Far Cry 2

[Executor32]

It happens with shadows from geometry too, though, not just leaves. I also noticed the same thing in Ass Creed with the shadows, even at the highest setting. I think it's actually due to the shadow maps themselves.

[Stark]

I actually haven't seen this effect, alhtough I've turned shadows down to low after playing on medium for a while, to allow me to turn some other things up. Bloody shadows. It's strange, since I believe Darwin has a similar card to mine.

[Executor32]

Here's a shot of the same phenomenon in Ass Creed:




Notice the very sharp difference between the left and right halves of the unshadowed spot above the window.

[charlemagne]

I'm on a similar rig, and I've got the same experience - Crysis didn't need the huge computer ignorant people like to think, but I can run Far Cry on medium-high (no I'm not using their stupid ZOMG HUGE names) with Dx10 and all the post effects on.

Maybe I should think about upgrading to Vista now, then. I figured my machine was still to weak to run games well under Vista, so I'm still on XP. But I guess if Farcry 2 would run fine, my "main game" (which is Lord of the Rings Online) would run like hell still.

I must say that I enjoy the game a lot, thus far I love the perceived open-world-feeling. It's refreshing to get a mission and then have to hike to the bad guys yourself instead of just being thrown in the middle of the action.

I had a blast yesterday doing the first real mission, I took the blue side-mission, drove to the coordinate guy's house, and got almost wasted by just driving up to it. I tried to get to the front crouching through bushes, but I got pinned down and firing blindly into the foilage didn't accomplish anything. So I circled the house, wasted the guys at the waterfront, took the stairs, and killed the guards while they were still looking in the direction of my initial assault. Picked them off, talked to the guy upstairs then shot im in the head. Then I got out, repaired my Jeep and drove to the next circle on the map, and made the mistake of just driving through a checkpoint - I was thinking in MMO terms, like "I'll lose those stupid mobs again", but no, they kept chasing me and blew up my car as I was stopping to man the turret.

So I have to start the mission from the beginning because my last save was some time ago, but it's cool, because I can use the practice. I seriously suck at shooting guys, especially in thick foliage.

[CaptHawkeye]

Yeah, the suppressed pistol is accurate enough to snipe with out to mid range, and it's cheap as fuck. Speaking of weapon issues, I'm really quite impressed overall with the lack of conefire and forced weapon balancing. The machine pistols are really quite effective, only limited by the lack of pickups for their ammotype on badguys, whereas I expected them to be super-retarded conefire silliness.
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Yeah, i'm happy to play a game where a shotgun is realistically accurate for once. *Gasp* The SPAS-12 and USAS are both shotguns...and semi auto! That's wrong! Video games have taught me semi auto shotguns don't exist and can't be accurate beyond 10 meters!

It's stupid that everyone in the cease fire zones just KNOWS where you are, they even know who was shot and who did the firing when you're running around with silencers or knifing people.

[Stark]

I'm eagerly awaiting mods to remove some of the ingame tidying-up - notably, to kill the time limit that appears to exist on fire, and dramatically extend the respawn time (or distance) of guard posts. Fire seems to stop spreading and burn itself out regardless of available fuel, which is a shame given how awesome it is. I finally bothered to buy the flare gun and it's awesome; 8 shots of flares that explode after a certain time spreading incendiary - an extremely effective firestarter that has a much larger area and is way more accurate than the molotovs.

[CaptHawkeye]

I kind of went easy on the limited fires you can start with explosives, which aren't really intended to start fires per design and molotovs, which are the game's "starting" fire weapon. I haven't even bothered getting the Flare Gun and Flamethrower yet out of the crippling fear they wouldn't be much more useful than the molotovs. Then again, the molotovs in the game are essentially useless for anything other than starting fires. Other than that the main character can throw them notably farther than the grenades.

Alas, getting the game on a console has essentially doomed me to its current state. Their are a lot of things that could fixed very simply. The price I pay for gaurunteed high-performance was the loss of player built mods. I've heard rumors that the developers want to make player mods available on Live and PSN, but everytime I hear a DLC rumor I can only laugh at what will happen.

A. Nothing.

B. An extra multiplayer map.

C. Stupid "making of" movies.

[Stark]

Man, the forced morality silliness is dumb. Yeah, half a dozen goombas can stop my three heavily-armed mercenaries getting away, even after I sniped half of them from a distance... because PLOT LOL. There's even a boat right there. Lame.

[CaptHawkeye]

I take it you just went through that incredibly lame "lawl chose the church or the bar" scenario that is so BLATENTLY scripted. I was playing it and doing a great job holding everyone off when my health just went from 100+full syrettes to ZERO instantly. What bullshit.

[Stark]

Don't forget the guys who attack it are largely invincible while animating their way in the windows, and must have beamed down from the mothership because there was noone out there.

It boggles my mind that they expect me to be cool with half the cast now being dead because they're too hopeless to kill TWO guys and jump on a boat. My feelings towards this game have now pretty much reversed; I was enjoying sandbox shit and burning things, but that's over now and it's all about scripted, forced bullshit that makes zero sense. Last time I died Singh killed like a dozen dudes with his PK, but now he can't kill two. PLOT!

