Far Cry 3 - the definition of insanity!

I think I managed to fix my crashing issues. I installed MSI afterburner and turned the GPU clock down 100 mhz and set the maximum power usage to 80% and was able to play for an hour with no problems. Performance seemed the same as well.

My main issue with the skinning animation is minor: if you're going to have a first-person skinning animation, polish it so it actually matches to something. Most of the time I'm apparently stabbing the ground a foot away from the carcass and the jungle itself sprays blood on me. I certainly get that'd take resources to have put in, but the nit is right there, it must be picked. More practically, the tolerances of exactly where you have to be angled in order to trigger the looting/skinning could stand to be loosened up.

Have also reached the point where skill picks are being mission-gated, which makes me sad in the common open-world flaw way. Attention open-world developers: I'm still going to play the main plot missions. You don't have to lock chunks of the world and game away from me until I do.

The game ony seems to crash for me when doing inventory things. This is of course problematic for a number of reasons. But it's done it while just in the inventory dropping stuff (once) and while selling individual items (twice).

Ok, I'm about 10 hours in. I have maxxed out weapons (the available ones...I'm assuming I won't be using a FA-MAS forever). I am loving the silenced bolt action sniper rifle. And I have a silenced FA-MAS for shorter range work.

Convince me why I should switch to a bow. I've tried it, and I've kinda wondered why I'd want to use it. The sniper rifle has more predictable range...and the silenced assault rifle is brutal at closer range.

Very silent, as far as I can tell it aids in stealth more than silenced weaponry, especially when using the grenade arrows. Also, fire arrows immolate heavies, I think, so one direct hit and they start flailing.

It is also significantly stronger than anything aside from the sniper rifles.

1. Versatility
2. Infinite ammo if you don't miss
3. You look fucking badass

Oliver Queen Simulator.

The only downside to the bow I can see is that enemies cry out when hit by it. I took out the back guy of one of those little two-man patrols and the front guy whipped around and started machine gunning me. I did the same thing with the silenced sniper rifle and the dude dropped without a sound. I think the bow is cooler, but the sniper rifle is more useful.
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Great moment tonight. I'm creeping around an outpost and trying to draw guys out, one at a time. I get one of the drunken dudes down, and draw another one over with a rock. I knife him but another drunken dude sees us and starts running at me, screaming "mother FUCKER!". I whip out my silenced pistol and fire as fast as I can and he explodes in fire. He was just winding up a molotov throw and I'd hit the bottle. He falls at my feet, burning, and I run back up the hill, hoping the flames don't catch me. After I catch my breath, I realize the rest of the camp isn't alerted, either. No one has heard or seen me, or heard one of their number exploding into flames and dying. I resume my stealthy creeping with a smile on my face. :)

I don't think they cry out from headshots ever.

God when enemies rush you from behind without warning until they go "HE'S HERE *starts shooting*" I love/hate it.

Well if you can headshot with a bow, my, uh, hat is off to you, sir.

Some pretty great mods already, fixing some of the stuff. I hate: http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.php/734046-Mods-for-Far-Cry-3?p=8773981&viewfull=1#post8773981 The first post is a good collection of them, but that's the best one so far. :)

And Ubi has announced they're going to patch in UI configurability. Thanks you jeebus! I wonder how much control they'll give us. 6o

Once you get the bow perks it becomes trivial to hit with a bow at maximum range. It's great, although I love the silenced sniper rifles too.

This is great. I should have waited a few weeks to play the game, I think I'll start over when the patch comes.

I haven't played the game, but watching videos I don't see much annoying about the UI in terms of minimap or inventory acquisition pop-ups, but the mission and enemy indicators are pretty obnoxious and unnecessary. In FC2 I like seeing the direction from which I took a bullet, but I don't need indicators over someone's head or a big yellow orb in my viewspace.

The minimap is kind of distracting to me, because it allows you to determine which direction enemies are facing even if you don't have any LOS to them. It feels very game-y and artificial. You can also see enemies through walls once you tag them, which makes no sense to me at all.

The mission markers, arrows, and indicators over enemies are really annoying and pretty much unnecessary.

Basically my feeling on this game is pretty mixed. I actually think Tom's review is pretty spot-on in this one: it's a pretty fun game, but it is much more Skyrim+guns than it is a good sequel to Far Cry 2. The gun play is fun, and the stealth is also much improved (possibly too improved- sneaking around is very easy). The voice acting is really terrible, with a few exceptions, and so far the story hasn't really grabbed me. Hunting, crafting, and looting is totally stupid and makes no sense within the fiction of the game. The game world feels over-stuffed to me, in the sense that there are so many locations and features that it doesn't really feel like a real place.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is definitely fun enough to make the game worthwhile, but for those that liked Far Cry 2 I think it will be hard to see the game as anything but disappointing.

The general take seems to be that those who loved Far Cry 2 hate this, and vice versa. :)

I loved FC2 and I love this, but that said, it is true that while this fixes most of FC2's problems, it creates new ones where FC2 handled things perfectly (map and the whole immersion aspect mostly).

I agree with this in spirit (I love both games, and think FC3 introduces some problems while solving others), but the map and and immersion/UI stuff doesn't bother me (though I wish I could turn off the quest reminders). The biggest problem for me is that whenever the game turns its attention to the story it becomes completely awful. Outside of one small series of missions that were sort of OK, the story is horrible, and the story missions are dreadful.

