First person shooters have achieved, over the years, what no
other genre could accomplish. They deliver an efficient mix of high replay
value, story and campaigns that are worthy of the likes of big Hollywood
blockbusters, and of course more bullets than you can count. I personally will
not deny that, as relaxed as I am as a person, nothing will beat a good session
of multiplayer fragging to calm my nerves. But are we getting anything new
nowadays?
You all the know the undying Call of Duty series – now with
it’s eighth edition – and even though it has been selling like no other
entertainment franchise, each new title is not an innovation, but a mere
updated version of the previous title. Now relax, and don’t get all fussy, this
is not what we’re here for. We’re here to discover ingenuity in a first person
shooter game, something fun, exciting and authentically new, that we have been
craving for a while. This, my friends, is the reason why I flew to London for literally
24 hours: to bring a fresh behind-the scene-look at Ubisoft’s upcoming Far Cry
3.
Previewed recently right here on At7addak, Far Cry 3 tells
the story of one Jason Brody, who finds himself lost in a tropical island (like
in the original title), and has to survive in a world that has lost all sense
of morality. In this pristine paradise, you man heavy machine guns, slam sniper
fire into enemies and stab one guy in the neck and, right after, throw the
knife into his buddy. Murderous and environmentally conscious. All the latest
trailers have been wonderful and mouthwatering, but solely focused on the single
player aspect of Far Cry 3. Where’s the multiplayer side of the game Ubisoft?
Well they’re about to unveil it to us.
All the way in Shoreditch, London (3500km away from Beirut),
at 73 Leonard Street, I enter Blackhall Studios, an art gallery taken over by
Vaas Montenegro’s militia men. It’s Far Cry 3 everywhere, and I’m not
complaining. We sat down in our chairs, visibly impressed. Enter Daniel Berlin,
Far Cry 3’s Game Designer at Massive Entertainment (part of Ubisoft’s
studios).
Berlin will be our host for the show, unveiling to our
craving eyes the multiplayer’s side of Ubisoft’s upcoming crazy shooter. And
what better man for the job than this Swedish former tattoo artist, now in
charge of designing Far Cry 3’s Multiplayer. He’s bringing his expertise from
Massive’s previous’ titles, World in Conflict and World in Conflict: Soviet
Assault.
Berlin started off with an open question, that himself and
his team had to scrub their heads for: Why do friends matter? Well, the only
way to survive this island of insanity is to play with allies. The single
player is already telling the story of Brody and his friends working together
side by side to escape the islands, so obviously the multiplayer segment had to
follow on the same theme. What does that mean for Far Cry 3?
Massive Studios has a lot of online gaming expertise (with
the World in Conflict series), and they noticed over time that the only team-based
interaction you get with your allies is the fact that you don’t shoot them.
And he’s right. There are no combo moves, no co-op attacks;
there’s no real support from your online friends in all of our first person
shooters. There’s no real feeling of joining hands and building something. The
closest a game has come to doing this has most probably been through infamous
class system, like with the caretaker Assault class in Battlefield 3, but that’
s about it. What if your teammate needs help or to be revived? You would love
to help them, but you’re a recon class. Or another example is that you need a
specific class to use a C4 and blow a wall to advance, but since no one on your
team is that class, the whole team effort is lost and falls apart. You see
where I’m going here?
What Massive did was create a series of team-play features
and interactive mechanics. The first one of them is the Battle Cry. Now don’t
go picturing yourself doing a "Fus Roh Dah" at people while shooting them with an
AK47, this is no Skyrim. There are no fantasy elements in the game, as the team
is working hard on bringing true-life achievement and hardship to the game.
Battle Cry(s) are rally shouts, a way to boost your teammates
in battle, making them do things like reload quicker, run faster, gain health
boosts, or even be more accurate, all depending on the class you chose. This
Battle Cry affects not only one person, but also the entire group of allies in
your vicinity. But what do you get in return? Well, you gain Team Support
Points. Now we will get back to those later on, but for the meantime let’s keep
on talking about team play interactions.
Another one of those team-based features is reviving
teammates. There’s no “I” in teamwork, and as you know from numerous
multiplayer first person shooters, this action is not new. Nevertheless,
reviving a teammate in Far Cry 3 is new from the core. Because it is not class
specific, anyone can help you get back on your feet, a perfect continuation of
the Far Cry 2 legacy. Getting shot down will put you in a state where you can
hang on to your life (by bashing the A/X button) until someone can come and
help you out. Now, you might have already guessed it, reviving your ally will
also give team support points.
The last team-play feature is tagging enemies. A trick most
Battlefield veterans are aware of, tagging enemies is basically pointing out to
your teammates where your foes are, or even indicating points of interest
(Defend this cache, destroy this, etc.). You can also use this feature to tag
downed teammates, letting them know that you’re on your way to help them out
(kind of like saying “Hang on brother, I’m going to get you out of here). This
is a simple yet very smart concept a lot of shooters should’ve done before,
because honestly it sucks when you’re laying there bleeding to death, clinging
to your last bit of health desperately, until you finally see your allies
passing by, neglecting you. Team support points? Yup, more of those fishy
points.
Berlin followed up by explaining to us that what they did
with the Battle Cry, Reviving Teammates and Tagging Enemies is to build
something called Team-play Economy.
A legacy of Massive’s previous titles, the World in Conflict
series, Berlin’s team decided to bring back the same core idea of Tactical Aid.
Points earned by destroying enemy units or capturing command points in World in
Conflict were spent on heavy long-range fire support, extra units, recon radar and
heavy fire support like air strikes, napalm, chemical bombs, carpet bombs, and
even nukes. You see where we’re going?
