Color us astounded, but for some reason, Far Cry 2 got its multiplayer servers back online. The game’s Xbox 360 for competitive goodness are live, as per TrueAchievements — achievements and all. And you thought that TV show on Hulu was the only new thing we had about the franchise, huh?
Originally, Ubisoft killed Far Cry 2’s servers around 2021, when most of the French publisher’s older titles got the online shutdown treatment. The company is known to bring back some of its oldies to glory, though it usually does that with the usual flair and pomp of a proper announcement.
Not this time: try as we might, there was no official commentary from Ubisoft regarding the matter, which leads us to recommend that, if you’re going back in on Far Cry 2 multiplayer modes, you do so quick: this might be a case of “someone forgot the lights on and its Christmas” thing and it may get nixed sooner rather than later.
What’s Far Cry 2 about
Originally released in 2008, Far Cry 2 puts the player in the boots of a mercenary tasked with hunting down The Jackal, a world-famous arms dealer who’s been supplying both sides of a civil war in Africa with guns in order to keep the conflict going and, thus, generating an endless stream of revenue for himself.
The thing is, as soon as your team enters the fray, everybody but you succumb to malarial fever. While you’re dealing with your sickly survival, you choose to continue the mission, regularly being taunted by The Jackal about your failure, the problematic law systems that are cracked just enough for guys like him to take advantage of, and betrayal scenarios on all of the game’s factions.
One of the fun things about Far Cry 2 is the fact that a longstanding gaming fan theory has been confirmed by Ubisoft: The Jackal’s true identity is Jack Carver — lead character of the first game, who grew disillusioned with the world and half expected to be taken out in the new game, but not without making a statement. We talked about this earlier this year, by the way.
It’s a plot that goes hand in hand with subsequent games, with villains who were not just in it for the money, but actually had an agenda and believed their words to a fanatical level (except, maybe, for Far Cry 4’s Pagan Min, but that might be a stretch).
The multiplayer part was pretty on par with several offerings from 2008, bringing modes like Capture the Flag, two different Deathmatch modes and one called “Uprising”, where you had to capture and hold specific areas in a map. Teams were composed of two 4-member units and it had some semblance of RPG in its division made by classes and roles.
