Far Cry 3 - the definition of insanity!

Far Cry 3 has a mission in which you kill leopards with a flamethrower.

Leopards with a flamethrower.

Game of the year.

Just finished this game, and I'm wingsuiting out of nowhere into this thread so please forgive if this has already been discussed to death. I read the first couple and last couple of pages but saw nothing.

So I have a plot question. We've got spoiler tags on this forum, right?

When you get to the pirate compound to

So as much as I loved the game, the guns, the wingsuit, Vaas's voice acting, ziplines, C4, goddamned tigers, and everything - I feel like the plot was a bit of a letdown at the end.

Or, as I'm seeing it having finished like, 10 minutes ago,

Too good not to repost:

Why wait for Ubi to patch the game when you have crazily dedicated modders for a game with no SDK?

Holy fuck.

This is a partial list: in the link above, each one of these is a link to a mod. It looks like the 'Compilation mod' is the rolling update of the most-requested features (you can only have one edited 'patch.dat' file at a time).

Now if only someone would fix the Far Cry 3 Service Is Unavailable for Ubi. Jesus christ, Ubi you always have to prove yourselves utterly inept on PC.

Switch Uplay to offline mode. Unless you're trying to play multiplayer, obvs.

I.. I really don't like that guy being interviewed.

Man, I don't get that at all from this game. It's escapism, but he's a rich douchebag. He's not escaping the threat of Gen Y or the economy or kids or anything else. He's escaping growing the fuck up like absolutely everyone in their 20s. I agree with him on the commentary on video game violence and that it's actually well done to show excessive to the point of being uncomfortable violence in the game to make you question it. But pretty much every other thing he says comes across as not actually in the game, and just trying to sound like he wrote the whole thing as a deep meta commentary on the world as a whole. Yet somehow all that deep commentary didn't actually make it into the game at all.

Or trying to redeem the deluxe content code I paid $10 for. Or have access to the leaderboards in the game, or plenty of other things.

I shouldn't have to run offline mode at this point, the shit should work.

But it's not actually conveyed in the medium at all. The game constantly comes across as wanting to convey a point, then forgetting about it. That's what makes the end such an oddly flat note, and what makes the strange bits in the middle seem like a build up to nothing.

The writer may have had a deep commentary in mind while writing the story, but either it got left on the cutting room floor, or he forgot to write it down. It came out as a deep commentary on the nature of violence and masculinity. It did not at any point convey the plight of the unemployed GenYer living in his parent's basement.

Sure. I don't disagree. I wasn't being dismissive; offline mode isn't exactly an obvious option in their interface.

The story parts of the game are by far the worst parts of it. The story itself is lame so far, and to the extent that it may have some interesting subtext that is hopelessly obscured by terrible voice acting and awful mission design. Basically if this is the guy responsible for the scripting and gamification of Far Cry then I hate him.

I lack a copy of the script, so I have no idea what the differences between "as written" and "as performed" are. I'm assuming you do, hence the assurances that all of this was absolutely in the script? And as such, I'd be honestly curious what was dropped and why.

I'd also be curious if you'd tell me where I missed the plight of the gen Y subtexts. I didn't rush to view the character as a rich douchebag, it was presented as the first views of said character within 15 seconds of the game starting, and reinforced frequently within all the Vaas segments and the interactions with his girlfriend. Which honestly are the only parts of actual character growth that I saw in your character, and they were mostly threads of Grow The Fuck Up combined with a pretty decent deconstruction of the idea of masculine identity with excessive violence and emotional detachment (his whole exploration of "fuck my friends, I'm a god here!" and repeatedly questioning the idea of leaving the island in the first place without revenge on someone he barely knew at that point), which would have made far more sense if:

I mean the inclusion of an xp system, achievements, popups, etc. Basically things where the game incentives you to play it in a certain way (e.g. you get more xp for silent take downs). Besides, the guy even says that the game is a response to gamification in the interview you posted.

Here.

The thing is that the "rewards" in Far Cry 3 are tedious as shit and get in the way of the actual gameplay. The xp system, looting, achievements, etc don't make me want to play Far Cry 3 instead of engaging on real life, they make we want to smack the shit out of the game designer for ruining the tasteful minimalism of Far Cry2.

