Far Cry 3 - the definition of insanity!

Hmmm, I never thought I would agree with Jim Sterling, but here it is...
http://www.destructoid.com/far-cry-3-the-creative-failure-of-industry-commentary--240819.phtml

(response to PA Report article)

I can't wait to finish the game and read all about these shenanigans.

Man where have I seen that before? :P

Huh dunno how I overlooked that.

Also, I just went to that location from the E3 demo, with everything on ultra/DX11/4*MSAA etc, and it really looks pitiful compared to that E3 video/screengrab. Just devoid of vegetation.
I really wonder what causes cuts like this. Lack of console performance?

I would think so, yeah. And what someone else already mentioned, at some point increasing the density changes gameplay and the whole "feel" of the game, and that would have been a LOT of thick jungle to walk through. They were like forced to keep the PC version consistent with the console requirements, so the maximum level of vegetation on PC could have then been dialed down.

I think the game is slightly misleading in its intro, it seems like that first escape sequence you do on the narrow jungle path has thicker vegetation than the island in general.

What's kind of strange is that this game engine (Dunia 2 I think?) is ridiculously great at handling vegetation performance. In FC2 and FC3 the bottleneck for performance isn't the vegetation, and it's barely even the LOD-distance or the shadow quality, it's the large amount of lighting shaders and reflection shaders (try altering reflection in either game and you get quite a jump in frames, a good 10%-20%, compared to vegetation quality), even in areas that had little or no reflection (I'm assuming the engine doesn't cull it efficiently, if at all).

BTW I don't recommend D3D11 at all, and it might not even be loading properly. The game is supposed to load its D3D11.exe file. If you enable it in options and think you have it on, you actually have to confirm it by going to task manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and seeing which .exe file it's using. D3D11.exe doesn't bring anything but light culling, which doesn't seem to help performance like it should, and shadow dithering for shadows which are far from their point of origin, which isn't actually realistic at all in daylight because the sun is essentially a wall of powerful light and not a point of light. If you're in a room with a lightbulb, then it makes sense, otherwise it doesn't, and the way it's implemented is treating the sun as a point of light. No reason to kill 10 frames for it (for me anyways).

Although there is this big and important thing going on right now about treating women like people both in games and the industry, I think you're overreacting a bit here. #1 and #2 read to me as basically the same thing: you don't find her attractive. OK no big. Sure she's got the halter-top thing happening but she's hardly EQ boobelf or DoA Volleyball or Lara Croft. Also yeah: she's naked during sex which, as a woman, she's allowed to have and even enjoy!

#3 seems like a real meta-complaint; femme-fatales have been classic archetypes for 100 years in all kinds of entertainment. What kind of originality do you want in a video game, something that no author or dramatist has even done before? That seems quite a high bar to raise. #4 seems to conflict with the final paragraph (unquoted) of what you wrote.

What I'm saying is: I can see where the intent of the writer was and where it was lost, and I can see where that might have occurred somewhere between his idea and the artists/designers at the end of the pipeline. But I hardly feel that his failure to communicate a more mature vision deserves the same complaints one would level against the team of nunslutssassins in Hitman: Absolution or the latest outfits in Soul Caliber 5.

It's not that I don't find her attractive (I don't, but that's besides the point). I thought it was gross because it's another straight male sex fantasy in a genre full of them. It felt leery and creepy. I found it particularly gross because all of the "main" female characters have been "hot" and because the game obviously intended me to find her attractive. It's like a long creepshot in a bad "B" movie. It's even worse because I'm stuck in the perspective of Jason, who is a creep that I already hate as a character. Finally, this was the first racialized woman character that was anything more that a quest dump, and so it was unfortunate that she was portrayed as a sex object. Exotic femme fatale is almost as boring and cliche as mystical black sidekick!

Basically I'm not interested in gross video-game cheesecake. It wouldn't be that big a deal, except I couldn't skip the cutscene, and because apparently the writer thought I was supposed to want to bang her or something? I just felt embarrassed by the whole thing.