[CaptHawkeye]

The execution is just so half assed. They could have done a waaaay better job at any point in that fight. You and the buds could have jumped on that boat and escaped down the river. It would have been EASY for the engine and wouldn't challenge the main plot. I can't understand it. I mean, no one on the development team looked at this section and went "we can do a better job than that."?

Oh well. It's an FPS and not to be mistaken for anything else. It's just an FPS that occurs in a game world rather than levels.

[Darwin]

I'm on a similar rig, and I've got the same experience - Crysis didn't need the huge computer ignorant people like to think, but I can run Far Cry on medium-high (no I'm not using their stupid ZOMG HUGE names) with Dx10 and all the post effects on.

Maybe I should think about upgrading to Vista now, then. I figured my machine was still to weak to run games well under Vista, so I'm still on XP. But I guess if Farcry 2 would run fine, my "main game" (which is Lord of the Rings Online) would run like hell still.

Far Cry 2, as a possible first, gets a decent performance boost when running in DX10.

[Stark]

Really? I'm using Dx10 and haven't got around to testing Dx9 yet, but I was expecting Dx10 to be slower as usual. That's pretty neat (although my card apparently can't do HDR under Dx10).

Oh and with shadows set to low (or 'high' or whatever the fuck they call it) I see the diamond thing you mentioned earlier, and there's a very pronouced triangle of shadow-quality increase in front of me.

[charlemagne]

Far Cry 2, as a possible first, gets a decent performance boost when running in DX10.

That's interesting, hopefully that's a trend that'll continue. But I think I'll still wait a couple of months and upgrade my CPU eventually, it runs fine and cool overclocked to 2100 Mhz right now, but I still don't feel that there's enough power to comfortably run Vista on my machine.

On the heavy scripting, well that's really fucking lame. Is it really that hard to account for various possible outcomes of a certain situation, or are developers just that fucking lazy to go "screw that, too much thinking on our part involved, let's just script it"?

[Stark]

That's interesting, hopefully that's a trend that'll continue. But I think I'll still wait a couple of months and upgrade my CPU eventually, it runs fine and cool overclocked to 2100 Mhz right now, but I still don't feel that there's enough power to comfortably run Vista on my machine.

Eh? I didn't notice any performance hit when I moved to Vista, and since I had 2gb RAM at the time the increased usage didn't bother me.

[charlemagne]

Eh? I didn't notice any performance hit when I moved to Vista, and since I had 2gb RAM at the time the increased usage didn't bother me.

Hmmmm, I shall investigate this. I was under the untested prejudice of "newer windows version = slower on same hardware".

[Stark]

There's a significant hit RAM-wise, and I heard much the same stuff about an overall performance drop, but the only thing I've noticed is games that run faster, alt-tabbing now working, things like that. Dx10 is still arse, and it's a Vista thing, so maybe that's what people mean.

[Flash]

The insta-spawning checkpoints are really starting to piss me off. I went through the same checkpoint three times in the space of five minutes last night, and had to clear it out each time. And it wasn't like I went a significant distance from the point either - maybe a couple of hundred meters away on either side. All they need to do is turn down the respawn times, and this really wouldn't be a problem.

[charlemagne]

The insta-spawning checkpoints are really starting to piss me off. I went through the same checkpoint three times in the space of five minutes last night, and had to clear it out each time. And it wasn't like I went a significant distance from the point either - maybe a couple of hundred meters away on either side. All they need to do is turn down the respawn times, and this really wouldn't be a problem.

Yeah, the respawn seems to be based not on time, but on distance, and that distance is too low. Respawn should be like 10 minutes, because it's really stupid that the same guys you took out would be back so fast.

There's a significant hit RAM-wise, and I heard much the same stuff about an overall performance drop, but the only thing I've noticed is games that run faster, alt-tabbing now working, things like that. Dx10 is still arse, and it's a Vista thing, so maybe that's what people mean.

I guess I really should start thinking about getting Vista 64 Bit then. I have 4 GB RAM anywaysy which should be enough (I know that XP can only use 4 GB - gfx ram, but they don't sell 1 1/2 GB bars )

[Stark]

Frankly I agree with JSF and Flash that the spawning should be replaced by trucks delivering dudes; at least you'd be able to detect their approach, spot the extra trucks as you return, intercept them, take them out with IEDs, etc. Not 'they beam down from the moonbase when you get 100m away'. What's fucking annoying is that in some missions they'll fire off flares to summon reinforcements - this would be a great way to clue the player in that an area has been respawned/will be respawned shortly.

And yeah, when I went to Vista I bought another 4 gig for no reason, so who cares if Vista has RAM overhead.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Sadly I really can't think of any game where respawning dudes is handled in a sensible way like trucks

[Zac Naloen]

What I find annoying is that there are no civilians.

There's no "life" to the game at all.

[Stark]

And all the life that exists wants to kill you. Even random people driving their sedan down the road decide to kill you ON SIGHT even if they pass you at 100kmh.

I mean, you'd think you'd start wearing a disguise or something.

[JointStrikeFighter]

What I find annoying is that there are no civilians.

There's no "life" to the game at all.

There are useless civilians in the opening sequence and the places you get malaria meds lol.

[Zac Naloen]

When I first about the game as a living world, you know like the wild life stuff I A. Expected more wild life and some predators and B. Expected more than just people that want to kill me versus my friends.