On the side of the game’s HUD is a small vertical bar that
gets filled with each team-support point you get, giving you access to
team-support weapons. At the moment, we only know of three, which are part of
three tiers - or levels - of weapons. The first tier is a basically a recon
radar, showing your enemies on the map. The second is Psyche Gas: a very
interesting weapon, which brings down the insanity of the island for a short
period to an area. Now what does that mean? Simply put, the area affected by
the gas puts enemies and friends in a state of hallucination: you start hearing
creepy whispers, seeing weird stuff, and your allies and foes start looking
like dark demons with glowing eyes. If you’re already the delirious type you
might even see a pink Dumbo flying around (just kidding).
As highly effective as this weapon seems, the consequences
can be harmful for numerous reasons if you’re not smart enough when using it.
Dropping the Psyche Gas also turns friendly fire on, which means that since
your allies and foes both look like dark creatures now, you might shoot a
friend mistakably thinking it’s a stalking enemy. This is why it helps to be a
loyal teamwork-based player – instead of a lone wolf – you’ll know who to shoot
and who to help. The last tier is a high effective fire support weapon, such
as a bomb drop or napalm strike.
Berlin continued by telling us that they want to give back
to the community for their gaming time in both the virtual battle and one being
fought across couches everywhere. Massive found a fun and interactive way to
congratulate the winning team leaders (depending on how many points they got at
the end of the match): by allowing them to humiliate the opponent team’s
leader, in an end-of-match interactive sequence. So what is that? You will
basically be seeing yourself along with the second and third best players on
your team kneeling in front of the opposing leader, where you can either show
him mercy – which I doubt many of you will – or embarrass him in front of
everyone by punching him gruesomely to the ground. Eat dirt sucker! That’s what
you get when you mess with the best!
We jump now to a brand new and exciting multiplayer mode,
built specifically for Far Cry 3 called Firestorm. No my friends, this is not
an intense flamethrower roasting match, but maybe one of the most genuine and
hardest types of match I’ve ever heard of.
Firestorm is based, yet again, on a previous idea from World
in Conflict, with a touch of Fire, which was one of the most important elements
of Far Cry 2. The layout is simple. Each team has two supply depots, and your
objective is to ignite each of the supply depot to start a fire. Sounds simple?
Think again.
Igniting one supply depot doesn’t suffice to win the
advantage because you will need to rush to the second point, to build a bigger
fire before the first is put out, while constantly defending your own depots
and taking into consideration that the map layout has changed due to the fire. As
if that wasn’t enough, once this Firestorm is initiated, you’ll need to fight
inside this inferno of death to control the second stage, a single node, in
which you must capture the communications technology to call your aerial
support to drop gasoline onto the fire, winning the match. If you’re on the
opposing team, and both your supply depots are on fire, you can reset the
course of the match, by capturing the radar and calling a plane to drop water
and extinguish the fire.
Berlin turned the page now to a new section of Far Cry 3’s
innovative features, one that will bring real world events and accomplishments
to the game. As every multiplayer match is done, you might be lucky enough to
find Intel assets. Now what’s the point of these?
In a short and fun video, Massive shows off one person who
has been playing Far Cry 3 multiplayer for a while and has received encoded
Intel via the game for a powerful new weapon. To decode the data, he will need
time, but can boost the decryption process by recruiting friends to help via cross-platform
gaming apps (most probably iOS, Android and Browser-based applications). This
will generate faster processing of the data that you can do at work, in class
during these boring math courses or even on the bus. It’s all asynchronous via
cloud gaming, and it’s directly transferred to your Far Cry 3 account.
After jumping down to a new room with my fellow colleagues in
the press, we tried out two multiplayer gaming modes (Domination and
Firestorm), in a jungle themed room, filled with guerrilla PCs hooked to Lan. As
we were dropped right into the mood, we put on our headsets, grabbed our Xbox
controllers and had a go at this game. Let me tell you one simple word to
describe it: FUN!
I was afraid of Far Cry 3 not reaching my expectations,
since the FPS is a gaming genre that is overused in the industry. We have too
many shooters nowadays, and I was afraid that the thrill couldn’t be found, but
Massive proved me wrong.
The controls are slick and smooth, with your usual Takedowns
here and there, and well-designed guns. The weapons are not overpowered, and
you get the feel of guerrilla warfare properly, with classic AK-47s and good
old school pump actions.
The team-support points are genuinely distributed, stopping
you at any attempt to find flaws or exploits to get these Team-Support weapons.
One thing I didn’t like, though, was the button combination for Battle Cry;
pressing both thumbsticks down felt rather unnatural and quite tricky, as I
would end up trying to knife someone or starting a sprint instead. Still this
is too early to talk about bugs, as it’s a pre-alpha build of the game.
Nevertheless, Far Cry 3 feels great, and I’m really excited
to see the final product. This is a serious attempt to bring something fresh
and new to a gaming genre that is getting too repetitive and concerned with
yearly sequels, with your typical shades of grey and brown. Far Cry 3 is
colorful and bright; it’s a dangerous paradise welcoming my wildest dreams and
daring me to survive.
There you have it guys; this is the first part of our Far
Cry 3 Multiplayer preview. Tune in tomorrow for an exciting interview with the
game’s developer to find out more about it. In the meantime, clean your
machetes; it’s going to get bloody.
Ozimandus has been reviewing games and gadgets since 2003. He's not afraid of speaking his mind, and loves to share his love of everything geeky.