Far Cry - On this day

At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the first-person shooter genre was looking for ways to escape the format of the so-called "corridor shooter". It was no longer interesting for the players to wander through the uniform corridors that were once an integral part of the level design in Wolfenstein and Doom.

The audience was looking for freedom, so more and more games were placed in open spaces. One of the milestones in such a design was the original Far Cry, a PC exclusive that offered an adventure to remember exactly 18 years ago.

Far Cry has cast us in the role of Jack Carver, a powerlifter who finds himself on a cruise around the Micronesian Islands with a handsome woman. However, his vacation cannot pass peacefully because after the shipwreck he ends up in the archipelago with mercenaries and mutants created by Dr. Krieger’s genetic experiments! To someone who hasn’t played this now, it probably sounds silly, but we adored stories like this 18 years ago.

Far Cry for the most part had levels we could access from whichever direction we wanted. It was still a format of running from point A to point B, but we could simply avoid some conflicts by sneaking in or using a vehicle or hovercraft.

The main attraction of this game was its graphics, which were extremely advanced in terms of time. Far Cry was the most beautiful game you could play on a PC in 2004, and it held that title to its maximum detail two years later. But for serious gaming, you needed a graphics card of at least 256 MB along with a Pentium 4! It was no small thing at the time.

The game picked up praise in the PC version, so Ubisoft moved it to consoles faster and better. However, Far Cry Instincts for PS2 and Xbox was a completely different game that only had a similar premise with the PC version but was far more linear.

Ironically, that release received several more sequels and remakes (FC Instincts Evolution, Predator, Vengeance) that never appeared on PC. Ultimately, the real Far Cry on the PS3 and X360 consoles came only in 2014 as part of the Far Cry Classic release.

Crytek's development team, meanwhile, switched to developing Crysis, and in 2008 Ubisoft turned Far Cry into a world-famous franchise.