Is Far Cry 3 a console port?

[nya[dc]]

I've played about 120 hours of Far Cry 3 and I absolutely love it as a game, but after going back to play Far Cry 2 some things stick out like a sore thumb which leads me to highly believe it's a port. I believe that Far Cry 2 was actually developed and optimized as a PC game and then dialed back and ported for console use, while Far Cry 3 was developed for consoles and then more or less 1:1 ported over for use on PC with extremely minimal development effort, optimization or change.

Textures and small details

Loading up Far Cry 2 you will immediately notice that all of the textures are extremely high resolution and that there is an adundance of detail. There are some high res textures in FC3 but overall they pale in comparison to not only the amount but the detail of the textures in FC2.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198252028
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198252658

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198253806
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198252646
There are examples of this all over the place if you look around.

Environmental Effect

The environment in FC2 seem much more alive, the way the wind blows everything around, how everything you walk through gets pushed out of the way when you touch it, when explosions happen you can see the concussion hit everything and makes it knock back, environmental objects break apart from explosions like buildings and leaves fly off of trees everywhere, when you drive over grass it actually lays flat to the ground and when a fire spreads it actually burns up the plants and what it touches, it doesn't just change the color to a charred black look.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198248349
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198248362
In FC3 it feels very stiff and scripted and without life, things only blow around during storms and it's not to the level that it is in FC2, only a select few plants interact with you when you walk through them, when explosions happen very few plants react to it, leaves do not fly off all over the place, buildings are ridgid and non-destructable, grass does not lay down flat when you drive over it, and when plants or trees burn they just change to a charred black color, nothing actually happens to them, they don't burn up.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198249960
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=198249980
You can clearly see the lack of flattened grass and how fire only changes the color of things which have been burned.

Game performance

Now you don't need a degree in computer science to understand that Far Cry 3 is an abomination as far as game code optimization is concerned, it's a gigantic sluggish mess. In Far Cry 2 for example at 1920x1080 with Ultra settings across the board including 8xAA I average around 170 FPS, Crossfire works beautifully and it's a smooth wonderful experience.

However, in Far Cry 3 with Ultra settings and anti-aliasing completely disabled I have trouble even maintaining 60 FPS. If I turn AA on it becomes a slide show and absolutely eats up every bit of my GPU's memory, on top of this Crossfire scales well however with it enabled the game hitches and chugs, you can feel constant stuttering.

This wouldn't bother as much if the game actually looked amazing and far beyond what Far Cry 2 was visually capable of, it wouldn't bother me as much if the game looked the way it was advertised at E3. Since it's none of those things and overall just looks like a console game absolutely none of this nonsense is even remotely acceptable.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=114470867
All I can say to this is ....................

Conclusion

This just ♥♥♥♥es me off beyond belief, the total lack of effort, the lack of development standards, lack of optimization, lack of really giving this community a PC game just grinds my gears. What makes it so much worse is the game itself, the concept and the way it plays are absolutely fantastic, it just comes off as such a slap in the face to not only the community but for the people who actually put in work on the development team to create a great game concept.

These forced out console port development standards have got to end, it's an absolute upsetting and unsettling joke...

[Tonka]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure FC3 is a console port, I wasn't able to find any well known sources, but it does seem that way. I think it just financially makes sense to port from consoles to PC.

Farcry 1 was only released on the PC and was developed by CryTek as more of a tech demo, so they were likely still in the mindset of PC gaming when they started working on Farcry 2. So naturally, they wanted to get in on the 360 and PS3 market, so porting TO the console made sense at the time.

In 2007, Ubisoft Montreal (the same studio that makes Far Cry now and started with Far Cry 2) released Assasins Creed, a huge hit on consoles which didn't even release on the PC for quite some time (5 months). Ubisoft more than likely gave the order to UbiMontreal to focus on the consoles, cause that's where the money it.

It makes financial sense really.

Using VGchartz data (I know it's not 100% accurate, but it's a good representative):

FarCry 3 sales ( http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=far+cry+3&publisher=&platform=&genre=&minSales=0.01&results=200 )

2.59 Million on 360
2.48 Million on PS3
630,000 on PC

Naturally, you are going to care more about the 5 million customers on console, than the 600k on PC.

I'm not saying I disagree with you, just playing devils advocate. I wish more games were made for PC and ported to console, cause it's better for me as a PC gamer, but I understand the business aspect.

Ubisoft has been pretty bad about their PC ports in the past, especially with this crappy Uplay garbage, but lately they have been catering a bit more to us, saying that Watch Dogs is focusing on PC and porting to consoles. It seems like 2007-2013 were the dark ages for the quality of Ubisoft PC games, but hopefully they are changing their mind :)

[nya[dc]]

Far Cry 2 had nothing to do with Crytek, the only Far Cry game they created was the original, they sold all of their rights to Ubisoft so they could focus on building Crysis.

As far as the rest of what you said is concerned, I am completely aware of the economics and how or why decisions are made the way they are. Now that we're getting into more advanced console hardware and an x86 based architecture essentially all games will be PC games more or less, I just hope they don't gimp anything on the PC.

[Karma]

in all defense here.....ports in general kind of suck. I've played games built for PC, then ported to consoles and the console ports sucks. Examples......Quake 2 for PS1 was pretty awful, ETQW for consoles was garbage (but one of my all time favs on PC), Unreal Tournament was crap on PS2...and so on. Now we as PC gamers are upset because the tables have turned.

But, as you said Nya, hopefully with the new consoles being on relatively the same architecture as PCs, we can end this cherade (SP?).

[jV]

One of the best looking games on PC is a console port? The performance could be better, but the graphics still look good to me.