Far Cry 3 - the definition of insanity!

Holy shit, this game has cassowaries in it! Why was I not told that it had cassowaries in it? When's the last time you played a game with cassowaries in it? Fucking never, that's when.

(I may be a little over-excited by this fact because they're native to my area)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary

Protip: you can turn off the crosshair in gameplay options.

I'm waiting for a mod to make nighttime actually dark (why even both with the nightsight upgrades when it's as bright as daylight just with a black sky?) and to convert the map back to FC2's idea. Apart from those niggles, this game is a blast, it's everything I wanted from Just Cause with enough of FC2's DNA to make me love it.

Yeah, when it works, it's totally great.

I'm having a lot of fun on Hard mode, not using the camera at all. If I need to zoom i pull out my silenced sniper rifle, and sneaking around outside a pirate compound is nervewracking and totally tense. Of course I don't try to reload if I balls it all up. I have no problems running away to fight another day (if I survive; trying to be a badass in hard mode will get me killed, every time). Great game (but eff that UI!). Hope there'll be mods. :)

I'm playing on Tourist (whatever they call easy) and still having a blast. The XP reward (1500?) for taking over an outpost without raising anyone's attention is so big that I'm trying it that way pretty much everytime now and it's rewarding as all hell, if not bloody difficult in some locations.

I haven't had much luck trying to hang glide onto the top of a radio tower. That doesn't work out too well (but it's a bloody great way to travel a kilometer to the the next tower location, since it respawns you at the tower base anyway).

Why the hell does this game unlock on Tuesday for the US? Screw you, UBISoft!

I just had a GREAT time trying to explore an area I hadn't climbed the radio tower for. The minimap is largely useless in this case, and I like it that way. Not all these leaves and chests and shit everywhere. Just blankness, enemies if you've seen 'em, and that's about it. I'm not sure I'll be climbing any more towers for a while. I hate the minimap, but really like the world.

I wish it wouldn't randomly revert to medium difficulty, that's really annoying. Otherwise this game is brilliant. Practically everywhere I go something crazy and awesome happens, even when I'm not doing crazy and awesome things intentionally.

So I take it from the Euros in here that this game isn't the same buggy mess Far Cry 2 was/still is?

I've noticed a few water glitches on the 360 version, but that's about it so far (fingers crossed).

PC version is a bit crashy, but that's improved by setting UPlay to offline mode

No problems so far. I don't remember having problems in FC2 either, but maybe that's because I played a while after it was released.

10 hours in, zero problems with either game or uplay, crash, bug or performance-wise.

Still didn't stop me from liking nooteh's gif :p

1 crash for me while loading into a fast travel location. CTD without a save. :( Save often!

No camera or weapon tagging, music off, in Hard mode with a piece of paper covering the mini-map and I'm having a ball.

The specialty silenced SMG is ridiculously powerful.

Also, it took me a while to read the stats screen but it turns out it's actually useful, because it tells you when you'll get specialty weapons by collecting stuff.

Okay. Jeff Gerstmann has interested me in this by testimonializing how he didn't like 2 but did like this, so I suppose I should ask how RPG-ey it is. Like, how good is the permanent change to the character/environment slope? For reference, AC2:Brotherhood and Fallout 3 would be really good for me and a regular ass shooter (it's been awhile....certainly any of the Modern Warfares would fit) would be bad. I might still end up not getting it due to sheer bandwidth limitations on my end, but it'll go on the to-buy list if it turns out that you can continually improve your character or the environment to discover new and useful things and also fill progress bars (that last bit definitely seems to be in).

Hmm. It's a weird game. Beautiful and very open, letting you approach objectives in any number of ways, but then forcing certain behaviors.

In an early mission, after you do what you've come to do, reinforcements arrive. Up to that point I had been entirely stealthy, and escaped the new dudes with a level of aplomb I was quite proud of. Then I realize the mission popup is saying "go kill the reinforcements", even though there are numerous ways to just freakin' leave.

It's weird. The designers don't want to support all play styles. They want to support a narrative through-line that has a little wiggle room here and there. The open areas in their design document aren't terribly open.

I did the exact same thing, ran about 200 meters out of the cove before realizing the game was going to make me go back for no reason. I'm hoping it's just an anomaly and later missions don't force this kind of thing, because other than this and some niggling UI issues, the game's fantastic.

Damnit why isn't this unlocked yet?

http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/far-cry-3-the-definition-of-insanity.676/page-4#post-357705

Do guard posts respawn? Whether I buy this hinges entirely on that answer since that mechanic alone broke Far Cry 2.

I wish games were less scared of allowing the player to change their game world. Brian mentioned AssBro -- I just started playing that and am loving it (especially compared to 2 and 3). Being able to permanently push the Borgia out of a district by blowing up their towers is a pretty huge deal to me. I think I loved the Mercenaries and Saints Row games for the same reason. There's something very rewarding about "pacifying" an area when it actually results in an enemy-free zone.

It wasn't the respawns so much as the way the game handled them.

Saboteur did the same thing with zone clearing I believe.

Matter of taste, really. I liked the respawning guard posts. They added to dimension to the map, by creating areas where combat was likely, and so incentivized taking back routes through the country. Some of my favorite memories of Far Cry 2 are planning routes to get to my destination as quickly and quietly as possible, then executing on those routes. Without the guard posts, there would be little need to go "cross country" and a lot of the map would go unused.

