WARNING: Far Cry 2 is still a broken game

On October 14, 2008 Far Cry 2 went gold - meaning the game was fully completed and sent to printers. One week later on October 21, 2008 Far Cry 2 was released in North America by Ubisoft. With an average Metacritic score of 85 - across the 360, PS3 and PC platforms - Far Cry 2 has received praise for emergent gameplay in an open world African setting. With a pretty kick ass multiplayer mode and rather robust map editor included in each version, it’s not hard to see why Far Cry 2 is a triumph in the FPS genre.We sat in our room looking at the game on our shelf the other night and couldn’t figure out why the game we wanted to play for months wasn’t currently in our 360. And thenwe remembered the bad news: we were playing it, and then we got stuck. Far Cry 2 contains severe game-ending bugs in every version available.

The other bad news? Ubisoft and developer Ubisoft Montreal have not released any sort of official statement or humble apology - outside of forum community developers desperately trying to save face - to the gamers who purchased the game at $60 (it’s being sold at $39.99 now for PS3 and 360).

Wecouldn’t find any hard numbers, but in a press release dated November 12, 2008 put out by Ubisoft, the company claimed one million units sold worldwide at retail in less than 3 weeks of release. Imagine how well the game sold through the holidays and to now, April 2009.

So what of these game-ending bugs? They all lie within the numbers: 27 percent, 62 percent, 73 percent, 88 percent. These are the most common percentage completes reported by forum users where their game has gone tits up. The issues include: the game freezing on the opening loading screens, the game freezing on the way to an objective, not being able to access missions through your partners, and the always handy times when you save your partner from certain death… only for him to get up and kill you instantly.

The most insidious aspect of many of the show-stopping bugs involves a critical mission-giving NPC just disappearing from the world. However, since you can do many missions in any order you want, it’s possible to not even know an NPC has disappeared until long afterward, and for many players the bug isn’t clearly apparent. Many forum posts ask “What have I missed?” or “What am I doing wrong?”