After only four weeks open to submissions, the Far Cry 2 Level Design Contest received over 250 entries across all three categories. The variety, creativity and effort put forth by the large majority of entrants was overwhelming to say the least. It was no easy task paring down all of the entries to just the one winner and runner-up for each category. ModDB and Ubisoft judges took the task seriously, embarking on marathon internet and LAN multiplayer sessions to narrow down the field. It was an incredibly extensive, rigorous yet fun-filled process. In the end though, only the winners can take home the spoils—a brand spankin' new high-end gaming rig (the Area-51® X58) courtesy of Alienware. Runners-up receive any Ubisoft catalogue game of their choice. Drumroll please...
What the !? Award
The aim of the "what the!?" award was to create something different and to stretch the Dunia engine to its limits. Levels entered in this category were judged more on originality in design and gameplay.
1st. Raptor Transfer by R6_Eagle_9
R6_Eagle_9 took inspiration in a well-known giant dinosaur movie (not King Kong, the other one) to bring you back in the memorable opening scene when raptors escape from their cage. A well balanced map that serves up plenty of action or allow you to try your hand at stealth while moving through dense vegetation. Exciting times to be had in all gamemodes.
Runner-up: The Expedition by paradoxmp
Nostalgia Award
The aim of the "nostalgia" category, was to recreate your favorite moments in gaming with some African flavor. We received all manner of levels from stock standard FPS games though to platformers and even a J-RPG inspired one.
1st. Bog by Nemesis-816
A re-imagining of the most popular shooter of 2007 multiplayer map that carries over with it the same balance and intensity for firefights. Move between cover and take your opponents head on or circle round the back via the river. Best results on 'Capture the Diamond' gamemode.
Runner-up: Goldeneye Facility by razorb
Real World Landmarks Award
The aim of the "real world landmarks" award was simple. Push realism in Far Cry 2 to the limits and recreate a famous landmark for people to play in. From the North Sea to Ellis Island and Manhattan, some awe-inspiring landmarks were made with stunning attention to detail.
1st. Disneyland Resorts Race by 4ev3r
While not a 1:1 representation of the actual theme park, Resorts Race takes a number of major attractions you see at places like this and put them together in a way that is not only amazing to look at, but a blast to play as well. Plays well on all gamemodes, deathmatch is great use a quick race/tour—providing you can resist blowing everyone to hell and back at the starting line.
Runner-up: The North Sea by shapelessform
Firstly, a huge thanks to Ubisoft and Alienware for supporting this competition organized and run by the ModDB team. Secondly a congratulations and bigger thanks to all the winners and those who entered. Many poured their heart and soul into their map and the end result blew us and the Far Cry 2 team away. (If you would like to know how the Ubisoft & ModDB judges saw your map - contact us). You can view or play all the maps entered in this contest (plus more) in the growing addons section of ModDB's Far Cry 2 profile and on our official competition server 69.12.25.12. That's all for now!
Lol death on the greatest place in the world
Yay for 4ev3rs and R6!!!
Never even heard of bog though 0_o
what's nostalgic about bog?! i mean seriously, it came out in '07. play it on cod4 with better graphics/gameplay. congrats though i guess.
COD was the most popular multiplayer game of that year and bog was one of the best.
Yeah man, I have such fond memories of one year ago. Those times can never be relived. While of course games like Ocarina of Time are a dime a dozen.
If the Zelda maps played better, they would have won.
Dude, exactly, it still is. Leave bog in COD4. bring back some level from a game no one can play online multiplayer on. Like Facility from Goldeneye (2nd place), not some map from a game that everyone still plays
(including me). it is not nostalgic, it is a thriving game/map right now in its current form. I'm disappointed with the judges on this one. ridiculous. not bashing the winner, good map indeed, just not right for this competition in my (and probably a lot of others') opinion.
COD4 is a strange phenomenon; could never understand how it was so universally loved. Kinda explains why someone would feel nostalgic about it though.
yeah, whenever i feel nostagic about it, i wake my desktop from standby and double click an icon on my desktop and load the real game...