Does the game incentivise you to play in a certain way? I'm pretty sure people who are doing no stealthy shit are still winning.

The tutorial and mission popups are a flaw, for sure, but achievements and stuff? Gamers want that. I used to bitch about it a little bit but seriously, who cares? What I like about some achievements is that they give you ideas on playing in a way you haven't thought of.

The XP system is hardly "gamification." I think gather double herbs is silly but I don't think this game has bad skill trees or talents (see Borderlands 2 for bad).

I don't think the writer is an idiot. I don't think his ideas translated to the end product. There is a massive difference there, as it could be a writing issue, a medium issue, an editing issue, whatever. I'm saying that his interview gave a lot of "this is what the story is about!" depth, but none of it is actually in the end product. Taking that as "writer = idiot" seems a bit of a leap, because I think the writing is top notch (Vaas is by far one of the best written characters I've seen in ages) but the plot repeatedly builds up to things and then completely drops them without a word.

It's also impossible for that group of characters to express the plight of the Gen Y unable to find a job or afford to live on their own because the entire plot is they're all rich entitled kids who never have to worry about anything. The whole setup is that they're so care-free in their lives that when that bubble is popped they can't cope (well, half can't cope. The other half seems entirely cool with how bloody their lives suddenly got. But the girlfriend's reaction to the situation is well written in context). But it's not the plight of the Gen Y in any way, there's not a single struggling Gen Y character in the entire game. The text that made it into the game is about the long fall from being/feeling invulnerable to being weak. If that's the complete opposite of what the writer intended, then something happened in editing that completely changed his body of work.

Who is it that didn't miss it? Seriously? I've yet to see anyone going on about Far Cry 3 as a deconstruction of the jobless Gen Y plight. The only result in Google for it is.. that interview in which the author comes out and states that's what it's about.

This is where I'm not understanding this. You're coming across as someone who knows the author or the devs personally here, to me. I've seen plenty of discussion on the plot of FC3, but most of it revolves around "was this plot any good" or "what the hell was going on there", which implies to me that I didn't miss the point, the point was confusing, poorly made, or not actually present in the body of work.

I went over the things that the plot does a good deconstruction of. But I highlighted the bit that isn't even remotely talked about, addressed, implied, or hinted at in the game. There is not a single distressed Gen Y character with bleak prospects for the future in Far Cry 3. You are rich, your brothers are also rich. You are jobless, but have unlimited credit to fuck around on (this is one part that's never actually addressed, and tries to make a point in a minor cutscene where you declare you're not buying drinks, but it conflicts with every other segment where you have no money problems and comes across less as "I need a job" and more "I'm giving my brother shit"), your girlfriend is an actress and rich, her friend is just rich, your stoner friend starts the game discussing his new black card. None of these people are struggling Gen Y people in despair about the economy or employment. If anything the only economically struggling group in the entire game are the fucking pirates and in theory the non violent locals who never actually have fleshed out speaking parts.

This is my complaint: you seem to be defending the author as "well he said this is what it's about, so thus is must be about this" while my point is "he may have intended that, but at some point between intending it and the gold master going out, that subplot was lost"

I think it said a lot about the plight of Gen Y when I liberated an outpost last night by sitting behind a tree and eating a sandwich while a pack of feral dogs killed everyone there.

Well, maybe I did use the word wrong. To me it makes sense to talk about arbitrary rewards and incentives as "gamification", whether or not the rewards take place in or outside a game. But I'll defer to you if you think it makes a big difference.

But in any event, it doesn't change my point, which is that the introduction of those kinds of rewards and incentives into Far Cry 3 makes the game much worse and directly undermines the concept of a sandbox, in that it is the designer telling the player how to play the game "right". I find it distracting and condescending, and directly at odds with a game that aspires to be a sandbox.

Do you eat the sandwich via a quick-time-event?

Well, it's at least attempting to incentivise you to play in a certain way. It is giving you greater rewards for playing in some ways than in others.

