Who is man's best friend- dog or hog? You showed us your best Timber and Horatio pictures, and the time has come to announce the winners!


We absolutely loved all of your submissions and it was quite a challenge to pick only three photos to capture the bond between you and your favorite Fangs for Hire. After much careful consideration, we have decided on the following winners:


AND THE WINNERS ARE...

SeaSwifted - GRAND PRIZE WINNER

Cleniver

SilverFrog

Congratulations to the winners and thanks so much to everyone who took part! The grand prize winner will receive a Far Cry New Dawn custom saw blade, beanie, and crew neck sweater. The two additional winners will receive a beanie and a medium pack of Far Cry Credits. If you would like to see the full list of contest submissions, search for hashtag #FCNDBestFriend. Don't forget to tag your own screenshots with #FCNDPhotoMode so we can see them!

Stay tuned for more details on upcoming contests- we can't wait to see more of your photos. Until next time, happy shooting!

It has been almost a week since Far Cry New Dawn was unleashed, and already we have seen you make great use of the game's photo mode on social media! To celebrate New Dawn's release, we are holding a photo mode contest with some awesome prizes up for grabs!

We need you to help us settle a dispute: Who really is man's best friend? Dog or Hog? To enter our contest, send us your best Photo Mode screenshot featuring your player character (male or female) with one of your Fangs for Hire. Show us how strong the bond is between you and your companion. You have until February 27th!

HOW TO PARTICIPATE
- Qualified photos must be taken in Far Cry New Dawn's Photo Mode. Entry photos cannot be altered using 3rd-party tools including, but not limited to, photo editing software.

- The photos must feature either Timber or Horatio with your player character.

- You must post your entry either using the hashtag #FCNDBestFriend (on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram) or as a comment underneath the contest announcement post.

- All entries must comply with Ubisoft terms and conditions – the full list of which can be found here.

- Only one screenshot is allowed per entrant, so choose wisely.


WINNERS
The Far Cry Community Team will choose one Grand Prize Winner and two runners-up. Photos will be judged based on originality, style and relevance to the theme of the competition.

The prizes up for grabs are:

- Grand Prize Winner: 1x Custom Far Cry New Dawn Sawblade replica, 1x New Dawn Crewneck Sweater and 1x Highwaymen Beanie Hat

- Runners-up: 1x Highwaymen Beanie Hat and 1x Far Cry Credits Medium Pack (in-game)

You can find the official rules, including information on eligible countries, here.[ubi.li]


HOW TO USE PHOTO MODE
Getting the perfect shot is simple! When the time is right, access the Photo Mode from the menu after pausing the game. From there, you can adjust the position of the camera and make further changes to the captured moment such as time of day, field of view, image filter and many more. For more information on Far Cry New Dawn's Photo Mode, consult our FAQ[support.ubi.com].

Discover treasure hunt locations, recruit Guns for Hire, upload Photo Mode screenshots, and more with the new #FarCryNewDawn interactive worldmap[far-cry.ubisoft.com]!

Build a safe haven from the Highwaymen! Watch this video to learn everything there is to know about the Prosperity Home Base, from crafting stronger weapons to flying out on expeditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C0paRl6sco&feature=youtu.be

Hello everybody,

Far Cry New Dawn launches in just a couple of days!

If you're playing a digital version of the game this Friday, you might be wondering when you can start playing at the earliest.

The digital release time for launch day - February 15th - on Steam is 17:00 UTC. The pre-load is available as of February 11th at 17:00 UTC.