I don't know what it was, but I thought I would hate it and it's one of my favorite games of all time, including OoT.
yeah, don't get me wrong, i love COD4; it's a great game no doubt. but its absolutely NOT nostalgic.
how on earth is something as fresh as CoD4 nostalgic? NOSTALGIA DOESNT COUNT TILL AT LEAST 5 YEARS!!
that said, where's a Quake or Doom 2 stock map when you need one?
the oldest games are MORE nostalgic, yeah? Goldeneye facility wins in my book, my heart, and my logic center.
We received maps for GOW2 and others, the nostalgia title is a little misleading - as we just wanted to explore great gameplay layouts. There were a lot of factors been judged here.
None of those extra factors were written in the category description. It is unfair on those who actually put the effort in to researching something that actually was nostalgic. Why make a competition with categories that are misleading. The idea is to make sure that everyone knows EXACTLY what to make, and there are people here who really put alot of effort into making maps that fell within the criteria of the titles as indicated, only to see them dismissed for CURRENT themes.
If there was a category to remake a level from any game from any era, then COD4 would be suitable for that criteria, however nothing about the game is nostalgic what so ever.
Sorry, but this is not fair at all on those who went out of their way to make a map that fits the description of NOSTALGIA.
Did any of them state what prize they were playing for or even how to download their maps?
CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS!!! Great job, guys! :)
Wow, congratulations to all the winners. Yeah the first time I played raptor transfer I got chills....well it was late at night (I'm not a sissy). lol
Great news, all the winners deserved it.
Congrats to all, fun contest!
Congrats,
It was a Great fun,thanks for the support guys.
cya on the after party server :D
Gratulations to the winners. Great to hear that the folks at moddb and Ubisoft were blown away by the contributions hehe.
Oh by the way, I've created yet another map which you will find here:
Fc2maps.com
what is the server is it 69.169.133.117?? because ive been playing and theres nobody on there! im THE_KNIGHT1982 by the way.
Wow, nice disneyland.
And stop being sore losers people. "gah not fair, bog isnt old. pick me even though the competition is over! not fair!!!"
give it a break
Congrats everyone !!! good maps !
Yeah I thought the "Bog" was weird too, but if you think about it the reason it got chosen was because it was not only reminescent of another game, but also a GOOD, BALANCED map. As said before, by "Nostalgia" they actually meant maps based on other games, not so much maps based on "older" games.
yeah because they really had to throw a lot of creativity into remaking an existing multiplayer map from a current game that is already laid out to be balanced (thanks to the amazing staff at infinityward). and also, maybe they should clearly state what they mean by "NOSTALGIA" the next time they ever host a contest like this.
nos·tal·gia
a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition
yep, sounds just like what they meant.
We defined what we meant by "nostalgia" on the competition page:
"Recreate your favorite moments in gaming with some African flavor. The challenge is not only having a similar layout in level design, but making sure it looks good and works too!"
At the end of the day all maps were assigned points across all of the categories and well in pretty much all cases the differnce between 1st and 10th place points wise was basically nothing. So we had to nit pick little things and bog happened to stand up well in this situation.
Right...so next time make a category called "Make a banana" and in the description you tell people to make applies and berries....
Nostalgia is Nostalgia, it has it's own meaning, you can't define that meaning, as it is already defined, just as you can't say that your version of a banana is apples and berries, because a banana is a banana, it is what it is, and can't be changed to any other fruit.
There is so mucn more I could say just so everyone knows the gritty details oh how poor the judging process was, but i'm sure you can all see how poor the selection of maps were right from the very first culling.
thank you, otreum. i couldn't agree more.
Ok ok ok ok, I'm ******, does that mean I won't be getting my Alienware® Mesh Cap ??
I think R6_Eagle's map really is a winner. When I first played it, there was this ''quality feel'' to it, it was nicely balanced and I never got bored while playing it. I'm really glad he won!
While I don't agree with Nostalgia's winner, maybe they didn't have enough quality maps and ''Bog'' was the only choice.. maybe idk. I just don't think people should win by Copy/Pasting the layout of an already balanced/NOT nostalgic map. Again, the judges had their reasons...
And too bad I havent played Disneyland, it looks very nice, but I can't really comment.
Thank you Moddb, Ubi and Alienware!
Congrats winners :)
Well deserved win. That has to be one of the coolest maps ever made!