Not this gamer. I just like to be left to my own devises without constantly being told what to do and how to do it, particularly in an open world game.

Well the XP/loot system is definitely aimed at a reward loop (I'm not going to use the term "gamification" lest Charles smirk himself into a coma). I like doing things in a game because they are fun or interesting (intrinsically rewarding) rather than being bribed into doing it through arbitrary rewards. The only such loop in Far Cry 2 (for example) was the diamond hunts, which were themselves often interesting as they involved exploration and environmental puzzles (e.g. how the heck do I get there?). Looting dead bodies for a blue pokerchip and $10 is not interesting or fun or intrinsically rewarding for me; nor is searching literally thousands of sparkly crates for things like "doll heads" and "flashlights". It's Skyrim trashloot times 1000.

No, the QTE was to comment properly on the terrible holes in their outer walls ever since the housing market crash.

This thread sure took a reward poop.

How about that Far Cry eh? It's still the most fun you'll have in a game this year.

I enjoy the signature weapons.

Well firstly if most people (and I'm not saying this is the case) don't see this interpretation then it's bad story telling.

Second, it strikes me as a pretty common theme (he even boils it down to the core element, which is young person escapes from the rest of the world) so even if it wasn't the story he was planning to tell I wouldn't be surprised to see someone offer it as an interpretation regardless.

Thirdly, I can't believe the person who complained about how people weren't taking advantage of the strengths (e.g. being personally engaged) of the medium when telling their stories is in the thread, slamming others, without having played the game himself. It's an interactive medium, you can't just view from the sidelines.

This isn't the first time I've had to bring this up, but in order to get rewards for playing stealthily, you're taking significantly more time than by running and gunning. And I mean significant. Think about how much time it takes you to line up a perfect stealth kill in this game, and then consider whether or not the +30 XP for the takedown took about as much time as just running around machine-gunning 4 enemies, 4 enemies from whom you will probably get at about 1 headshot without trying.

I just loaded up the game and took down a fort in about 1 minute and 15 seconds, significantly shorter than if I had done Takedowns on every single enemy. In the long run my levels per hour would stay the same and I would have a shorter time getting to the "end" and seeing content, if that were my intent of playing the game.

Good thing none of those things forced you to do anything!

Which parts of Far Cry 3 prevent you from doing interesting things?

You don't have to search a single crate or body in Far Cry 3, as the weapons and ammo dropped from enemies is enough to take you through the entire game if you liked. Hunting, however, is required in a way that compliments the open-world nature, not restricts it.

Far Cry 2 is an awful example if you're going to say it only had one "interesting" reward loop. Just because Far Cry 3 adds more reward loops doesn't make it a worse open world game, or more restricting somehow.

Skyrim trash loot is another perfect example of a completely ignorable aspect of a game that people couldn't handle ignoring. I laughed, and laughed, and laughed at people who were posting (on Qt3 even) about being weighed down from all the armor and weapons they picked up in order to sell at merchants who probably didn't have enough money to buy it all. Preventing people from saving them from themselves is not intrinsically bad game design.

So what? Why even bother having the XP at all? Why is there a need to reward people from playing a game in any particular way? This is what I meant when I (mis)used gamification above: why is there an incessant tendency to poke and prod the player to play a game in a certain way?

Another obvious example of this is the assassination missions, which (so far at least) all require you to kill your target with a knife. That's an insane decision to me. Why should I not be left to chose my own method of assassination? In the assassination missions in Far Cry 2, if I wanted to spend 30 minutes stalking the target and taking him out with a knife, that was great. If I wanted to line up the perfect sniper shot from across the map, that was great too. So was going balls-out crazy with a bazooka or a mortar or flame thrower. So why am I being told that I must kill this target with a knife?

At the end of the day, if sneaking around is fun then it's fun and I will do it. If it's not fun, don't try and bribe me into doing it with XP rewards or cash.

The parts where I get fail states if I do a mission the wrong way is a good example. You can get fail states if you get detected, if you trigger an alarm, if you kill the wrong person, if you kill the right person the wrong way, etc. You must complete missions in a particular sequence and your actions in much of that mission are taken away from you.

