Far Cry 3 Dragon Blood
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a 2013 first-person shooter game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It is a standalone expansion to Far Cry 3 and the eighth overall installment in the Far Cry franchise. Blood Dragon is a retro-futuristic parody of 1980s action films, cartoons and video games, and takes place on an open world island. Players assume the role of military cyborg Sergeant Rex "Power" Colt. Gameplay is largely similar to Far Cry 3, though several systems from the base game were simplified or removed, and it introduces the titular blood dragon, a massive reptile-like creature that can shoot laser from their eyes and be lured to attack hostile outposts.
far cry 3 dragon blood
The island is an open world that is about half the size of Far Cry 3.[6] Players can hunt wildlife, complete side missions to unlock new weapon upgrades and attachments, and liberate enemy outposts and garrisons.[3] The unnamed island is the home of the blood dragons, as well as various wildlife such as cybersharks and mutant cassowaries.[4] Blood dragons are blind, but they can shoot lasers from their eyes and hunt using their sense of smell. Players can throw cybernetic hearts to lure blood dragons to an enemy base, which would help Rex to wipe out nearby enemies.[7] The only way to collect cybernetic hearts is to rip them from the corpses of fallen enemies.[8] Blood dragons are infused with the lights of neon, and the color the neon lights reflect their hostility status. Red means that the beast is already attacking, yellow suggests that the beast is being cautious, while green means that they are calm.[2] The game features 13 hostile garrisons that the players can liberate.[9] Hostile enemies will call for reinforcements and activate the alarms if they detect the presence of Rex in their compound.[10] These bases have an energy shield that must be deactivated before a blood dragon can enter the compound.[11] Once liberated, these outposts became fast travel points for the players, though they can also freely exploring the world on foot or by various vehicles.[2] As the player explores the world, they will find various collectibles in the form of VHS tapes and CRT TVs.[12]
Rex is awoken by Sloan's assistant Dr. Elizabeth Darling (Grey DeLisle), who, disillusioned with Sloan's goals, betrays him. He teams up with Darling to overthrow Sloan's plan to revert the world to a prehistoric-like state with his rockets, armed with the blood of the "blood dragons" that roam the island. After liberating bases, saving scientists, and killing animals, Rex fights Sloan's other assistant, Dr. Carlyle (Robin Atkin Downes), who has used the blood of blood dragons to turn humans into zombie-like creatures called "the running dead". After he fights Dr. Carlyle's cyber soldiers and blood dragons, Dr. Carlyle is killed by his own AI, who had been mistreated and acted out of revenge.
Initially, Ubisoft considered hiring Dolph Lundgren for the lead role, Rex "Power" Colt, but Evans met Michael Biehn, who was known for his roles as Kyle Reese and Dwayne Hicks, during a Q&A session for The Victim, and decided that he would be the perfect candidate to voice Rex. Evans contacted Jennifer Blanc to set up a meeting, but he was initially reluctant to meet with Evans due to his unpleasant experience voicing Hicks in Aliens: Colonial Marines, his only voice role for a video game. Biehn changed his mind after meeting Evans, as he found the 1980s influence to be inherently interesting. The team described Rex Colt as "Michael Biehn in Terminator - but if he was the Terminator".[17] Biehn portrayed Rex as "somebody that was old and done [wiping out blood dragons] 100 times". Evans added that Rex was "bored" and "cynical" about the events happening in the game. As a result, the team had Biehn record satirical one-liners with a hoarse voice.[15]
Since the game had a very short development cycle, many systems, such as skill trees and crafting, were either removed or streamlined significantly. Evans said the essence of the game is entirely about "running around with very big guns and shooting cyborgs in their faces whilst trying to avoid dragons that fire lasers from their eyes".[18] Most of the enemy designs were simple, but creating the blood dragons was challenging for the team due to their massive size; the developers had to rethink the island's design to ensure that the dragons can fully interact with the environment without clipping into the terrain. Many features were cut from the game since the team became over-ambitious: one deleted ending involved Rex eating Sloan's heart before transforming into a giant to battle a massive dragon, and a boss fight with Sloan was replaced with cutscenes.[15] At one point the game included self-aware quick-time events, such as "press A to show emotions" and "press A to cry", but this was subsequently removed from the game.[20]
