FarCry: Break the Ceiling of Game Genre

On this year’s GDC, Ubisoft’s Farcry became the eye candy of various graphic cards manufacturers. Gamers talked about Farcry everywhere. But the most interesting part they talked about was not the game play or character or stories. This game is a complete technology experiment.

Before Half-life 2, Doom3 and Unreal 2 engine release, Farcry engine is doubtlessly the best and the most realistic one on the market today. The graphics in the game could be described as photorealistic. The physics engine and different effect simulation stunned all the player. For example, when a grenade explodes beside you, your ear will be filled with tingle until half a minute later. You vision will become blurred in order to simulate the dizzy eye sight. The AI is highly advanced in the game. NPC will talk to the player and communicate each other. Overall, the game play experience is rather a military rehearse than a traditional first person shooting game.

Farcry reminds me of the relationship between technology and digital game entertainment. It is a loop like all the other entertainment media. While a new technology came out, because it was new, public will like to spend money on it, because of their curiosity and vogue. But after a shoot period, when all the people had got used to this kind of technology, they started to criticize the lack of content and connotation. Certainly, Farcry is in one of these new technology waves, and it caught the right time. If half-life 2 or doom3 was released last year, Farcry will definitely be buried by these big brands. Because of Farcry was the first new generation graphical advanced game, everybody wanted to try it and raised their thumbs for the unheard-of experiences.

In Will Wright’s game design chart, Farcry could not break the boundary of the traditional game territory. However, the reaction from the public is similar to the reaction for a new game concept. FPS has already become a peak of game genre. The vertical change of this peak with the technology breaks the boundary of the ceiling. Besides looking for new genre in the unknown territory, to improve the existing height of a game genre is also considerable and practical method. However, there are limited inventions in the industry, how many games can share the benefits from technology creation? Compared with that, concept creativity is more accessible to the game designers.

A Game Journal from Jenova Chen

Posted by Jenova at April 25, 2004 4:03 PM