It’s tough to go home again, too tough. That is why this map remains for Far Cry on the original Xbox and will never see a recreation for the 360 – it cannot be improved, or duplicated. Feudalism is the 2nd place prize winner in the Official Ubisoft Map Maker’s Council Map Contest, and has often been said to be one of the greatest Far Cry maps ever made by either community or developer.
Feudalism is pure gameflow with very few tricks or extras thrown into the mix. Today it is tough to find a map without a “Glitch Trick”, or special gimmick to help it stand out above the crowd. The idea behind Feudalism is simple: Stone Huts. When this map was made nobody had ever tried combining a Covered Deck hut from the Tropical Template with stone walls from the Ruins Brushset, and as far as I know – no one has tried since. The combination of the two creates huts that have stone walls and grass roofs, a very early medieval peasant look unattainable any other way. There is one more feature of this map that stops everyone in their tracks. I have even gotten comments from the Ubisoft developers stating how shocked they were to see such a thing in a map – they never imagined that their creation would be used to that end. What is it? I’ll save that for last.
The stone hut is where this map truly began, a single stone hut in the middle of a blank map. I had opened the map maker with a question that I needed to answer: “How can I make medieval huts with the Far Cry editor?” After some tries with different templates and brushsets I finally came upon the combination I described above – Covered Decks with Stone Walls. I built my first stone hut. I liked it so much that I decided to build the rest of the map around this single hut. I drew out roads, two small ponds, and raised two sections of land on either side of the map for the two bases to reside. I then set out to filling as much space along the roads with different types of stone huts, a barn with small crop space, a chapel, and two large castle-like bases. The bases each have a large front entrance and multiple sneaky entrances, with Blue Base using a sewer as a secret path inside.
So what is it in Feudalism that made the Far Cry Map Maker developers stop and stare in awe? A Dog on a Spit. Yup, I made a stone dog roasting above waving flames on a wooden spit. How? Well I’ll tell ya. The dog is the standard Jaguar statues of the Ruins brushset and the spit is a bamboo gate used for the bamboo fence brushes. First I placed a campfire small brush, and then sank a series of Tropical Flower bushes as low as I could in the center of the campfire. This created the “flames” and the natural motion of the plant in the wind helped by animating the flames. Then I placed the stone jaguar statue on top of the campfire. Because each brush is surrounded by an invisible barrier, the statue appeared to float above the campfire. Once done I took the bamboo gate and lowered it enough into the ground until the top crossbar for the gate went directly through the statue. All that was left was to ring the campfire with small rocks sunk in so deep that only the very top of the rocks would show. This finished the look, as well as covered up any leaves sticking through the ground from the Topical Flower Bushes.
So there you are, the famous Feudalism map and the always talked about Dog-On-A-Spit creation instructions. Tip of advice, if you are playing this map in any team mode and are unable to find anyone to shoot – go to the Dog-On-A-Spit, they are all there frozen in wonder staring at the creation. Kill them – they are easy targets.