A lot of mechanics also hinder your ability to do your own thing. Gathering herbs to make syringes is lame and boring. The whole crafting interface is fucked and the basic idea is terrible too. Why would anyone think that the bag-crafting mechanic from MMOs should be incorporated into a FPS?

Another thing that bothers me (that may not bother anyone else) is the Radio Towers. I like the idea of unlocking maps through the towers, and though I think the minimap should not contain every single lootable item, it's satisfying to gradually unveil the map.But I really hate the Assassin's Creed-style swooping camera that you get when you reach the top.

The first reason I hate it is that the game is very careful to keep you inside Jason's perspective. From the very first moment of the game, you see through his eyes, and even in the "cut scene" parts you stay in first person. That's awesome and really effective, particularly in action sequences. But then for some reason when you get to the top of the tower, you go into third-person mode. As far as I can tell, it's the only time the game does this and it frankly makes no sense.

The second reason, which ties more into the game not letting you do your own thing, is that in giving you this swooping camera the game focuses in on every single point of interest in the area. The game is not content to let you explore and discover the island on your own; instead, it shoves your face in all of the neat locations that the level designers came up with. It totally ruins any sense of discovery, for me at least.

But you do need money to unlock weapons and upgrades, and the best way to get money is to search crates and bodies.

Why do you think hunting "compliments the open-world nature"? Do you seriously enjoying shooting animals so that you can craft bigger bags? If so, we are not likely to agree on this point.

There's a bunch of problems with this point. First, you do need to search crates for money, unless you want to do the side missions I guess, and those are not much fun either (c.f. knife-only assassinations, above). Second, the inventory interface is awful, even worse than Skyrim's. Third, when you loot a crate or body it picks up everything in that crate or body (you cannot choose which items to pick up and which to leave), so you must hit escape, return to the inventory, and drop each unwanted trash item out of the inventory.

I'm not convinced including loot (money and items in corpses and crates) adds anything at all to the game experience. None of the loot is interesting in the way it is interesting in something like an ARPG, because it is all basically currency or crafting items, and crafting basically amounts to bigger bags and medkits/stimpacks. The only cool thing loot does is provide money to unlock weapon attachments, which could just as easily be unlocked by something like the diamond system in Far Cry 2 as opposed to cash + trash items. The loot also makes the game world feel much "busier" and nonsensical (Why are there boxes of cash everywhere? Why does no one in the village care that I am stealing their cash? Who is buying "doll heads" and "poker chips" at 6 bucks a pop?).

E: It's probably obvious given the length of my reply how frustrating I find this game, but I do want to make clear that I don't think it's a bad game. It just seems like a game that was not thoughtfully designed. It reminds me a lot of Assassin's Creed in that there are a lot of game systems that have been added on without any consideration of whether they improve the game at all.

You're getting awfully close to wondering how the universe began if you start going into the territory of "why do open world games have objectives that require usage of specific gameplay mechanics."

You mean the method of assassination in an optional mission that is roughly following the native-man-hunter nature of the gameplay experience?

Sorry, /uninstall. You're playing a game that has mechanics explicitly and meticulously crafted with a particular experience in mind, an element that is optional nearly all the time. That it's not actually all the time doesn't matter.

Dear lord, you're being pretty ambiguous about this now. Attempt to apply this reasoning to anything more open-world and you'll start questioning why the developers have put walls between me and my target.

Then buy them. Or don't, because you can heal without syringes.

You really hate objectives, huh.

Good fucking lord, are you the dork that I actually had to argue against saying that 3rd person kill cameras and cover system in Deus Ex:HR would ruin the Deus Ex experience? What part of the exploration has been ruined for you that you're briefly shown a shitty shed with a broken boat over on the beach, a location which most likely doesn't actually contain anything useful and that you're free to go search out if its brief 1.5 second glimpse enticed you to? Isn't that the same thing as looking out from a mountain you just climbed and seeing it in the distance anyways? Your argument about ruined discovery doesn't make much sense in the context of a game that doesn't restrict you from going out and discovering things anyways. When Skyrim marks a destination on my map after hearing about it from an NPC, is my sense of discovery ruined because I didn't find the location by myself?