The file sizes will be as follows on PC:

• without HD texture pack: 19.3GB
  
• with HD texture pack: 39.2GB

Not long now! We hope you enjoy New Dawn when it releases this Friday!
The Far Cry Community Team

Far Cry New Dawn's post-apocalyptic setting takes the series in bold new directions, and that requires a bold new soundtrack. To create it, Ubisoft turned to two composers, Tyler Bates[www.tylerbates.com] and John Swihart[www.johnswihart.com]. Bates, a guitarist, songwriter, and record producer, has worked on films including Deadpool 2, John Wick, and Guardians of the Galaxy, and co-wrote and produced Marilyn Manson's The Pale Emperor and Heaven Upside Down albums, among other achievements. Swihart, meanwhile, is a guitarist and multi-instrumentalist whose musical credits include Napoleon Dynamite, Youth in Revolt, How I Met Your Mother, and Go On.

https://youtu.be/8Isd__tW_y0

To find out more about how the two worked together to create a multi-textured musical backdrop for Far Cry New Dawn's colorful but deadly new world, we chatted with Swihart and Bates about their influences, instruments, and creative process.

What was it like working together to compose the soundtrack?

John Swihart: Tyler and I have been friends for 10 years, so I was psyched to do a project with him. Tyler does so many epic projects that I knew this would be a lot of fun. The level of trust, respect, and the value of our friendship made the collaboration a really fun process. Tyler is one of my favorite humans.

Tyler Bates: Likewise! John is a great composer and a great guy. We had talked about collaborating on something for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. I was especially excited because I know that John has so much more in his bag than what he's sometimes called upon to write.

What did the development team show you of Far Cry New Dawn before you started to work?

TB: The team at Ubisoft gave us an outline of the story and planetary conditions, along with about 50 images – including a presentation of what the world would look like 15 years after the nuclear apocalypse. They emphasized the makeshift nature of the weaponry, and the lawlessness that would occur when the invading force of the consuming Highwaymen would enter the then-peaceful area. All of this is set to the backdrop of half-destroyed buildings and the natural beauty of the superbloom.

https://youtu.be/MGJXpj8xHIo

What aspects of the game did you most want the soundtrack to convey? What do you see as the soundtrack's central themes?

JS: "Makeshift" and "Wild West" were the words that I felt really described what the music needed to reflect. We would have to represent the kind of pieced-together instruments that one might expect to find after an apocalypse. Central to the sound were some broken guitars, bowed instruments, and improvised percussion, along with some rebuilt electronic instruments.

TB: We definitely didn't want to take that to an extreme and make the score completely out of improvised instruments, but instead make those the main melodic instruments. There's a bended note motif that is one of the themes that was developed throughout the game. A lot of the different themes come from a permutation of that idea.

Did you draw inspiration from things outside of the game?

TB: I like to work with live audio as much as I can, and I know John does too. In this case, I don't mean recording an ensemble – because that doesn't fit with this game - but rather manipulating sounds from my guitar, the guitarviol, and a number of awesome instruments John has in order to make something unique. I looked to those instruments for inspiration.

JS: The team at Ubisoft wanted to have a trap-influenced vibe to the score, so some darker trap-influenced artists, like Ghostemane for example, provided some inspiration for the rhythms and dark harmonic content. We also were able to draw on some classic Morricone-style spaghetti western melodies and chord progressions to help create drama and singability.

Far Cry New Dawn is a different, more vibrant and colorful post-apocalypse. Is that something you wanted to bring across in the music? If so, how did you reflect that?

TB: We didn't feel the need to go super dark and focus on low frequency all the time, although there's definitely a lot of that. We kept a good balance across the frequency range – we weren't afraid of mids and highs. I feel this is similar to the Far Cry team's approach to the post-apocalyptic genre: they chose a bright and colorful experience, and so did we.

JS: The superbloom is a big element in the game, so we had to match the beauty and organic nature of the surroundings. We used a northwestern hammered dulcimer to create some textured effects that sonically represented the vibrancy of the superbloom.

Is there an instrument or family of instruments that you centered the soundtrack around? Did you try to identify characters with certain instruments?

JS: Guitar is such a portable instrument [that] it was easy to imagine some rebuilt guitars in this world. Tyler introduced me to the guitarviol years ago, and this instrument was a great resource for the project. Its visceral and primitive nature is very unique. We also had some electric violin screeching at times.

