I bought Xenus 2 a couple weeks ago and played it for the first time last night. Much to my surprise, it looks and runs twice as good on my laptop on the lowest graphics settings as Boiling Point does on the highest settings. The graphics are a HUGE upgrade over Boiling Point. The character modeling in Boiling Point looked laughably bad even for 2005, whereas everything in Xenus 2 looks exponentially better. Honestly, for such a huge open world 2008 game Xenus 2 looks very fine even on the lowest settings, even when compared to other big-buget, heavy-weight 2008 FPS graphical contenders like (coincidentally) Far Cry 2 on the highest settings.

But enough about the graphics. What I dislike about Xenus 2 in comparison to Boiling Point is the removal of the universal grid-based inventories and the physics interactivity (i.e. picking up, throwing stuff). I am also seriously irked by the broken audio, which makes playing the game feel like the equivalent of watching a silent movie. Literally all I hear is the music. It's insane. I've never played a game with such a broken audio system. At least the music sounds nice, though.

So while I don't agree that Xenus 2 runs like crap or requires multiple mods to be playable, and while I wouldn't say that it's objectively better than Boiling Point, I do agree that it desperately needs an official fix by developer Deep Shadows, although I'm not even sure they're around anymore.

Xenus 2 is still a great game, though. I binge played the hell out of it last night and I look forward to putting hundreds of hours into it. These two games really do feel like the ambition of old-school Bethesda combined with Ubisoft Montreal Far Cry. Such fascinating games, especially when you consider they were made by a studio of only around a dozen or so people. Gotta love the Euro Jank genre for giving us gems like these.

Agreed! Every first person game should have this type of mechanic.

(oops, didn't see your reply until now)

YES! FINALLY someone who gets it! I LOVE interactive physics, but nobody else seems to care about it and devs don't seem to put it in games anymore. I don't believe it's in Cyberpunk 2077 for example, another eurojank game that you'd expect would have it, but doesn't. I don't own Cyberpunk so I can't confirm this. I really need to upgrade my rig so I can play some of these modern games.

Crytek almost perfected interactivity with Crysis, but it still falls just short of virtuosos of interactive physics like Deus Ex Invisible War. Why? Because unlike Invisible War, you can't pick up ragdolls! Same problem with Half Life 2. I love games that let you pick up/toss around absolutely EVERYTHING like Invisible War, Trespasser, and Garry's Mod. Unfortunately these games are very few and far in between.

On a similar note, I REALLY wish there was a mod for Far Cry 2 that adds the ability to lift/haul/drop physics-based objects in the game world like oil drums, old tires, etc. and maybe even ragdolls. I don't know why someone hasn't made that yet, since Far Cry 2 is absolutely filled to the brim with glorious Havok physics objects. Interactive physics would really spice up battles in Far Cry 2 a lot because then you could do even more stuff like creating barricades and making traps or roadblocks out of piled explosives. Kinda makes me wish that the Fortune's Edition had officially added this feature into the game. Missed opportunity.

That would be so cool. I don't think it's possible to to mod that in with the tools we have, BUT it wouldn't have been that big of a deal for Ubi to implement since Crysis already had it.

It's not the same obviously, but we did drastically increase the amount of concurrent physics objects in the Realism+ Redux mod - https://www.moddb.com/mods/far-cry-2-realismredux

Crud. I've heard other people complain about Far Cry 2 modding, but I didn't know it was that restrictive/difficult/limited. I talked to a modder who attempted to mod Far Cry 2 but he gave up out of frustration. All he was trying to do was tweak the properties of the firearms but he never got anywhere because according to him the game's code is either glitched or purposely encrypted, which prevented him from editing things like recoil, damage, accuracy, fire rate, etc. of specific guns.

I wonder what the deal is with Far Cry 2 modding. Do you know? It's a crying shame that one of the most technologically ambitious games of the late 2000s didn't ship with a proper official level editor. Even the TES games up to Skyrim had those. I mean, FC 2 does have a very cool sandbox editor which I enjoy using, but that's just for the multiplayer mode, not for real modding.

I would think a simple mod like lifting/moving physics based objects wouldn't require anything fancy, but in the case of Far Cry 2 I guess not. Shame.

