One of the big surprises at this week’s Sony E3 press conference was the announcement that PlayStation console owners would be able to share Far Cry 4 for multiplayer co-op with friends who don’t own the game. How’s it’s going to work? Well, for starters, it sounds like you’re going to need a lot of space on your hard drive.
Co-op game-sharing will be a PlayStation-exclusive feature. Reports from Eurogamer and Gamespot details the steps that PS3 & PS4 owners will take to invite their friends to the Himalayas. If you’ve got a PlayStation Plus subscription, you’ll get ten invites to pass out when Far Cry 4 hits retail. The experience is referred to as a “trial” in the Gamespot write-up:
We’re going to be generous. We want you to basically download the game, jump in your buddy’s game, play as Hurk, play for a couple hours, run around, experience the entirety of the world, take over some outposts, take over some fortress, understand what it’s like to be able to wingsuit, to be able to climb on top of the elephants, to be able to get a whole bunch of new vehicles and weapons, and effectively play the game.”
Eurogamer‘s reporting says that players being invited in multiplayer co-op will need to have a big standalone app installed on their consoles. That elephant-sized client will reportedly contain all of the game’s content except the single-player portions. Kotaku has reached out to Ubisoft for clarification and will update this story once they respond.
Update: Here’s Ubisoft’s official statement on how Far Cry 4‘s game-sharing co-op will work.
The “sender” will receive ten “Keys to Kyrat” which he can send to ten PSN “friends” of his choice. The “friend” will receive a single unique key allowing him to download a PSN exclusive trial version of the game allowing co-op play in the open world with the “sender” for a limited amount of time. XP, loot, etc that the “friend” earns will then carry over if they buy the game.
Comments
16 responses to “How You’ll Play Far Cry 4 With Friends Who Don’t Own It”
So I guess its like a timed trial that resets each day? or you only have say 24 hours of in-game playtime then you can’t play any more.
Yeah so it’s basically a guest pass. Hardly revolutionary.
“We’re going to be generous”
I don’t think I’d call a timed demo ‘generous’. Reminds of when Microsoft fancied themselves as benevolent for allowing apps like YouTube and Skype to be used with silver accounts.
They are letting you play their game for free. Sounds pretty generous to me.
*They’re letting you sample their game for a limited trial period before you have to buy it.
This sounds a lot like the game sharing they marketed heavily when the PSP first launched. I think only two or three games I bought actually supported it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this feature is similarly ignored as time goes by.
Quite a lot of the games I bought supported it actually.
It’s been a while since I’ve actually checked the game sharing features out, but my memory is that it was featured mostly in launch titles, and quickly forgotten as time went on.
Ah, well I DO mostly have launch window sorta games, that’s really when the best came out imo, cause all the ones I have on Vita have game sharing.
There was definitely a drop off in interesting games after launch, but there were some interesting games later in its life. Patapon and LittleBigPlanet come to mind.
Really deceptive by Sony and Ubisoft to be honest. They made it sound as if during the press conference that only on Sony platforms that you would be able to play co-op/multi with a friend who owns the game. A timed/limited trial was not said – they deliberately made it sound like the the ability to play co-op with that friend would have been permanent.
While i am personally not surprised it is time limited, it is still deceptive marketing speak that new or potential ps4 owners might have considered as a serious feature.
It is permanent..once the co-op partner buys the game, which they would probably do if the co-op is good. If it’s not on the other hand well I doubt they’d be fussed if it wasn’t permanent.
While I agree it’s marketing cheap speak it’s still half true, which is better than a lie or a promise not kept
What? How is it permanent if what they are delivering is basically nothing more then 10 keys to purchasers to give to friends so that they can join them for some co-op but only for a limited amount of time. While it is unknown for how much time it could possibly be as short as 60 minutes to something like 3-4 hours.
It was lie of omission. They promised that non-owners of Farcry 4 can join owners for co-operative play exclusively on sony platforms. This is true. However they never said there was any time limitation in the initial announcement and because of this omission most of the articles that i see that covered sony events are making this sound like a permanent feature rather then a much less attractive time limited trial.
I am sorry but saying – if you enjoy the co-op you will end up buying the game to make it permanent feature is a cop-out.
It’s not Sony or Ubisoft’s fault if people assume they won’t be on a timed demo or that they have permanent access.
“They promised that non-owners of Farcry 4 can join owners for co-operative play exclusively on sony platforms. This is true. However they never said there was any time limitation in the initial announcement “.
They also never said that it would be permanent. Anyone assuming it would be permanent has nobody to blame for their dissapointment beside themselves.
“Eurogamer‘s reporting says that players being invited in multiplayer co-op will need to have a big standalone app installed on their consoles. That elephant-sized client will reportedly contain all of the game’s content except the single-player portions.” What would be great, is if you actually listed what “elephant-sized” was in, oh I don’t know, Gigabytes? That’d be good….
Going by current install sizes for
Games anywhere between 10-60Gb
This trial does not work, tried and tried ubisoft is using a dirty cheap and useless sales tactic. Consider me abononing buying this shizenhouzen game. Ubisoft can rot in filth