A tropical paradise seethes with hidden evil in Far Cry, a cunningly detailed action shooter that pushes the boundaries of combat to shocking new levels.

Freelance mariner Jack Carver is cursing the day he ever came to this island. A week ago, a brash female reporter named Valerie had offered him an incredible sum of cash to take her to this unspoiled paradise. Shortly after docking, however, Jack's boat was greeted by artillery fire from a mysterious militia group swarming about the island.

With his boat destroyed, his money gone, and the gorgeous Valerie suddenly missing, Jack now finds himself facing an army of mercenaries amidst the wilds of the island, with nothing but a gun and his wits to survive. But the further he pushes into the lush jungle canopy, the stranger things become.

Jack encounters an insider within the militia group, who reveals the horrific details of the mercenaries' true intentions. He presents Jack with an unsettling choice: battle the deadliest mercenaries, or condemn the human race to a maniac's insidious agenda.

Features:

• Feel the Far Cry Engine - The meticulously designed, next-generation Far Cry engine pushes the threshold of action gaming with proprietary Polybump mapping, advanced environment and character physics, destructible terrain, dynamic lighting, motion-captured animation, and total surround sound.
• Unparalleled Long Range Gunplay - Battle to the ends of the earth with Far Cry's utterly unique, 800-meter scalable view system. Lock onto enemies from a distance with motion-sensing binoculars. Then choose your style of attack - from long range sniping to ballistic close-quarters firefights - and everything in between.
• Cunning and Complex AI Tactics - Battles never become repetitive when you face Far Cry's unpredictable, intelligent AI mercenary units, trained in advanced adaptive group tactics. Units include snipers, stalkers, scouts, and grenadiers that engage you from all angles, distances, and terrains in coordinated strikes. Commanders will even call for reinforcements by land, sea, or air.
• Diverse Combat Action - Master a dynamic slate of combat skills - close-quarters combat, long-range shooting, search-and-destroy tactics, stealth operations, and combat driving skills through indoor and outdoor environments.
• Heart-Pounding Atmosphere - Experience unprecedented drama and realism in a misleadingly perfect setting, with incredible lighting and shadows, adaptive audio, and weather effects.

GCM:

Please start us off by introducing yourself and telling us a bit about Crytek Studios.

Chris Natsuume:

I am Chris Natsuume, producer for Far Cry. The history of Far Cry is really the history of Crytek. Cevat Yerli and his brothers Faruk and Avni, started the company about 4 years ago as a small Internet startup, and our first employees worked over the net in putting together a demo – which became “Dinosaur Island.” It was technically cool enough to attract a great deal of attention, and a contract with Ubisoft – one of the top publishers in the industry. Immediately the team moved on to full game production, starting with a design called “X-Isle” that included dinosaurs. It was a neat story, and the dinosaurs looked great, but massive lumbering creatures like that didn’t really work with the advanced AI designs that we were working with, and so some changes were made in the core design and story. We added a whole new story with different characters and a stronger plot.

GCM:

Kindly tell us about the main character(s) in Far Cry and give us some sense of the story that propels the game forward.

Chris Natsuume:

Because the story dynamically unfolds throughout the game, we don’t want to spoil it for anyone – but I can give you the setup: Jack, a charter boat captain in the South Pacific is hired to take a beautiful photographer (Val) to a remote island in Micronesia, hundreds of miles from nowhere. She goes into the island to do her work, and while he is waiting for her to come back, his ship is blown up by missiles from the coast, he is taken captive by a band of cruel mercenaries, and questioned about what he is doing here, off the coast of Krieger’s island. We escape into the jungle, and the game begins.

GCM:

Is there any single element that you feel will separate Far Cry from all of the other competing First Person Shooters out there?

Chris Natsuume:

Our biggest advantage compared to other competing FPSs out there definitely begins with our proprietary engine, the CryENGINE. But the single biggest difference, of course, is the CryENGINE ® Sandbox™, the editor and level building tool that the designers have used to make all the levels in the game. Because it has a “What you see is what you play” editor, we can immediately play what we are building, as we are building it. Our design process includes play testing each part of the game over and over as it is actually created in the editor, rebuilding everything as many times as necessary to make it cool. Before anything even gets to testing, the designers have already played it over and over again, so we can be sure that it looks and plays well.

GCM:

Can you describe a few of the environments and levels the players will be fighting their way through. Any favorites?

Chris Natsuume:

We don’t have missions, as such. The story just unfolds as you go, and most of the time, you are just trying to get off the island, or keep yourself out of trouble. The game is as much about survival as anything else. The jungle is full of evil mercenaries and… worse. There are evil research laboratories, forgotten jungle temple ruins, old Japanese bunkers and shipwrecks from WWII, bug-infested swamps, crystal clear pools, hidden lagoons, underwater caves, the list goes on. There is no shortage of cool places to go and things to see – and plenty of stuff to blow up when you’re there.

GCM:

What sort of enemies will the player be up against and can you tell us a bit about the AI driving their actions?

Chris Natsuume:

As you have seen in the preview builds, we will have a lot of mercs of different shapes and sizes - with various weapons and strategies. As for rumors of non-human enemies… well, all I can say is that we can neither confirm nor deny these rumors. :-) In many ways, the AI is the heart and soul of the Far Cry gameplay. If you think about FPS games, there are a limited number of things that you can really do at the end of the day – move, shoot, and interact with things, tools, and vehicles. Because we knew from the start that we were going to do something different in the genre, we knew that we would have to change some of these variables radically – we chose what you shoot at and how you shoot it, or more to the point, what makes shooting it different and exciting. Our AI do not just hang out and wait to get shot – they actually respond to player action by seeking cover, calling reinforcements, using mounted weapons and vehicles, or otherwise using their environment to protect themselves and hurt the player. What is critical to understand about this is that none of this is “pre-scripted” – we actually have no idea where the AI will go or what they will do. They actually understand their environments and respond effectively to various forms of stimuli. When they are shot at, they can query their environment for a place to hide. When they want to attack the player, they can develop strategies for surrounding him based on where their friends are, and what kind of training they have had.