Modding FC2 is PITA, glitchy and quirky, but things like modifying weapons' params is doable relatively easily. It only requires wading through poorly structured and obfuscated XML files and then recompiling them into patch files. Could be better, could be worse. :)

At least developers didn't deliberately make modding (almost) impossible, like in Sacred, for example (they admitted to it).

Well, if we had such nice tools, as Morrowind's TES Construction Set for every game, it would be great.

Interesting. I guess the guy I talked to wasn't aware about any of this when he tried to mod it.

With that established, though, how come we haven't seen any mods that tweak or rebalance the guns in FC 2? I mean, lots of people complain about some of the guns in FC2, particularly the rifles like the AK, the FAL and the G3. So if FC 2 really is modible, how come not a lot of people mod it? I mean, I know modding it is tricky (based on what you guys have told me), but considering FC 2 had one of the absolute best game engines for any game at the time, it has always baffled me that there haven't been more modders who would dedicate their time to the game.

Personally, I can think of a TON of stuff in FC 2 that I would fix if I was a modder, like the driving or the forests, and some of those guns I mentioned. The driving in FC 2 is another thing that everybody has complained about since it came out, but nobody has made fixes for it yet! Why can't I get a simple mod that speeds up all those slow-ass vehicles so it feels like you're driving something that has more than two gears? I mean, I know that Ubisoft Montreal purposely made the vehicles slow for the sake of multiplatform optimization, i.e. in order to prevent game crashing and other issues that could happen in the game engine, which was already pushed to the limits as it is on the 360 & PS3. But the game is MUCH more stable on PC, so based on my experience with the PC version, making the vehicles faster shouldn't cause issues

I feel like Far Cry 2 is one of those games who's modding community is going to explode in popularity one of these days, similar to how the modding communities for games like Super Smash Bros 1, 2 & 3 have. FC 2 has already appreciated in popularity ever since the release of FC 3, so the modders are going to have to notice it eventually. It's just a matter of time, I think. Even people who love FC 2 like me don't deny that the game has some flaws and shortcomings here and there, so when you take that into consideration plus the fact that it had one of the best game engines by 2008 standards, it only makes sense that the modders would want to go nuts with it, despite their supposed limitations in modding the game.

And yeah, Bethesda's TES Construction Sets are awesome and I liked your comment just for that. Oblivion and Skyrim's modding communities are/were legendary because of them. Surprisingly I don't remember Morrowind getting modded as much by the community. I guess the game engine just wasn't as stand out as Oblivion's or Skyrim's. Maybe there are some good Morrowind mods out there, IDK I haven't actually checked. But I digress.

Editing weapon properties is super easy, actually.

FC2 modding is in the best state it's ever been in.

Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ozhN9s_4puzSXVYs12ZAOayyL036hgQuFCVS_jSXbd0/edit#

Tools: https://www.moddb.com/mods/far-cry-2-redux/downloads/far-cry-2-mod-tools

Great overhaul mod: https://www.moddb.com/mods/far-cry-2-realismredux

Nice, thanks for all this sweet info! I'm going to save these links.

I've been fantasizing about modding Far Cry 2 for years. I'm no modder, but I have experimented with some stuff like making denser forests in FC2's sandbox editor akin to the forests in Crysis, OG Far Cry, Boiling Point, and other high-end PC-exclusives that didn't need to make sacrifices for the sake of console optimization. Needless to say, I can see why Ubisoft Montreal couldn't make forests that matched those in those aforementioned games because the drop in performance was HUGE; only about half the FPS on PC, which would literally have crashed a PS3 or 360.

Anyway, there are a ton of other little annoyances I would fix like (as I mentioned) increasing the top speed of land vehicles, stopping the grass from rotating, and getting rid of all of those countless stupid invisible walls blocking off all of the buttes & bluffs (the only reason Ubisoft added them is to prevent the player from noticing that the trees on them are fake 2D sprites!). It would be so nice to actually be able to hike up all the biggest hills in the game, which would also add a TON of playable map space. On that note, I would also make a mod that adds real trees/forests to the tops of ALL of the game's bluffs and buttes. Crysis and the original Far Cry didn't use 2D sprites in place of any trees, so considering how well optimized the PC version of 2 is, there's no reason why all those trees can't be the 3D models.

In fact, all this together could basically just be a mod to bring FC2's level design up to snuff with the first Far Cry's.

