Far Cry 2 - PC - PC - News - HEXUS.net

Lovely weather today...

The AI is autonomous, meaning that they’ll go about their business if you’re not interacting with them. So as night falls they’ll light fires, eat and evening meal and go to sleep, but if you go in and disturb them they’ll react accordingly. Steel their jeep and they’ll chase after you in another, if they have one. Wipe out most of a squad chasing you and the others may become less aggressive…

Now the weather effects deserve a mention as, to be honest, they’re bloody stunning. You’ve got a full night/day cycle, which runs between 4 and 6 times faster than real time, but on top of that you’ve got a weather system hovering overhead. Ubisoft are using this to highlight moods within the game, so if you’re doing badly, the skies will darken, the light dims accordingly and things look grim. Should your buddy, if he’s there, go down under enemy fire, you might even get a full blown storm raging to emphasise the loss.

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But you can use the weather to your advantage as the scenery isn’t just there as decoration… it, like the buildings, is interactive too. So trees can be shot and branches stripped away, you can track enemies by the trails they leave in the grass and they can do the same to you. But the really impressive bit is how the weather actually affects the game world.

If there’s a stiff breeze blowing, branches might snap off trees and blow away, which is nice to watch but far more useful is the grass. Say you wanted to flush out some bad guys hiding up ahead… why not get upwind and start a grass fire, which will be driven across the plain by the wind, lighting up trees and anything flammable in its path. You have to see it in action to see how impressive this is but it’s damn good.

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Now lastly, a quick word about the storyline which is sort of linear but also sort of open. The idea is that you play one side off against the other, doing a mission here and there for each faction of the war. Your success and how you achieved it affects your reputation and this in turn affects how NPCs deal with you. Kill everyone all the time and you’ll be feared by the locals and hated by one side. The trick is to try and strike a balance which’ll get you closer to your goal.

Don’t worry though, you don’t have to be goody two shoes… you can still complete the game being a completely blood thirsty git, it’ll just be a fair bit tougher in places.