My Farcry 4 experience

Hey guys. So I'm writing this thread just to serve as a warning to those of you who want to buy Farcry 4. I'm going to explain what my experience was like. Don't worry, I'm not doing a review of the game. There are going to be no spoilers. This is about trying to get the game to run.

So on about Monday my dad let slip that he bought me Farcry 4 for Christmas. I was overjoyed because I really love the Farcry series and I was extremely excited about this new release. I was just a little bit worried because after checking my pc specs I noticed my pc did not meet the minimum requirements to run the game. So my dad decided to let me install the game to try see if it would work. I was not surprised to see it did not. At the time the two piece of hardware that were not up to scratch were My Graphics card (ATI Radeon HD5550) and my processor (AMD Athlon Tri-Core 3.3 Ghz) I noticed that the minimum AMD processor listed was a quad-core. My dad told me that that would not cause the game to give the black screen error that it was giving, he said it would just lag and be slow. I believed him because that made complete sense. The problem could then be isolated to my graphics card. So I sold my old card and bought a new one. And Nvidia Geforce GTX 650. It basically cost me my entire holiday income that I had earned from performing in the orchestra. But I figured it would be worth it.

So I install this new graphics card, sort out all the drivers and run the game again. No dice. Black screen error continues. shocked and incredibly disappointed my dad and I checked online to see if people were having problems. We found that lots of people were getting this accursed black screen, even people who had hardware that fit the minimum requirements. My dad figured then that it was a software issue that could be fixed with a patch, we patched the game and ran it. Got the same error again. so we spent about 2 days searching the web looking for reasons why this game was not working, we tried every fix we could find. Deleting folders, running as administrator, uninstalling usb ports and devices and fiddling with stuff in my bios. Eventually I decided to see if my CPU was the problem, because I had heard that intel dual core cpu players were getting the same error as me (Which Ubisoft claimed to have fixed in their patches) I found a piece of software that basically tricked the game into thinking my CPU had 4 cores and ran it. Still got nothing. By this stage my dad and I were so exhausted and fed up with everything that we decided to go to a last resort and bypass uplay with a game crack. So we downloaded a crack for the game with a clean conscience to see if it would work.

Guess what? After 4 days of trying to get the game to open and putting up with uplay rubbish...the game actually opened!! Unfortunately it only got as far as the menu. Starting a campaign would result in the game crashing at the loading screen, but it only took us another day to download a 1.5 patch for the game as well as the crack and today I finally got the game to run the campaign. I am overjoyed, but this whole thing just made me think. Ubisoft is out there selling broken copies of this game to people that give countless bugs and issues and there are cracked versions that work. Seriously Ubisoft? Get your act together! Now I realise there is a chance that all this might have been avoided had I had the correct hardware for the game. But then again, the game works when you apply a crack to it on my machine. Explain that. Hopefully a patch will be released by ubisoft that will allow me to play the legit copy online. But I don't have a lot of faith in Ubisoft after this whole thing.

TL;DR The moral of the story is be very cautious if you are going to buy Farcry 4. You could be in for a lot of trouble. Make dead sure that your PC has the right hardware and software to run it, or just be prepared to put up with lots of errors and bugs.

(This is one of the few times I wish I had a console)