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Last-gen revisited: Far Cry 4

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  • Last-gen revisited: Far Cry 4

    Did last-gen simply run out of steam? Xbox 360 launched in 2005, with its successor taking eight years to arrive - three years longer than the console lifecycle established by the first two PlayStations. Artificially extended due to rising software development costs and the urge for Sony and Microsoft to maximise profits from hardware sales, the prolonged life of these consoles was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, the need to upgrade was staved off, but on the other, there was undoubtedly the sense that these machines were hitting their limits in their twilight years. Far Cry 3 is a perfect example - a game that wowed with its scale and ambition, held back by its rather wobbly performance on console. This year's instalment emphasises the wall developers hit - Far Cry 4 is bigger and better than its predecessor, but the problems faced by its predecessor on last-gen console are just as pronounced, if not more so.
    Ubisoft's latest Dunia engine-powered magnum opus is simply beautiful on Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Could it be that the latest iterations of the tech were always designed with next-gen architecture in mind? Triple-A games take years to develop, and nobody quite knew when the 360 and PS3 replacements were going to arrive - developers had to hedge their bets. Far Cry 3 was a world apart on PC compared to its console incarnations, while Battlefield 3 - its Frostbite 2 engine designed around DirectX 11 and a many-core PC architecture - was clearly a next-gen warm-up project. Crystal Dynamics' Tomb Raider is another example of a title built with one eye towards the future of console hardware.
    Last-gen scalability was built into all of the games, but the results were lacklustre compared to their PC versions - next-gen console proxies, if you will. Far Cry 3 arguably fared worst of all, bereft of the graphical bells and whistles, and blighted with horrible screen-tear, low frame-rates and muddy controller response issues. The core game was there, the performance wasn't. This begs the question - how much more compromise is built into the last-gen versions of Far Cry 4? Is it still worthwhile?
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