.I.

“Our mandate was to reinvent Far Cry,” reports Creative Director Clint Hocking, whose previous project was Ubisoft’s sublime Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.

After just five minutes of our demo, we were convinced they’d succeeded. Set in the sunny savannahs of Africa, Far Cry 2’s story is driven by a single goal: kill an evil arms-dealer warlord who’s left you, a mercenary, dying of malaria in a hotel. To do this, you’ll need to work — at your own pace and discretion —with two opposing mercenary factions who’ve each been given the empty promise of diamond rights to the area by a government that has since fled town along with most of its civilians. What remains is a tense war zone for you to navigate through. The plot offers a lot of choice (see sidebar), but it’s the graphics and gameplay that will really astound you.

While loading the upper-northwest squarekilometer section of the 50-square-kilometer gameworld, Hocking unleashed a truckload of technical buzzwords to describe Far Cry 2’s engine, but what appeared on-screen was a better translation than any dictionary could give. Grass blows in the wind and gets trampled, trees can be shot apart, clouds pool together to affect lighting conditions, sun filters perfectly through treetops, and roads are dynamically altered by the tracks of passing vehicles.

All of this set the stage perfectly for Hocking’s encounter at a shantytown. Scouting with a sniper scope from afar, we could see the hovel was manned by one patrolling guard, a merc who was refilling his bullet cache at an ammo dump, and a couple of other trigger-happy foes. Hocking tried to quietly sneak through the grass, but one of them spotted him and they all opened fire. Thinking quickly, he hopped into the back of a nearby truck, manned the gun turret mounted in its bed, and let it rip. He killed one or two enemies, but with fire coming at him from different angles, he wasn’t going to win this fight. So he slid through the missing rear window into the driver’s seat and sped away.

Looking back, we saw the shantytown guards had procured a truck of their own and were following him! As bushes and tree branches bounced off of the vehicle’s grille and windshield, Hocking was clearly not going to ditch his pursuers easily. He stopped at another makeshift town, grabbed a conveniently placed rocket launcher, and ended the conflict by setting the entire area ablaze onc  his foes caught up and hopped out of their ride.

Hocking promises that none of this was scripted — nor is any of the game’s A.I. behavior, he says. And neither is the incredible fire effect, which will propagate realistically across the dry grassy plains and highly flammable huts.

We also observed hovercraft, meandering roosters, flocks of gazelles that would scatter as your hang glider flew overhead (yes, the glider’s back), nemeses who would drag their wounded comrades to safety, and loads of other awesome touches that we were too stunned to process. Forget the serviceable Xbox Far Crys: This one’s going to up the ante for the whole genre the
same way their PC forefather did.