Funny, I find the story pretty good. Not as good as I hoped for from Charles's first post in this thread, but still fairly good. I absolutely love the fact that Jason speaks, has normal nonbadassdudebro voice, and in general reacts fairly realistically to these crazy situations (I loathe silent protagonists in games in general though). The other characters I have no problems with either, ok Oliver is your typical stoner douchebag, but he is supposed to be..and even he had a nice moment already. And Vaas is just fantastic, although my appreciation of him increased a lot after I watched all Far Cry 3 experience videos on youtube (it is a prequel to the game and stars Michael Mando who also voices Vaas in game, and it really is great, including those shorter bonus torture shorts).

The story mission design itself has been pretty great so far as well.

And those quest reminders that bother you? I disabled them few days ago already via simple hex tweak:
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B62pMJy7OMMeajBkVDVPVEFuNU0

(works only if you use DX9, backup your file and put this into bin folder, overwrite)

The story is fine before and after the Buck -> Sam sequence. Though some of the Sam sequence seems to be trying too hard and has a few breaks in the flow that scream "wait, what's my motivation here?"

But the Buck sequences and the ones right after it go completely off the rails given what the overal feel of the game has been before then, and where it goes back to afterwords. It stops being a survival game of saving your douchey friends and possible revenge motives with heavy drug use and PTSD, and turns into magical murder fun times where you locate a piece of eden for the templars.

My main disappointment is the end, where they:

Still a solid game, good gameplay, and none of that ruined my experience at all. I just feel like they had two writing crews who never actually talked or read each other's stuff.

Bit of a tangent but here's a nice documentary about Cassowaries:

Cool but I'm still going to set every one on I see on fire.

So I cracked open the multiplayer and it seems pretty neat. It has some system where you get items and have to "decode" them to get bonus xp or special weapon thingies or I don't know but it'll probably add value to my purchase. I also liked that weapons feel just like they do in the main game and are just as instantly lethal if someone draws down on you. I'll talk about it more once I have more than just a single pathetic match under my belt.

Guys.. guys..the multiplayer has Friendships

Whoa; teabagging just wasn't hardcore enough anymore, i guess.

Ah, the joys of legitimizing torture.

As opposed to murder?

But just think how many teens you will piss off when you vote to spare the guy, untie him, and shake his hand instead! It's brilliant.

Today I hunted a pack of rabid dogs with a car. Then, on the way back to the village to report my success, I was run off the road by a jeep with a heavily armored machine gun, which in turn careened off the bridge I had managed to stop short of and violently exploded 60 ft below.

Fuck and yes.

As much as I was really underwhelmed at first with this game, it's firmly rooted itself into continuous play. I am pretty far into it, though I haven't gotten to the 2nd island yet (Unless there's no penalty for just driving across the water, at which point I will do that next). I really like killing the camps of dudes as stealthily as possible.

I wish there were more/different guns. I've started unlocking some of the "Signature" weapons and they are pretty snazzy.

Not as opposed, in addition to. Which is a part of why it's so disappointing it's there.

"Boy I wonder if you can land a glider on top of a tower wouldn't that be cool? Gee it's so hard though I don't know how mortal man could do it and survive!"





Yeah, I'm kind of a big deal.

Finally to the 2nd island so I feel comfortable giving a review thus far.

I do like the game, but the HUD is console huge with no option to shrink it, popups are annoying, constant whinging after skinning animals for the 100th time is annoying and wonky caliber/weapon hierarchy (why is the 1911 the lowest damage even compared to the 9x18 Mak?) . Overall I think there are lots of improvements over FC2, like animals, weapons feel, bow, no malaria mechanic, no infinite enemies check(choke)points, no jamming, and the tatau is a neat way of presenting skills. There is something missing though and I cannot quite put my finger on it. Some feeling or mood that FC2 invoked that FC3 fails to and while clearing zones is nice, I feel like there should still be an enemy presence even a reduced one over the entire island regardless of cleared zones.

It's pretty easy to turn the HUD and popups off if they're bothering you.

I could be wrong, but I thought the second pistol you unlock has lower damage than the 1911, which is mainly distinguished by being average at everything. Also, it seems pistol damage is consistent only within a weapon category, but I'm not sure.

I do wish there were ways in the xbox version to remove or reduce parts of the HUD. I'm on a 52 inch screen but it feels tiny with all of the stuff popping up all of the time. I'm not concerned about immersion so much as clutter.

I'm a big fan of enemy perma-clear so far, though.

I'm also a big fan of the switch to the island. It gives such a different feel when climbing a hill to be able to turn around and gaze out over the local bay. Far Cry 2 felt like I was being shunted into various leafy conference rooms.

They said they are going to create a patch that lets you turn off the hud.

Just throwing this out there on a side note: FC3 made me reinstall Just Cause 2, which is by far one of the better open world crazy shit games I've played in forever.

Hmmmpff the second island is not as much fun as the first, despite the fantastic addition of wingsuit :/

Anyone seeing any real difference between DX9 and DX11? I can't even tell in side by side screenshots, that's how good this game looks.

I couldn't even tell a frame rate difference.