Ubisoft's upcoming sequel to Crytek's Far Cry is the topic of a new Q&A on Gamasutra talking with Dominic Guay about the Dunia engine, the multiplatform technology that underlies the shooter follow-up and a number of Ubisoft's other future projects. The exchange also includes a discussion of the state of PC games, relating to high-end system requirements, and recent comments by Crytek on the piracy issue. Here's a larger than usual excerpt:

This is a high-end PC game, and that's an interesting place to be right now, but it's not PC exclusive.
Dominic Guay: No. We kind of cover all our bases. Obviously, our key focus is going to be on the PC, and it's pretty scalable. We haven't defined any minimum requirements yet, but we have the game running on a Pentium 4 and an [Nvidia GeForce] 6600. Obviously, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles of what you just saw there, but the key experience is still there. You have the same game on that system.

But we'll also be having a PS3 and 360 version shipping at the same time. For the gamer that has a maybe four- or five-year-old PC, he can play it on his PS3 or his 360.

Do you think that it would be dangerous if it were only a high-end PC game?
DG: If it were only a high-end PC game? Considering the amount of time we spent on that game and the investment, yeah, it's probably not a good idea to make an only high-end PC game, because you'll only limit your market a lot.

That seemed to be something was more feasible in the past. The market for high-end PC games is kind of shrinking, piracy is big, consoles have become more capable.
DG: Well, yeah, but games were always scalable on the PC, to a certain extent. Games usually let you have a two- or three-year-old PC and still be able to play, even if it isn't optimal or anything.

There have been examples of, at the time, high-end games that required almost for you to have a brand-new PC. That might not be possible anymore, actually. Not in this period, for sure.

They ran into some problems last year with Crysis. Crytek did come out and say that they don't believe that they can stick to being PC-exclusive for their games in the future. Obviously, you've already made the decision not to.
DG: Yeah, I've read that. I think they referred to piracy as a major issue for them. Their game was perceived as being very high-end - and it is true that in order to get the kind of quality we were used to seeing in their videos, it did require a pretty high-end PC - but you could play their game on a lower-end PC, and you could still get a very good framerate. I don't know how much of it is piracy or not.