Far Cry 3 - the definition of insanity!

As well as the first person roll, try driving your jeep directly into a wall/tree.

Wow. I used the video here



to turn the HUD off and now it's the game I want to play.

No HUD means no mini-map, no UI popups, no nagging mission reminders. All of the things that annoy me about the game; in fact, the main things wrong with it. No 'Press R to reload', no 'Dingo tongues', no 'explore the jungle, or find Cidra's earrings'. There's no '26 dollars' popup, or loot popups like 'someone's keys'.

It also means there's no health bars, no enemy-awareness indicators, and no 'press a button now to do a takedown'. But you know what? They've overdone the player-assist stuff so much that you don't NEED any of those things! There's a sound when you enter takedown range. There's a sound when you start getting seen by enemies. There's red screen-edges and greyness to your vision when you start to get hurt.

It's suddenly exactly the game I want to play: It's amazing to be in the world, not viewing it through a screen.

The only thing that's holding me back from doing that myself is the fact that I won't have any idea what button to press for QTEs, and I don't want to get ate by a tiger because I'm mashing the wrong button.* Tell me I should not care about that, because I find the whole HUD extremely distracting.

*That it's not always the same button is pretty stupid to begin with

I really didn't expect so many people to be such lilies when it came to the HUD. Really basic stuff. It would never have occurred to me to be even mildly bothered by it.

Seriously, not knowing what you picked up or how much life you have left is a good thing? Oookay.

It's always been the same button for me so far. This isn't AC3 though and you don't always get a chance to knock the creature off before it tumbles you or takes a huge chunk of your life.

edit: Okay it's not the same button each time heh. Tiger made me learn the hard way.

I've tried a bit of the multiplayer. From what little I've seen the basic gameplay isn't too bad, quite fun actually. However it's like being hit in the face with a firehose of UI nonsense. The HUD takes up most of the screen (drastically more than singleplayer, and it was too big there) and the menu UI is indescribably obtuse and ridiculous. There is so much information about loadouts and unlocks and 'decoding' and what in the hell. I don't mind all of these mechanics, I quite like unlocking guns for example, but the way it's portrayed is abysmal.

I don't mind the HUD, but I would like a standard "reset inventory to this set of weapons" somewhere in the safe house.

On the other hand, bow.

The multiplayer interface is not ideal by any means, but it's not bad enough to qualify for "abysmal." For abysmal go play Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Talk about a screen full of useless information.

I don't think it's unreasonable given how straightforward a design challenge it is. I mean, it's a bog standard multiplayer mode, just with a bunch of stuff layered on top, most of which is pretty much standard these days anyway. For example you can only change your loadout between rounds in a game, and are given 60 seconds, which if not enough just dumps you straight back in. And practically the entire multiplayer is designed towards improving your loadout.

To burden it with such a cluttered and unintuitive UI is unforgivable. It's egregious. It's literally Hitler.

It sounds like there are plenty of good reasons for you to prefer Far Cry 3 over Far Cry 2. But you honestly can't understand why someone might prefer the immersive no-HUD of Far Cry 2 over the HUD of Far Cry 3?

Minimal-HUD, you mean.

I have no HUD hate thus far, because I'm rarely in Camp Immersion on games. Except that I will join in the lilying about the neverending upper-left mission notification.
(shwoop) GO TALK TO DENNIS
(shwoop) GO TALK TO DENNIS
(shwoop) GO TALK TO DENNIS
(shwoop) GO TALK TO DENNIS

Nope. Trolling for a couple more sharks to shoot is more important. I need my wallet to match my holsters. Your plot missions are a distant secondary priority. Don't argue with my tatau!

Exactly. I'm happy to know how much health or ammo I have or what I just picked up. I'm not a "no hud" purist. And I loved the Far Cry 2 map, but i'm actually okay with the minimap here. I thought "oh this HUD is okay what's the big deal" right up until that shwoop "reminder" thing started happening. It just kills my mood. I'm playing a big open-world game about exploration here, I don't need the game tapping me on the shoulder ever two minutes and saying HEY. HEY. DON'T FORGET TO VISIT THAT GUY.

It's not even an immersion thing. It's a basic "stop actively bothering me, game" thing.

Where the fuck do boars live? I have a boar skin in my inventory but I think it was from that first mission you do for Dennis (after taking the radio tower); I've never seen any boars there since. I've never seen any boars where pigs are. I saw a boar carcass next to a couple of redshirts but I couldn't loot it.

I've downed a couple more boars in that same area. You may just have to spend some time wandering in spirals and circles in the general area. I suspect there's also occasional spawn issues where the best thing to do is to leave the area for awhile and then come back later.

Jamming yellow leafs into your veins to get the Hunters Instinct buffs is also really helpful. This could just be confirmation bias, but I think as well as letting you 'see' game from farther away it might actually increase their spawn rate.

Thea boar and pig icons in the map are different, you can see the little tusks on the boar icons. Maybe they haven't shown yet if you haven't unlocked some parts of the map.

It has crashed 2x on me so far in a couple of hours of play. Running win8, latest FC3 beta drivers 3.10 something, and a 660ti. Not sure what the issue is. Nothing is OCed.