I get your point about enjoying progress through pacifying areas on a map, but Far Cry 2 was not about pacification by any stretch of the imagination. Rendering areas safe kind of goes against the whole point of the game.

Nope. Once you clear an enemy outpost it is occupied by friendlies and there won't be any more enemies in that area.

I can't say I enjoyed the respawning outposts as a whole in FC2 but the route planning was definitely a good consequence of having that. I think they could have tweaked the respawn rates to be slightly less frequent, and the patrols too. I don't mind being surprised by a patrol at times but it happened too often.

In general FC2 was better at restricting your abilities and not letting the game become too much of a power fantasy. Another example is how they restricted what kind of weapons you can take from the weapon stores. In Far Cry 3 once you get the best holster you can pretty much carry around a kit specialized to any kind of situation, and the mines/c4 don't even occupy a holster slot. I think it's cool that in Far Cry 2 you couldn't carry everything you wanted, so you had to make do with what you had.

I like that Far Cry 2 tried those things, despite its many flaws, and was often successful. Far Cry 3 is a very fun game, but it tries too hard to make the player not have to deal with slightly harder situations.

Now I just want to start Far Cry 2 again.

Yeah, I dont buy that it was a deep and meaningful design decision. Personally I think it was just a sloppy, grindy way to add length to a short game at a time when people were grumbling about short games. It's pretty much that Sequelitis video comparing Castlevania to Castlevania 2.

Far Cry 2 is pretty much the only "make your own fun" game I've ever enjoyed. Exploring the gorgeous map, finding diamonds, raiding bases, and genuinely being in danger of getting killed. It was awesome.

Well, I think you're wrong. Without the guard points, the map would be huge and empty and boring. Far Cry 2 is about operating deep inside enemy territory, and in order for that to work you need actual enemies.

But if you don't want to deal with guard posts, there's nearly always a way around them. You can take the river, fast travel, sneak through the bush, drive around through the desert, etc. Taking the roads through the checkpoints is the fastest route, but also the most dangerous, which is exactly as it should be in my opinion.

RPS has great couple of articles about FANTASTIC:
www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/03/what-i-love-about-far-cry-3/

And FUCKING HORRIBLE:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/04/what-i-loathe-about-far-cry-3/

elements of this game. Agree completely, my list of gripes would also include extreme handholding by making everything glow and stuff like that.

At least HUD can be removed via some hex editing:


As well as pop-up messages.
So I will now go download Hex editor so I can do what Ubi should have done in the first place. And I love their god damn game too much to wait for their patch solution, if it even ever comes.

Tom bitched about it at length on the qt3 homepage, and in usual fashion it draws in the 'why-U-give-lo-score' crowd.

If anyone was looking for solid proof that Far Cry 3 is one of the best games of the year, there you go.

Has anyone played around with the map maker yet? I saw a youtube video a couple of weeks ago that showed the map maker in action and it looked pretty slick; powerful yet easy to use.

The complaints about checkpoint saves and the menus are complete whiny bullshit. The game does not need quicksaves at all and it takes literally two button presses to get to crafting. Talk about desperately looking for something to complain about. The other stuff I agree with, but those two are just silly.

Edit: And a guy in the comments there even points out that there is a quicksave key and a crafting shortcut key. You'd think someone about to write that article would at least look in the keyboard binding menu to double check that the keys he wants to use don't actually exist.

Because I will never, ever have the chance to bring this up in conversation, I'm going to use this excuse to mention it.

This is currently sitting on my desk here in New Jersey, a gift from an anthropologist friend who lived for 2 years in Papua New Guinea. It's a Cassowary Bone Dagger. If FC3 was a quality game they'd let you craft one.

My favorite bits are the take the outpost things and just getting to the highest peak possible and squirrel-suiting (you get a squirrel suit at around the half-way mark) as far as I can.

The outpost bits are great because you can approach them anyway you like. I usually go for the stealth route with a silenced sniper rifle. If the outpost happens to have a badass killing machine beast, I'll snipe the snipers first, then let loose the beast (they don't raise the alarm for animal attacks) and snipe the stragglers, whose presence won't be missed by the pirates trying not to get eaten by a komodo dragon.

I also greatly enjoyed the assassination missions. One of the coolest things I've done is carpedo a jeep from the top of the hill to where the baddies are stationed -- it killed a heavy and everyone was all "wtf" but not enough to go searching for me. It was so great. The guy got slammed into the building he was in front of and squashed like a bug.

The bow seems kinda silly but when shoot the grenade arrows the enemy has no idea where it came from, unlike the grenade launcher.

Oh, and one last good thing was when you start successfully stringing together takedowns. Immensely gratifying.

And. . . crash. This is probably going to happen a lot, isn't it?

The good news is that it was right after I took the first outpost, so that should be saved.

Also, based on the trippy butterfly motif, I'm going to go ahead and predict this is all some sort of dream!

I just took over my first outpost (technically second, I suppose) by freeing a rampaging tiger, sitting back, and giggling as it killed everyone there, then some reinforcements. The tiger fought bravely and with honor, but the last pirate managed to slay it. Whereupon I snuck up behind him and put a machete through his throat. While giggling. I'm certain that giggling is what harnesses and focuses the powah of the tatau.

I don't have much to add other than to say this game is great.

I love the first person roll you do when you bail out of a moving vehicle.

The first time I encountered a crocodile (attached to my leg as I was about to go ashore and kill a goat) I actually shouted with surprise.