Or kill animals and sell the skins

Do I enjoy shooting things with different, unpredictable behavior patterns and target profiles in a first person fucking shooter?. Yes, alexb, I do. If I had no reward, I would still run over wild animals with my jeep just like I did in Far Cry 2.

The inventory interface is certainly not worse than Skyrim's. You can sort by item value and there are icons to tell you what something is before you select it.

I don't actually disagree with this, but I also don't care, because it's all flavor text. You should consider that last sentence a bit more carefully, because asking who carries around a picture of a dwarf is kinda funny the first time you see it.

This is wrong. It shows 3 interesting sites, which is a Far Cry (pun4tehwin) from your bolded statement.

Played a bit of coop with some randoms earlier. It's pretty decent, seems to be fairly long series of missions with varied objectives (hint: all of them require killing a shitload of pirates.) I guess you could say it's L4D style but seems to be a lot less stressful than that game. Even set on Casual you earn metric assloads of multiplayer xp.

I don't really think so. Game mechanics should exist for a reason. I don't think this game needed an XP system to work well. I don't see any value in the XP system as implemented. Do we really need XP to encourage us to play this kind of game the way we want to play it? I'd say that the success of games like Far Cry 2 and the Stalker series shows that an open world game can work perfectly well without an XP system.

Well this is just one of many examples. I do think it is objectionable that I have to kill the bad guy with a knife or I fail the mission. It seems totally arbitrary and not fun to me. The assassination missions in Far Cry 2 were much more fun because they allowed me to make my own plan and strategy and then execute on that strategy. For example, in one such mission there is a target in one of the "neutral towns". I could have run in, guns blazing, and killed him that way. I could have sneaked through the alleyways and got him with a silenced pistol when he was alone. Or I could climb up a clock tower and snipe him from a distance. I think the ability to choose how I complete that kind of side mission is valuable and holds a lot of the fun for me.

I don't really think the game was crafted with a particular experience in mind, and to the extent that the design attempts to put the player in a straightjacket I think that's a defect rather than a perk. Again, game mechanics should be justified. What exactly is the benefit of encouraging players to play one way or the other? Why was it necessary to add this mechanic when other open-world shooters work as well or better without it?

How am I being ambiugous? I think arbitrary fail states are bad design. If I get detected in Dishonoured, for example, it's not a game over. I have to deal with the consequence of being detected, but I don't get a "Mission Failed" message. If I get detected in Far Cry 3 I get a fail state and have to restore my game to an earlier point.

Let me explain my point in greater detail. I don't think the 3rd person camera has any real mechanical impact on the game. What it does, for me, is interfere with the presentational choices the designer made. I think a big part of the artistic design of the game is the fact that you remain in first person throughout. For example,

That's a great reveal! Through the rest of the game you never leave Jason's point of view, so why do you leave it when you get to the top of the tower? It's exactly as if in the middle of "Treasure Island", which is told through the perspective of Jim Hawkins, all of a sudden we are given a third-person perspective and find out what Long John Silver is thinking. This is actually really different from both Deux Ex games, since neither of those games are strictly first person: both games feature cut scenes told in the third person, as I recall. There is nothing wrong with third person perspective, of course, but once you pick a storytelling perspective you should stick with it. If they had really want to do a camera swoop thing they could just as easily have left me in first-person perspective and at least that way they could have preserved the convention they had built.

Another thing that the "camera" swoop does is that it effectively "tells" instead of "showing". I've just climbed a tower, I'm perfectly capable of looking around at the cool scenery, I have a camera with zoom, so I'm capable of taking a good look at things I want to look at it. I don't need (or want) the game to tell me what I "should" be looking at. Leave it to me to determine what I want to look at.

This ties into how it ruins discovery. I want to find things out on my own. It is much more fun for me if I stumble over an old artillery emplacement or an ancient ruin or a piece of indigenous sculpture as opposed to having the game point it out for me explicitly. I don't mind if you give me a mark on a map upon being informed of the spot by a character in game (as in Skyrim) since that makes intuitive sense to me: if I have a map in real life, I actually can just put a mark on it. I don't like an automatic checkpoint (especially if it displays on screen in the "hud"), but thankfully Skyrim let me turn that off.

