He slowly places his hand on the barrel of your pistol. Or, if you used up your healing items on yourself during the encounter, you might not have what you need to help him at all, and when you kneel down to help him, he will instead beg you to put him out of his misery. Or, maybe the damage is too severe for a boost of adrenaline to get him back onto his feet. Maybe you have enough medical syrettes on you to bring Xianyong back. Then, one after another, Crowbcat shows the possible outcomes. Xianyong Bai, Crowbcat’s in-game AI “buddy,” falls to one knee and gasps for breath. After demonstrating how, in Far Cry 5, the player can endlessly revive their AI-controlled “Guns for Hire,” Crowbcat jumps back to Far Cry 2 one last time.
![far cry 2 release date far cry 2 release date](https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/49/48685/auto/kCC8d0i.png)
The second peak in “Far Cry 2 details vs Far Cry 5” is, of course, at the end. The way it communicates this risk of finality is part of what makes Far Cry 2 so powerful (and what made Ben Abraham’s “Permanent Death” such a great exploration of the game). AI companions, once earned, are yours forever. Fire will not take leaves from the branches of its trees. Outside of its cynical endings, Far Cry 5 can’t conceive of this sort of risk or finality.
![far cry 2 release date far cry 2 release date](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gWOI5VEG_5Y/maxresdefault.jpg)
Healing looks painful, and in the case of drowning, death looks even worse. If there’s a through line in this video, it’s an unspoken argument that risk is real in Far Cry 2, for the player, their companions, and their enemies. There are even ways that aren’t explicitly compared in Crowbcat’s editing, but which still are noticeable here, like the rapid-fire, anxiety-inducing way that every character in Far Cry 2 speaks. Each of those individual elements is one color in the systemic palette, a way that the developers were able to communicate something like a cinematographer's style or a novelist’s voice. What this video does is explain that there isn’t one reason, it’s about how all of these details come together in Far Cry 2. Nothing ever felt like that for me in Far Cry 5, and I could never point to one specific reason why. The ambient chirping and buzzing of insects and birds rises to crescendo in the absence of combat. They finally rest their back against a nearby rock, covered by the drifting shadow of a nearby tree. After being shot in the leg, an enemy falls to the ground, then struggles back up to a limping gait, dragging himself through the waving grass towards cover.
![far cry 2 release date far cry 2 release date](https://nemuiblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/far-cry-2-infamous-2-1600x900.jpeg)
The first comes early, just three-and-a-half minutes in.
![far cry 2 release date far cry 2 release date](https://www.aroged.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Ubisoft-planned-to-make-the-main-character-of-Far-Cry.jpg)
After all, any argument like this is going to be reductive, and Crowbcat even notes this in the description, writing “FC5 has its own attention to details that FC2 doesn't have, this comparison doesn't mean FC5 has nothing to show.” But because Crowbcat never speaks in the video, Far Cry 2 is able speak for itself, and as the details piled up, one after the other, I found myself aching to play Far Cry 2 again. This sort of point-by-point argument for why Thing A is better than Thing B has always rubbed me the wrong way, especially when I’m a fan of Thing A. But in action… none of it bothers me, and I’ve never quite been able to put a finger on why that is, besides vague allusions to subjective taste. Yet time and again, the response I hear from non-fans is that most of those things are actually pains for them, and on paper I get it. Though it still offered a familiar power fantasy-guy with gun gets over his head-it did so in ways that, to use a phrase from Cameron Kunzelman, “altered the conditions of that fantasy.”īy now, you probably already know how the rest of this conversation goes, right? I bring up the guns jamming, the malaria, the feeling of powerlessness and player-hostility, the Nietzsche quotes, the systemically driven anecdotes that the folks at Idle Thumbs succinctly summed up as “grenades rolling down hills.” If you love Far Cry 2 you’re probably nodding along to all of that. When it released in 2008, Far Cry 2 offered such a unique, different take on the first person shooter than the (then recently) ascendent model that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare did. Which is why, when people ask me why I fell in love with Far Cry 2, it’s easy to answer: It felt like it came from another world. I take every chance I can to revisit it in streams, write about it in articles, and even delve into it more deeply in conference talks. It’s fair to say that my love for Far Cry 2 is well recorded.