The publisher has acquired the remaining intellectual property rights related to Far Cry.
Expect to see more Far Cry from Ubisoft in the futureThe deal grants Ubisoft exclusive rights to the Far Cry brand, including all characters, likenesses, environmental settings, and copyrights. The company is now free to develop and publish games using this brand on any systems it chooses.
"Far Cry is one of Ubisoft's most successful brands and this agreement is one further step in our strategy to constantly enrich our catalogue of fully owned brands. With Far Cry, we look forward to further consolidating our leading position in the first person shooters genre," said Yves Guillemot, President & CEO of Ubisoft Entertainment.
Ubisoft also has the licence to use the Far Cry Edition of the CryENGINE, meaning any of Ubisoft's development teams can use the engine in future projects. Far Cry Instincts Evolution for the Xbox and Far Cry Instincts Predator for the Xbox 360 are both out on Mach 31.
Iain McC wrote at 10:12 on 30 March 2006
Does this mean that they can stop Uwe Boll from making a crap film out of it? Pleasepleaseplease...
vandy wrote at 13:24 on 30 March 2006
Prolly makes it more likely than anything. I suppose we can expect fairly regular updates Splinter Cell style.
TomO wrote at 13:34 on 30 March 2006
Just wonder what they can do with the engine as it's not CryENGINE 2.
vandy wrote at 13:48 on 30 March 2006
Couldn't they just license the new engine?
TomO wrote at 13:52 on 30 March 2006
Seeing as EA are heavily involved with Crysis I'd guess it's pretty tied to them and Crytech. Might be wrong though.
vandy wrote at 14:20 on 30 March 2006
This was something I wasn't aware of. I guess it would be pretty tricky after all.
Iain McC wrote at 17:54 on 30 March 2006
"Just wonder what they can do with the engine as it's not CryENGINE 2."
I don't see it being too much of a problem - 3rd parties got quite a few years' life out of the Quake III engine. Not sure how easy the 1st CryEngine is to mod in comparison to that, but they wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't improve it. It may not be CryEngine2, but then I bet it cost less to buy the rights to the old engine outright than it would be to license the new one.
It'll be nice to see what Ubisoft can do with it, really, because I personally thought that Far Cry was a glorified tech demo. The game fell apart for me as soon it went indoors.