GCM:	As for weapons, what sort of arsenal will the player have access to?
Chris Natsuume:	The game is set in the near-future, so there will be no summer-future weapons, like laser pistols or phasers. But we will have a mix of current and slightly near future weapons that are currently known to be in development.

GCM:	Can you give us some examples of the vehicles in Far Cry and their fighting capabilities?
Chris Natsuume:	Single player and multiplayer we have a number of vehicles, including a HMMV, a buggy, an inflatable boat, and some other fun toys – even a hang glider that is testing out to be quite fun. We like it so much that we tore up a couple of levels to make some more cool spaces to use it.

GCM:

About how long do you anticipate the single player game to last and what multiplayer options will be available to add replay value?

Chris Natsuume:

We don’t want to spill the beans on our MP game too much just yet. We are still experimenting with some new ideas, and want to make sure we are having fun with them before we announce them. But there should be no surprises that we will focus our attention on bringing the main strengths of Far Cry into the multiplayer experience: long range gameplay, jungle fighting, vehicles, stealth, and visual beauty.

GCM:

Are there any plans for post-release expansions or tools to support the active MOD community (level editor, etc)?

Chris Natsuume:

We will be releasing a full SDK for the game to the mod community as soon as we can – we are developing a plan for that now, and are hoping to have it out somewhere around the time the game ships – but this is not definite, yet. We actually knew from the beginning that the key to long-term success for the game was in the hardcore and mod community. Because of that, we have built the game from the ground up to be modded – almost anything a mod team will need to alter is available through simple lua scripts: all the AI, vehicle, and weapon logic, for instance. Furthermore, we will ship the complete CryENGINE® Sandbox™ Editor – the same editor we used to make Far Cry. It includes a “What you see is what you play” editor, which allows the player to switch between game and editing mode within seconds. You edit the terrain, the objects, the materials, and all of the flags for hypermarking the environment for the AI with the same simple tool. With all of this at the disposal of the mod community, we hope to see some amazing mods very quickly after it is released.

GCM:

Can you tell us a bit about the game engine behind Far Cry and what type of system gamers will need to enjoy this game?

Chris Natsuume:

First of all, you should know that the CryENGINE is a wholly Crytek produced product that was demonstrated at GDC this year with reasonable acclaim and fanfare. Major modules of the engine include: A massive terrain allowing enormously long view distances, rendering detailed, vast landscapes with a lush environment with detail-level down to pebbles and grass. It supports an enormous amount of vegetation and static objects – we have entire jungle mountainsides shown in real-time – some vistas and gameplay areas are kilometers in size. The polybump technology, which allows models of 100’s of thousands of polys to be rendered through an advanced normal map on a lower poly model, creates easy to render models of great complexity. This allows us to create extremely detailed characters, vehicles, and weapons, as well as detailed walls and game-surfaces, while keeping a reasonable frame rate. There is really no limitation on what this technology could be used for. A new streaming physics system that we use with all characters, vehicles, and rigid bodies, which allows us to dynamically determine which objects to physicalized and when. This gives us the freedom to physicalize just about everything in the world smaller than a jeep - or bigger, if we choose to… If it looks like it should move, it probably does! A revolutionary lighting model that allows us to mix light mapping technology with per pixel lighting to create vividly lit worlds with moving light sources and shadows, but without the usual limitations in design and style that come with per-pixel lighting. And this is only a partial list – there is actually more new and groundbreaking technology in Far Cry than we even want to think about – it’s added years to the lives of the coding staff here - not to mention to the designers who have been through 2 years of constant code development while they were trying to get their levels done! But the final result is a very lush, immerse environment unlike any we have seen before in video games. Our minimum spec machine is a P3-800 Mhz, 256 RAM and a GeForce 3 – this is quite low. Our recommended machine is only a little more butch: P4-1.5 Ghz with 512 RAM and a GeForce 4. Even this is substantially less computer than most soccer moms will be buying come Christmas, much less gamers.

GCM:	Mixing indoor and outdoor environments can be challenging. How does the Far Cry Engine handle these and does it do one better than the other?
Chris Natsuume:	We have worked very hard on the visuals, and a couple of key CryENGINE technologies have really helped us push the envelope, including PolyBump, Dot3 Light mapping, and a complete material system that allows us to seamlessly integrate sound, particles, decals, physical properties, and texture in a single material system that can be applied to anything, from the characters to the trees and rocks.

GCM:	Are there any plans for porting Far Cry to next-gen consoles?
Chris Natsuume:	Sorry, we’re not allowed to discuss the console versions just yet.

GCM:

Thank you for your time. Are there any final impressions that you’d like to leave our readers with?

Chris Natsuume:

We would like to say thank you to all the people who are taking an interest in Far Cry. We are genuinely grateful for all the attention we have gotten in the last few months, and we can’t wait to deliver something to these people who are already showing us so much support! If anyone has any other questions, we will be opening the official Far Cry website at www.farcry-thegame.com at the end of the month (there is already a teaser website there with a discussion board), and Crytek developers will be there to answer any other questions anyone might have. Please come check it out!