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You may not know this, but work on StarCry began in 2004 on FarCry. At that time, it was a StarCraft story following the cancellation of the game StarCraft Ghost, hence the name of the mod: StarCraft + FarCry = StarCry.
In previous years, we had worked on games like Quake 3 Arena, Serious Sam, GTA San Andreas, and Battlefield, until the release of the FarCry Development Kit.
Wallpaper “StarCry – A Far Cry Mod” (2004)
Quake 3 Arena – Unreleased weapon mod (2001)
The CryEngine was quite comprehensive and allowed us to gather an initial community around the mod while familiarizing ourselves with the game engine.
Some community members gave ideas of original content like weapons and vehicles, sometimes drawn in MS Paint, which was fun to bring to life in 3D.
References to StarWars were then added, followed by Battlestar Galactica. Even though the overall quality wasn’t very good, the mod became a playground for all the elements we wanted to create.
Assets and concepts for Far Cry (2004-2006)
Because of limitations, we were still looking for a better engine, trying modding for games like TES Oblivion.
The CryEngine 2 was revealed in 2006, followed a few months later by the release of Crysis. We decided to start from scratch with a higher quality and more serious mod, but still somewhat sandbox with many references to the licenses we loved. We added Gears of War, Fable, StarGate…
Even Mister T. was added following a World of Warcraft commercial (2007-2008)
Assets inspired by Gears of War (2007-2008)
Most of the features are not in the final version of the mod
Assets inspired by StarGate movie and series (2008)
References to StarGate became very noticeable, and mods based on this license were being shut down one after another by MGM at the time, so we took precautions to be able to quickly remove StarGate references if necessary, without having to stop the mod completely.
The development of the mod was progressing well but slowly with only a team of two, because it was impossible to find motivated modders to help us.
Assets inspired by StarGate movie and series (2008-2009)
The story chosen in 2008 was primarily based on an alternate StarGate scenario: Lieutenant General Jack O’Neill knocks on your door one morning, and you, a gamer, are the only one who can save the human race from an extraterrestrial invasion… Which, to our great surprise, would be almost the plot of StarGate Universe in 2009! So we had to change the story entirely.
Spaceship level introduced in 2010 inspired by Mass Effect, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica
The boss “Guardian” added in 2011
The levels and assets have been modified multiple times
We may have been too ambitious with this mod, which kept growing in the number of assets, features, and levels for only two developers. The bigger the mod grew, the more the game engine slowed down and required technical optimizations. We had to revisit each element to remove polygons, reduce texture sizes, spend hours configuring level of detail, or add a huge number of exclusion zones. The mod’s release was postponed several times for these optimizations or to add new level sections serving the story, and the years 2010 to 2012 became quite laborious.
The first version of Abydos temple was composed of individual stones and caused a huge performance drop (2011)
Despite weeks of testing, some physics or save bugs couldn’t be fixed with Crytek’s incomplete development kit. The mod was released as is, unplayable on many configurations or considered too difficult by casual players. The hype around certain franchises like StarGate was much less significant after so many years, and the game was starting to be a bit dated technically. A multiplayer version for Crysis Wars was released in december. Even though many players appreciated our work, others felt frustrated and didn’t hesitate to criticize the mod, which discouraged us from working on another project afterward.
Optimizing the mod was quite difficult (2012)
The “Centaur” inspired by Gears of War (2009)
In 2016, I decided to relaunch the mod with a few patches and videos for the fans who were still playing it. But with the release of Windows 10 or AMD processors, it became unplayable. The official ModDB page had to be closed some time later.
In 2024, I decided to put the mod back online as a fix is available to make it work on recent configurations. Maybe some players who missed it back then will be happy to discover it now, and new modders would like to continue our work?