The speed of vehicles is increased in most mods. Certainly in Realism+ Redux, Scubrah's, etc.

The grass will always rotate, and that's not something that can be fixed with the tools we have. The max slope of the player and jump height is slightly increased in R+R, so you can actually get a bit higher than the vanilla game.

That said, there are a LOT of holes in the geometry in those areas, so you can fall through the world. The invisible walls also "hide" the fact that the rest of the world is basically unloaded when you're not there.

Is there a mod dedicated to removing the invisible walls and fixing the holes? Have any of you guys considered making one?

It's been said that something like 30% of FC2's map is unplayable terrain due to it being out-of-bounds or off-limits, i.e. blocked off by those invisible walls. This is a shame considering one of the biggest draws of FC2 is the sheer size of the map compared to just about all other open-world games that came out during the 7th gen, so it only makes sense that modders would want to capitalize on something the game already does very well; in this case, open up more of the game world.

I never really fantasize about seeing this done to the other open world games that I own because most of them (like the TES games, for example) don't have any invisible walls within the game world. Far Cry 2 is kind of dubious in that regard.

It's true what you said, because I got out of bounds once and managed to climb up a mountain in FC2 and I fell through the hill/mountain to my death. When that happened, I thought to myself "well, if I was a modder, I'd just pave over all these holes the devs left in all of these hills and mountains, which would make exploration and navigation much more fun". That would be easy, wouldn't it? Deleting the invisible walls and paving over the "holes"? You could do that, couldn't you? You should make that your next mod! I sure would love that.

It's not possible without the full SDK. Also, the way FC2 works, those areas are only loaded in when needed. I don't think it would even be possible to do that in the original Dunia engine.

It did.

It seems Ubisoft forgot to add invisible walls to some of those bluffs, because I was able to climb at least one of them. Like I said before, I managed to get out of bounds by climbing to the top of one of those buttes, and I hiked to the opposite side of it, narrowly avoiding those "holes" in the ground. When I reached the other side of the bluff, the next game zone loaded flawlessly, and didn't crash the game or anything. Not only that, but I was standing on top of a 200 foot tall cliff, which gave me an incredible view of the game world and a great vantage point, too, enabling me to snipe unsuspecting mercs. So navigating those bluffs doesn't seem like it would be a game-breaking feature to add to the game like you're implying, assuming some modder had access to the full developer kit for FC2 (I hope to GOD it will be leaked one day).

If I'm not mistaken, doesn't FC2 have several console commands? I might have to try toggling the collision off and "flying" around those bluffs to see which ones aren't off limits.

EDIT: Apparently it does, but only if the DEVMODE parameter is enabled.

Since we've been talking about FC 2 modding a lot lately, I would just like to say that Xenus 2 needs attention from modders WAY more than Far Cry 2 does. The first Xenus (Boiling Point) delivered on all fronts and was by all accounts a legendary game, especially given what little budget and manpower Deep Shadows had to work with. But Xenus 2 was a half-assed, underproduced dud that removed more features than it added. And when I say "half assed", you need look no further than the map; literally 80% of it was water! There was barely any playable land! How lazy of Deep Shadows to just fill the entire map with ocean water. A mod that converts all of the ocean to landmass by raising the sea level and covering it in forests/wilderness would alone make the game worth playing, for me personally, anyways. It would basically make the game world like Boiling Point's, i.e. actually good.

Have you considered modding/fixing Xenus 2 and/or other Far Cry derivatives? I don't think a level editor was ever released for it. There is a level editor for Boiling Point, but I don't believe Xenus 2 got one. If a level editor was ever released for it, I certainly haven't come across it.

I just figured I would toss that idea out there for you modders. Far Cry 2 modding is clearly great, but at least vanilla Far Cry 2 is hella fun even without any mods. Xenus 2 on the other hand needs a map overall mod to get rid of all that water before I would even want to touch it again. I quickly uninstalled it after I realized just how little playable land area there actually was, which made owning vehicles redundant since you literally never need a car as a result of the lack of any real landmass. That's just one of the game's many problems.

I can understand if modders like you aren't up to the challenge of fixing or overhauling underwhelming Eurojank like Xenus 2, but I think it goes without saying that games like Xenus 2 DESPERATELY need that treatment. Some degree of modding would basically turn it into a must-play. What do you think?