Congrats to all those who won. Great maps. And to all those who competed great maps as well. next time maybe it will be one of us. Til then Good job to the winners. Thanks ModDb for the contest as well.
You haven't played any of the other maps have you? Just like the judges didn't.
You would see there are far better maps that didnt even make the initial culling. Look at my Ultra Tank for example. Dimissed because it was "sniper friendly" (like every map -_-, including all of the winning maps), and took too long for anything to happen (If the admins didn't join when there were only 4 people in the server then maybe they would see that it was not the case at all. The admins only joined a full server when that map was up, just to tell people to go to their ****** moddb server, which nobody did, because the maps were so poor.
I am not going to waste my time complaining because like everyone else, I think my maps should have won as well (or we wouldn't have submitted them) BUT that said I played like 80+ submitted maps with some of my guys and alot of good ones were submitted. I loved the Disney map. Also i liked bog. I liked the maps more so that were much more player friendly. Bog was that way. We ran around that thing like everyone does in COD4. So yes I did play the maps and I still say good job and congrats. if you want the maps I played I uploaded them all to media fire for friends to download:
Mediafire.com
There ya go that is pretty much everything we went thru for 2 weeks playing.
Wow, Otreum is one bitter little muffing :D
muffing? What the hell is a muffing? :P
I can be extremely bitter, especially in cases like this, because alot of people followed the categories properly and invested good time and effort into creating something that really fit the categories, yet maps that were hardly any good, made the first culling, and made the top 30. Of course, the judges will just say "that's your opinion" but ...look around, it's not just MY opinion, many people would agree...nobody likes seeing that COD4 map up there, it's not nostalgic, I didn't have to say anything without that fact being pointed out by everyone else...
And yes, what is a muffling :D Sounds like you're calling me something cute :S
Anyway...I think that'll do me, I shouldn't even look at this website at the moment, it gives me headaches and makes me angry (and bitter ;) )
BOG ??? What The ****!
Haha, Fou's reaction is priceless
I was waiting for F0u to post. I knew he'd be just as ****** off as me :P
I guess what's done is done f0u :S it's bloody crap, but ohwell.
haha! I'm not angry because I didn't win, but a second run through "BOG" in the editor really ****** me off. Why did it win!? Pacman is even better!
Anyway, I expected that gamers would prefer smaller maps with non-stop action, I know Lava Giant is huge and sniper friendly, but it has the same feeling as the original UT99 map.
You must chose your weapons depending on the battlefield. You will use your pistol, a submachinegun or a shotgun in a small interior map while you'll equip an assault rifle, a sniper rifle or even a rocket launcher in bigger maps as mine.
well, what a surprise... BOG ??? hahaha WTF!
Oh and before leaving, Congrats to 4ev3r & R6_Eagle_9 for their wonderful creations.
Haha, I ran through bog on the editor, and it turns out that I did play it before on the moddb server or eagle maybe. I wasn't really impressed, so this is a surprise. I'm not going to argue about the level of nostalgia part though, that is kind of irrelevant if the map itself aint all that [or even a part of that :P ]. Anyway, this is just a little anomaly; nothing more. The world is filled with unexplainable stuff. Let's not worry about what has already been done eh.
Congrats all.
I'm a little puzzled by some of the choices, The raptor transfer seems like a nostagia map in theme. I've never played CoD4 :P so i duno what Bog is heh, I would echo that it seems too recent (indeed still being played) to be classed as "nostalgic" - thats just how I see it. Its kinda like making a Crysis map in FarCry2. But again.. congrats to the winners :)
Congrats all.
Big surprise in the "what the...?" category...I thought (like other people here) that it was a nostalgia map too.
Thanks for this contest, hope there will an other one for another game and i wish Ubisoft will release a SDK for FC2, perhaps one day...
I would try to ride everything on that disney map...
It's a cool race map. If you don't have FC2; here's a video that he made:
Moddb.com
congrats everyone! :D and yea i think the raptor map was the most playable out of all the winners :D great work! ohhh and enjoy ya pc's u twats haha :D guess i gotta buy one now ;( heheheh anyways gj and enjoy :)
Thanks razorb,good job,i thought i`ll see your name and some others on the winers list but so many good maps for only 6 awards.
Your Disney Land looks very nice, really good job man :)
Congrats for the other winners as well, of course.