Gameplay

Gameplay will revolve around the player character’s manhunt through a fictional region of Africa and will be entirely open-ended, with the player being able to ally with anyone he/she chooses. The player’s choices are completely unfettered, giving a sandbox style of gameplay and allowing the story to progress at the speed the player chooses. Instead of using individual maps, the game will take place in a sprawling African landscape, with terrain ranging from savannah to jungle. The gameplay area will be 50 km2 (19.3 sq mi). Some members of the Ubisoft Montreal team spent two weeks in several locations in Africa filming and photographing native wildlife. The team will use the animal footage and environment photos to create an extremely realistic environment.

The player’s actions may also have a lasting effect on the environment: for example, one of the missions shown so far by the developers had the player sabotage a pipeline owned by one of the factions that’s pumping fresh water from a lake to a neighboring country, exchanging it for arms and munition. After the player destroys it, part of the surrounding area becomes flooded, including a mine where another mission may take place.

Various factions and vehicles will be featured; enemies will include human mercenaries, but sci-fi creatures such as the mutants from Far Cry will not be featured. Furthermore, the player’s feral abilities introduced in Far Cry Instincts and its expansions will not be returning in Far Cry 2. A dynamic weather system has been added that varies the weather based on the player’s ability – if the player is doing exceptionally well the sky will be clear and sunny, but if problems arise the sky will become dark and stormy.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer in Far Cry 2 attempts to include the dynamic elements of the singleplayer game (such as fire propagation) and to provide as accessible gameplay as possible so that it is available to all skill levels and so that players have specific gameplay aspects to keep in mind when designing their own maps in the map editor.

There can be up to twenty players per map, and the game will ship with fourteen developer-designed maps ranging from the slightly undersized to the modestly corpulent.
Setting and plot

One of the possible player characters.

Far Cry 2 abandons the science fiction aspects of its predecessor in favor of a more realistic setting. The game will take place in a small, fictional, central-African nation that is in a state of civil war. The name of the country is Mwanzo. The protagonist of previous Far Cry games, Jack Carver, will not be featured in this game. When Ubisoft interviewed players about the original Far Cry in their research for this game, the interviewees didn’t find the character very memorable or likeable. However in the “no heroes” trailer for Farcry 2 you see a man stab and kick the player to the ground who’s face looks much like Jack’s face from the computer version. As a result, in the sequel the player will be able to choose from nine different characters to play, each with a unique look and back story. All of the playable characters will be different types of mercenaries. The playable characters the player does not choose to play will become non-player characters who are friends of the player’s character and who can be found around the in-game nation.

According to the game’s plot, the nation’s government has recently collapsed, leaving two major factions vying for control. At war are the United Front for Liberation and Labor (UFLL, led by Addi Mbantuwe, a former opposition leader) and the Alliance for Popular Resistance (APR, led by Oliver Tambossa, Chief of Staff for the former government). Both factions have claimed that they have the people’s interests at heart, but both have shown signs of ruthlessness, warmongering, greed, and a general disregard for the well-being of the people. Both sides have hired many foreign mercenaries to bolster their strength over the course of the conflict.

Read more at Wikipedia

Far Cry 2 on Amazon

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Well, now that Spore has been officially released many gamers are ripping the game apart, because of DRM troubles, incompatibilities, and more over on Amazon.

In fact, Ars Technica wrote a review of Spore and descriped the game as:

Spore had begun to feel like the world’s largest kiddie pool: five miles wide and two feet deep

There is also a new article on Ars Technica detailing how Gamers fight back against lackluster Spore gameplay, bad DRM

I personally haven’t rushed out to buy a copy of Spore because I wanted to wait and see if the game would live up to the hype, and it looks like that was a good decision to me.

So, what do you think of Spore? Did you pre-order or rush out and buy the game?

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Theirry Nguyen has written what appears to be the very first full review of Spore over at 1up.  You can read the full review at: http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3169768&p=1, or read some of the highlights here:

Leave it to iconic game designer and Maxis cofounder Will Wright to one-up his own work on The Sims. While his dollhouse/life-drama simulator became phenomenally successful, he didn’t just sit back and collect simoleans. After making a game about human lives, he started working on (and has finally released) Spore, which Wright himself nicknamed “SimEverything,” since its focus extends beyond humanity and tackles life on a…well, galactic scale. If you really need a quick one-line summary of what Spore is, I guess I’d describe it as “intelligent design via minigames.” The Spore “plot” (it’s got one, honest) is about your species’ multistage journey from panspermia all the way to the center of the galaxy. You start your run of minigames with the Cell stage (where you’re just a single-celled organism munching at whatever you can get) and work your way through the Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Space stages.

This era-spanning scope allows for Spore to feel like a different game at any particular moment, depending on what stage you’re in. To use the language of other games, the Cell stage resembles flOw (but with more purpose); the Creature stage feels like a mashup of World of WarCraft, The Sims, and, er, Simon Says; the Tribal stage plays like an elementary real-time strategy game; the Civilization stage is sort of like a real-time version of, well, Civilization; and finally, the Space stage makes me feel like I’m in a hybrid of Master of Orion and Wing Commander: Privateer.

Sounds like Spore is quite a mashup of gameplay and strategies, in fact it’s such a mashup, that the final grade was a B+ for Spore.

As I mentioned earlier, strictly as a game, Spore’s a flawed effort in five different genres, smushed together in a casual-player-friendly manner. But as a tangible representation of intelligent design, with an emphasis on creation and sharing, it falls perfectly in line with the rest of Will Wright’s work. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s definitely one that any serious gamer should try.

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