So for me, the camera swoop has a lot of negatives and provides no benefits at all. Again, I don't understand why it was included. It is consistent with the rest of the game in that it doesn't trust the player to decide for him or herself what is cool or worth looking at.

Isn't that exactly my point? We don't need piddly prizes to do things that are fun. If shooting animals is fun I will do it; if I don't think it's fun I don't want to have my inventory arbitrarily limited because I don't feel like doing it. The game doesn't trust you to find your own fun so it tries to force you to do what it thinks you should be doing. I don't like that.

Coupled to this is the fact that the mechanic doesn't even make sense within the fiction of the world: why the heck can a shark-skin wallet hold more money than a boar-skin wallet? Far Cry 2 also had some inventory limits IIRC, but at least the means of expanding the inventory made sense in the world: you bought better equipment from merchants just like all of your guns.

I think you're doing alright explaining you opinions but I'm having trouble reading some of that and not thinking that you're going to have some cognitive dissonance.

We're not too far apart here regarding the experience system, actually. The game doesn't need it, but I don't think the genre is particularly hurt by it.

This is still confusing me, because you're focusing on side missions in FC3 as a comparison to FC2, and the reason it doesn't make sense to me is because your tactics in the rest of the open world are your own to implement. Far Cry 3 strikes a decent balance between letting the player spread out to where he wants, and giving him optional objectives that focus on different gameplay mechanics. It's actually better at this than Far Cry 2 was, as the extent of Far Cry 2 was really "figure out how to kill a guy that's in a jeep caravan driving in circles."

You might have to justify what other open-world shooters work as well or better. Saints Row 2 wasn't particularly harmed by locking things behind a system that gave the player a feeling of progress, as arbitrary as some of those things were. Just Cause 2 didn't always justify its restrictions either.

I don't know what happens after that in Dishonored, but I would rather not have to manually load a save or trudge my way back to a quest giver to redo a mission. Do you think those are somehow better for gameplay than a fail state? People who actually remember my arguments against the Prince of Persia remake's removal of fail states might see some irony in what I'm saying here.

Alright that's too much detail, but I never felt like it was out of place. The zooming out is so quick that you don't actually see yourself, and what it actually accomplishes (for me) is making you feel small in what is an extremely large game world. I don't think it hampers any feelings of discovery. The zoom-out certainly doesn't actually point out anything all that interesting, so it fails a little bit in its purpose. The most interesting things I've found in the game were not shown from the radio tower cutscenes.

I have no idea what the purpose of this is other than that it's your ideology, and one that I'm not necessarily opposed to, but I can't help but think that the only game you actually sound like you want to play... is Minecraft. Which is cool with me, because I love Minecraft.

Alright, come on, ordering weapons from a 486DX2 computer in the middle of a war-torn African country and having them appear instantaneously next door to be stored in magical chests (which also had "arbitrary" unlocking requirements) did not make more sense than hunting sharks for more wallet space if you step back and look at it.

My closing argument, since I know where you're coming from and you're probably tired of explaining it to me, is that restrictions in open-world games serve the purpose of giving the player a sense of progression while allowing that progression to occur in an organic way that the player can fit to their playstyle. In Far Cry 2, if I favored switching out special weapons I would probably buy a special weapon chest, if I had gravitated toward primary weapons I might get that chest first, if I was having problems with stealth or health I would buy camo or a syringe kit with the diamonds I got from briefcases that were strewn about the game world (but usually found on the roof of a shitty jungle shed).

I don't always like arbitrary restrictions either but I think Far Cry 3 makes a great attempt at melding a first person shooter story into an extravagant open world, and I think it did it better than Far Cry 2 in *most* areas. There are some hops backward with the steps forward, unfortunately, and I'm also one of those people that usually cringes at hand-holding in videogames, wishing devs would give a bit more thought to how intelligent their customers are.