The gameplay received generally positive reviews. Most critics liked the blood dragons, as their presence gave players an additional way to clear outposts and garrisons. They found the blood dragons' interaction with other enemies to be an engaging experience.[11][39] However, several critics remarked that it was not too challenging to kill a blood dragon in the game.[43][39] Wiltshire added that they were not interesting to fight, and were more interesting as an ally than an enemy.[41] Whitehead praised the game's progression and pacing, noting that the game ends before it overstays its welcome.[38] Bertz disliked some of the side objectives for disrupting the game's pacing, and thought that some of the quests were repetitive and boring.[9] VanOrd and Dyer liked how most of the skills in Far Cry 3 were already unlocked at the beginning of Blood Dragon, with Dyer noting that this made Rex a very powerful character. Many critics remarked that the gameplay strengths of Far Cry 3 remain in Blood Dragon.[41][39][42] While several critics were disappointed by the lack of new gameplay additions,[42][37] Arthur Gies from Polygon thought that Blood Dragon was a more manageable game due to its smaller size and simplified systems.[11]
Evans initially planned for a sequel,[48] though Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson later added that the game would not have a follow-up.[49] Although no sequels to Blood Dragon have been released, a Trials game titled Trials of the Blood Dragon was developed by RedLynx and released by Ubisoft in 2016.[50] Evans left Ubisoft in March 2018 after his project was cancelled internally.[51] Following the success of Blood Dragon, Ubisoft continued to release spin-offs for the series using assets built for mainline games, which led to the release of Far Cry Primal in 2016 and Far Cry New Dawn in 2019.[52] Blood dragons return as enemies in Dead Living Zombies, the final DLC pack for Far Cry 5.[53]
Rex is awoken by Sloan's Canadian assistant, Dr. Darling, who after being disillusioned with the colonel's goals, decides to betray Sloan. Rex teams up with Dr. Darling to overthrow Sloan's plan to revert the world to a prehistoric-like state with his rockets, armed with the blood of the "Blood Dragons" that roam the island.
After liberating bases, saving scientists, and killing animals, Rex fights Sloan's assistant Dr. Carlyle, who has used the blood of Blood Dragons to turn humans into zombie-like creatures called "the running dead". After Rex fights Dr. Carlyle's cyber soldiers and blood dragons, Dr. Carlyle is killed by his own AI, who had been mistreated and acted out of revenge.
The planet is in crisis, spearheaded by power hungry dragon-blood fumed Colonel Sloane, and as Rex Colt, your aim is to stop him from doing so. In the process, you kill, and you kill A LOT. From Cyber Soldiers to Cyber Sharks to Blood Dragons.
However, unlike its use in last year's Far Cry 3, this stand-alone expansion avoids playing to the technology's usual strengths. Rather, it hampers its visuals outright to stick to a garish retro 80s aesthetic. It shrouds the details of its world in an overbearing smog, forces blood-red scan-lines over the picture, and bears out its coming-of-machismo story mostly through pixellated 2D cut-scenes. And yet, for all that, bizarrely, it works.
Aliasing is Blood Dragon's biggest issue. The new art direction means we have a constant contrast between the sullen backdrops, and the day-glo colours that line the game's laser-fire, ammo vendors and titular dragons. Stair-stepping artifacts greatly detract from the look of the world in spots, and there's a noticeable lack of any post-processing anti-aliasing to solve this. Even relatively inexpensive methods such as Timothy Lotts' fast-approximate AA could have gone a long way to soften the blow here, but instead, it appears the in-house solution seen in Ubisoft Montreal's last game is either absent, or ineffective against sharp edges in this form. Fortunately for PS3 owners, the inferior dithered shadows seen in the last game aren't in evidence this time. This owes a lot to the lack of strong directional lights while outdoors, plus the scarcity of cut-scenes to draw attention to the effect on character faces; shadows are mostly muted in this world, making both consoles identical in this arena. Meanwhile, the PS3's major advantage in Far Cry 3 - the superior texture filtering - is also nigh on impossible to distinguish from the dark, heavily scan-lined environments of Blood Dragon, which nullifies this advantage as well.
As far as terrain detail goes, there is very little to tell the three versions apart. The high world detail setting on PC allows for a greater density of trees, though the game is still relatively barren in this sense compared to Far Cry 3's flourishes. Triangle culling is also used more aggressively on PS3 and 360 - a level-of-detail (LOD) scaling technique that dynamically alters the quality of geometry based on Rex's distance to certain objects. From a performance perspective, this is an excellent cost-saving trick that doesn't affect the appearance of larger building blocks, such as garrison structures or the blood dragons. Instead, it's only noticeable on minor items like crates, and even then their shapes are filled out fully again within a blink of an eye. 041b061a72