My favorites of the past few years are DOOM3, Prey and F.E.A.R., all of them higly polished FPS games that put Far Cry's gameplay to shame, not to mention the architecture showed off in those games. I don't really care about engines that can do the most pretty outside environments, since that's not the environment I would want to experience a story in. I personally prefer dark and cramped indoor spaces to experience a story, than a wide open outdoor environment as showcased in Far Cry.
On another note, why do you think nobody plays Far Cry these days, while games like Quake are still being played quite a lot? Could it be the hollow gameplay Far Cry has? Or it's buggy network code? Or? I don't know...
Yes, we get into player choice here. I was tired and burned out on the typical linear indoor dark and gloomy (no pun intended) scenario so when Far Cry came out with it's miles of beautiful islands where you could go anywhere any way (swim, boat or fly), I thought it was finally something different and it was great.
Why no one plays Far Cry? I thought that was obvious. It is still too hardware intensive to run on 90% of the computers that are running today.
It DOES have buggy network code. No doubt about it. But it was originally not meant to be networked. I can't remember the origins very well, but it started as
X-Isle (17 MB .avi) a prehistoric island kind of thing. For those that have never seen a sample of Far Cry in action so to speak,
here is the teaser (21 MB .mp3) for the Obsidean Edge mod which shows Far Cry's game play pretty well.
I do understand that FEAR is pretty good and will have to give that a try. It is one I missed and sounds like I should try it.