TB: The locations really inspired different sounds in the score, as much as some of the characters.

JS: The exploration cues had the hammered dulcimer textures. I have an old Santoor - the dulcimer's larger cousin – that we also sampled and reworked for some of the threatening sounds for the twins.

Did you learn any new instruments or techniques while composing the soundtrack?

JS: Creating the "makeshift" types of sounds was a big challenge. There were a lot of time-consuming experiments that eventually yielded some inspiring sounds. Sometimes I would have to take a walk before I could tell if something was musically fit enough for the score, or just noise. One of the biggest challenges for me was trying to make both the action-type cues and the big melody theme cues function at trap-music tempos. Trap is often sort of a half-time vibe, so keeping the intensity up when it feels like the music is half as fast was a challenge indeed.

TB: I agree; blending cinematics with trap pushed me as well, and I'm glad we rose to the challenge. There's a lot of really cool stuff in the score, and it's born from the collision of those two disciplines. Another interesting challenge with the joining of those two styles is the actual production. I had to pay attention to how low frequencies interact with the rest of the sound. When you have a giant kick drum sound that also functions as the bass, it can be difficult to portray a chord progression to support the stronger melodic material.

Did anything in the Far Cry 5 soundtrack inspire you? Were there any musical themes from that game you wanted to preserve?

JS: We wanted to make this a completely clean start, so, if anything, we made sure that the guitars did not reflect the Appalachian type of quality represented by the guitars in Far Cry 5.

TB: I think the reason we wanted a clean start was to represent that, while this is the same geographical location as Far Cry 5, it's a totally different world. We wanted the sounds to be "echoes" of that past world. Take the rebuilt instruments we talked about earlier. The guitar was a part of Far Cry 5's score, and so too in ours, but the way the instrument is used in both is very different.

What are your favorite tracks? Why?

TB: In the game, there's a track that I really liked for its simplicity. It's a tense, stealthy cue that uses a lot of those makeshift instruments. There's a string-thwack sound made up of a number of them. These instruments also play individually in other layers of the same cue as background texture without drawing attention to themselves, in a way I really like. For a stealth mission, you're not looking to draw attention to yourself anyway, so it works well in that context.

JS: I think I need some distance to give you a proper answer, but the bendy melody and sound we made for the pause menu track came out especially cool, and was quite useful throughout the score. The stealthy cues were perhaps the most experimental. There are a lot of happy accidents in there. I like being surprised, so there's a great sense of reward when I stumble on something I did not expect to find. The nature of the stealth cues was perfect for this.

How does composing for a video game differ from composing for film or television?

TB: I really think there's a difference in the relationship between the creative teams involved in games versus film and television. For one, the timeline gives us a little more play than some films, which feels more liberating, and allows for more experimenting. Lastly, there's an excitement and energy that the people involved in the making of video games have. It's infectious and really inspiring.

JS: Once in a while, we composers get a script before we get the cut of the film, and we can be inspired purely by the material in the script and the feelings we get from the story and characters. This was similar to those conditions, but in many ways even more liberating and inspiring. Because the team at Ubisoft was so gracious and excited to be working together on this project, we really wanted to make sure we were making something that left us as excited as we were when we started the project. They wanted us to make something that we thought was cool.


Far Cry New Dawn launches on February 15 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC. For more on Far Cry, check out our previous coverage[news.ubisoft.com].

Life in Hope County has changed drastically since the events of Far Cry 5, and you’ll be able to explore the new post-apocalyptic landscape when Far Cry New Dawn launches on February 15. To help you get geared up for the fight to survive against the vicious Highwaymen, the development team has shared a look at the PC system requirements.


“We are very proud of what our team achieved with the PC version of Far Cry New Dawn and cannot wait for PC players to discover the post-apocalyptic scenario we've created,” said Raphael Parent, tech director at Ubisoft Montreal. “The bold art direction we have taken for this game is all about a colorful, hopeful, and inviting world, which we know will benefit a great deal from the power of current PC hardware. We hope that players will love the fresh new look of Far Cry New Dawn."