The icons for them are also facing different directions, if that helps. I believe there are some boars in the grid directly south of the starting one.

Speaking of my anthropologist friend, he could probably write a handful of papers on the problematic depictions of race and native peoples in the first hour of FC3.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game. But I really have to laugh of the exotified magic native peoples and the mystic connection with your character's douchey frat tattoo.

I've played about 2 hrs and having a good time just galavanting across the island. When I tried to clear out the first base of enemys stealthily a tiger beat me to the punch and killed everyone inside. I thought that was a pretty amusing turn of events. Later on when I approached the next base, suddenly some Komodo dragons pitch up and eat everyone inside and I take over another base without having killed anyone... Just now I approached another base looking forward to a bit of action, but what happens? Some rabid dingos rock up to kill everyone for me! Is this just some freaky random coincidence or what?? Perhaps I need to run in guns blazing before nature beats me again in the future!

I executed some vehicular homicide on a deer last night.

My vehicle was a boat.

That's a pretty cool dagger, although I'm guessing you probably wouldn't want to hit anything too solid with it. Would I be right in thinking that they would have used the inside as a way to hold poison or dung or something to help make it more deadly?

Mounted machineguns on patrol boats are the only way to hunt Sharks.

My only really odd moment thus far was sneaking up to clear a base, then I hear a dog bark. Well shit, I didn't see the dog!.

Then eight fucking dogs come screaming around the corner because I was apparently trying to liberate a puppy mill.

just started the game, so not reading much cuz spoilers.

BUT

Fuck this save system. Fuck it up its stupid ass.

The whole point should be to experiment with scenarios, try out different approaches, etc. Sending me all the way back to the safehouse and undoing all my progress? Not on.

So...how do I find dingos? And how can I tell them apart from rabid dogs?

It's pretty hard, actually. The model looks very similar if it isn't just the same one. You can always kill a member of a given pack and skin it to check.

Just don't sit next to Dennis.

There's a radio tower I found that was just infested with them. Somewhere in the northeast section. It was a good thing, as I was really starting to chafe at the rucksack limitation prior to the dingo hide upgraded one.

So mid game spoilers, the entire Buck segment:

I took the magic stuff as side effects from the drugs he does (though it isn't all the time) and the shear amount of fucked up shit he has to go through. They all seem to be crazy hallucinogens and that allowed me to read it as pseudo-magic and seem them as metaphor rather than real magic happening in the game world.

Jason (the main character) is a douche. All the young white Americans are douches in the game.

Initially it comes off as drugs and stress. Then it goes right into fucking stupid magic. The Buck section is where it derails entirely.

I've only died a few times but I've yet to die and respawn more than a few yards from where I was, I guess I'm just blessed. There is a manual save you can do although I don't know if it will put you exactly where you saved or not.

It seems most of the outposts are intentionally either put close to potentially dangerous wildlife or a "friendly patrol" will wheel by there every so often (and usually get easily killed off while you come in from behind and do some wetwork.)

So I'm in part 2 now (post Payback mission and followups). Main character: TOTAL DICK. Main Plot: completely goes off the fucking rails with Buck and beyond.
Ranting about the plot so far and where I think it may head, please don't take as damning of the game as much as me venting a bit at shitty game writing (besides Vaas, who is seriously some amazing voice acting):

I'm enjoying the hell out of the gameplay. I'm just a bit irritated by the direction the plot has been taking.

Spoiler in regards to Kildorn.

I've only gotten as far as the lumber yard mission (like 3 missions in I think). Thus far I've been capturing towers and murdering guys at outposts.unfortunately I'm starting to bump into the "you must do a mission to unlock this skill" carrot so I'm going to have to get back to that.

Just before I stopped playing tonight, my face got eaten by a Sumatran Tiger out of fucking nowhere while I was sneaking around an outpost sniping dudes. "Hey, what's that noiAH FUCK"

Nope. I saw the manual save, but from what I can tell it seems to do exactly jack shit.

It saves your equipment and progress, it just puts you back at the nearest outpost as far as I can tell.

I've died assaulting bases and been put right outside it.

Some of the mechanics in this game are just all wonky. The skill gating, the carry-limitations combined with not knowing precisely what you'll need in the future and what you won't, the crappy inventory managent once you realize you've filled up on a lot o skins you probably don't need any more. The absurd "well, this fall looks comparable to that fall whoops there goes a bar of health". Also, I loath how fiddly the game is. You can't loot things unless the cursor is in just the right place. Looting makes you go through a stupid time wasting animation. There's extra inventory clutter for no reason (ease of auto sell aside).

I had another crash. Also, I was doing the Medusa mission and slinking around. I was preparing to get an agle to take out a radio guy. I was moving left (strafe moving), just inch by inch, over uneven terrain. Suddenly I am propelled way to my left. Something like 4-crates worth of movement. I'm now right in front of the guy. Mission over! I was fortunate that I restarted "at the beginning" but the soliders I had eliminated were still dead.

Also, now that I've used shark skins to upgrade my holster and wallet, can I safely assume I will never need shark skins again (possibly excepting a skin from a special hunting mission)?

I do like the game; it's fun to play.