14 DAY TRIAL // Far Cry 2 was a very good game that offered players quite a lot of interesting features, never employed in any other titles, and which took realism to new heights in game design. From the weapons that begin to jam if you use them too much, to the fact that you need to fix your car in order to keep it running, everything seems real and believable.
We reviewed it and praised it quite a lot because it definitely changed the way players looked at other shooters. One of the most interesting features of the game was undoubtedly the fire. It spread on the African savanna like... wildfire, scorching everything in its path. The wind or the rain had a serious impact on it and, depending on your goal, it could either help you or really hurt you.
Jean-Francois Lévesque is the man who is entirely responsible for the fire in this great game. He recently talked with GamaSutra about his work on the Ubisoft Montreal team and how the fire, which started off as something quite insignificant, became one of the strongest selling points of the game. He went on to say that, originally, it was intended to burn on a surface of almost 10 by 10 meters, so that it wouldn't affect the framerate of the game.
"The fire didn’t start as something really ambitious from the beginning. Before technical director Dominic Guay assigned me to fire propagation, the game was supposed to have that feature, but nobody was working on it. He explained that the player would have a flamethrower and some Molotov cocktails to play with, but that explosions and other sources of heat might set fire too. Fire would propagate only on small predefined patches of grass no bigger than 10 meters by 10 meters, and on a very limited set of small objects."
But then things got a bit more complicated, as the executives of the game really liked this feature and demanded that it would be implemented on a larger scale. "The management team in Paris loved the fire so much, they asked that the entire savanna and every tree be capable of catching fire and propagating it. Since I was junior and had no idea how complicated it was going to be, I agreed. That’s how it turned out to become an important feature of the game."
Quite an interesting story, and it’s really nice to hear that such highly praised features started off very small and because of a few lucky decisions, they became what they are today. No doubt the fire of Far Cry 2 is something a lot of players will remember and it will be pretty hard for any other game to reach the benchmark it has set.