Read on for the minimum and recommended system requirements, supported peripherals, and more.

MINIMUM CONFIGURATION:
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64bit versions only)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i5 2400 @ 3.1 GHz or AMD FX 6350 @ 3.9 GHz
RAM: 8GB
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 (2GB) or AMD Radeon R9 270X (2GB) or better
RESOLUTION: 720p
VIDEO PRESET: Low
DIRECTX: DirectX June2010 Redistributable
SOUND: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
HARD DRIVE: 30 GB available space
PERIPHERALS: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset

RECOMMENDED CONFIGURATION:
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64bit versions only)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-4790 @ 3.6 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 @ 3.2 GHz
RAM: 8GB
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (4GB) or AMD Radeon R9 290X (4GB) or better
RESOLUTION: 1080p
VIDEO PRESET: High
DIRECTX: DirectX June2010 Redistributable
SOUND: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
HARD DRIVE: 30 GB available space
PERIPHERALS: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset

4K 30FPS CONFIGURATION:
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 (64bit versions only)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.4 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X @ 3.6 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 16GB
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB) or AMD RX Vega 56 (8GB) or better
RESOLUTION: 2160p
VIDEO PRESET: High
DIRECTX: DirectX June2010 Redistributable
SOUND: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
HARD DRIVE: 30 GB available space
PERIPHERALS: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset

4K 60FPS CONFIGURATION:
OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10 (64bit versions only)
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.0 GHz or AMD Ryzen 7 1700X @ 3.4 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 16GB
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 SLI (8GB) or AMD RX Vega 56 CFX (8GB) or better
RESOLUTION: 2160p
VIDEO PRESET: High
DIRECTX: DirectX June2010 Redistributable
SOUND: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
HARD DRIVE: 30 GB available space
PERIPHERALS: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset

* Processor support for SSE4.1 instruction set required

**Supported NVIDIA cards at time of release:
• GeForce GTX600 series: GeForce GTX 670 or better
• GeForce GTX700 series: GeForce GTX 760 or better
• GeForce GTX900 series: GeForce GTX 950 or better
• GeForce GTX10-Series: GeForce GTX 1050 or better
• GeForce RTX20-Series: GeForce RTX 2070 or better

**Supported AMD cards at time of release:
• Radeon 200 series: Radeon R9 270 or better
• Radeon 300/Fury X series: Radeon R7 370 or better
• Radeon 400 series: Radeon RX 460 or better
• Radeon Vega series: any Radeon Vega series

NOTES:
• Important note: Series or models of CPUs/GPUs not covered by the list above, are not officially supported and may not be able to run the game at all or in optimal conditions, due to technical limitations.
• Laptop versions of these cards may work but are NOT officially supported.
• Latest WHQL GeForce drivers tested: 417.35 for all supported series
• Latest Radeon drivers tested: 18.2.2 for all supported series

SUPPORTED GAMEPADS:
Microsoft Xbox One Controller
DUALSHOCK® 4 Controller
XInput gamepads
SUPPORTED DIRECTINPUT GAMEPADS:
Thrustmaster Dual Trigger 3-in-1 V.2
Thrustmaster Firestorm Dual Analog 3 Gamepad
Thrustmaster Dual Analog 4 v.1
Thrustmaster Firestorm Dual Power 3 Gamepad
Thrustmaster T-Mini 2-in-1 Rumble Force
Logitech Rumble Gamepad F510
Logitech Wireless Gamepad F710
Logitech Dual Action
Saitek P880 Dual Analog
Acme GA-02 USB
SPEEDLINK STRIKE SL-6535-SBK-01
SPEEDLINK Torid Gamepad Wireless

*DirectInput gamepads outside of the list above are NOT officially supported.

For the most up-to-date minimum requirement listings, visit the Far Cry New Dawn FAQ on at https://support.ubi.com/.

**Updated January 16th**