Well I haven't gotten to any sex scenes, so I guess I have that to look forward to.

My point is this: she is surrounded by warrior guys in what look to be tribal outfits. She is wearing a mini-skirt and a halter top. It's just really, really stupid, in my opinion, akin to women having cutouts in their armor in fantasy games.

Actually, yeah, I do think original characters is something that you should have in a videogame if you're going to make me interact with those characters all the time. And there's nothing wrong with femme fatales per se, except that tends to be the only kind of "strong" female character that ever ends up in video games. It's certainly the only "strong" female character that has ended up in this game, so far.

Well I didn't play those games so I have no idea. I'm just relaying my experience playing the game and reading the writers explanation for certain plot decisions. I'm not saying that it is the worst most misogynistic game ever; I'm saying that I did not have the intended reaction to the character in question, and so rather than being startled by his story I'm just annoyed.

Just as a side note, what is the deal with the game removing my control over the character's eyes in some cutscenes but not others? In much of the game, even when I'm frozen in a cutscene I can still look around. In other cutscenes I can't. I can't see any logic to it.

Ugh why do I have to use a bow in the hunting side-missions? Bows are fucking stupid; that's why people invented guns. I have a whole bunch of cool weapons, let me use those instead.

e: LOL I'm in another stealth mission where you game over if you get spotted, and one of the native islander women propositions a white character and literally says "fuckee fuckee suckee suckee". Yeah if this is quality writing I'll take Just Cause 2 any day.

e2: also, it's really dumb that if you want to re-locate your thumb or put out a fire, Jason has to do that in real time. But if you want to make a wallet or a fucking syringe, you pause and do that in a menu. Nothing like being in a fire-fight and making home-made serums and leather fashion items, I guess?

Yeah I also thought that there should have been a crafting table for skinning, and a crafting animation for syringes (though not for each individual one, of course). Sort of like The Witcher and making potions required meditating after you put the potions you wanted made into a queue of sorts.

And bows are fine, not that hard to use. Go ahead and make the hunter syringe that increases damage to animals if you're annoyed with trying to take things down. I know the leopards can be kind of brutal.

I grew up in the Australian country town of Dubbo. Its in the middle of nowhere and the sole reason to go there is that it has an amazing Zoo. From my memory, the defining characteristic of the Tapir is that they are capable of incredible projectile defecation. My advice, if your shopping for a new backpack, approach Tapirs from the front.

I'm done with this until it's patched; too many crashes. Also, I just did the prison mission, which was sort of terrible because it was nonsensical (all part of the dream/hallucination? Who cares) and because it was filled with a series of awful quick time events.

Post prison I did a few more of the bulletin board missions (in fact I crashed on the way to one). I haven't done a ton of these, granted, but I've done some. And yet here I sit, with my skills still locked. This gating in this game is fuck-all.

RPS has an interview with Jeffrey Yohalem on the FC3 story and whether or not it's sexist and racist or just satire.

I found a lot of Yohalem's answer's confusing or contradictory, but at the end John Walker explains his own feelings on the game's story, which I thought was pretty perceptive.

One thing I don't really understand after all these interviews is what Alice in Wonderland has to do with Far Cry 3. Alice in Wonderland is an awesome book, and I definitely pick up a lot of the references to it, but I just don't see what the point is. Jason "is through the looking class" seems way too facile to be the only reason to include those references. But I see no deeper connection other than these broad, literal references: "eat me" pills, potion drinking, wacky characters, etc. And so I wonder if I'm missing something, or if there's nothing more to get. Perhaps the game is telling me that this is all just a dream, but hopefully not, because that would be incredibly lame. Thoughts?

This is from a different article, but is also kind of troubling:

If this is how he sees games, he's really failed. If shooting is how the player acts and interacts with the game, then why does every plot point in the game move forward through mandatory plot scenes? Far Cry 3 does not have an interactive story in any sense of the word: not only is there no player agency in how the story unfolds, the story segments are completely non-interactive (other than the occasional obligatory QTE). I do think the gameplay mechanics and free movement are awesome, but those have nothing to do with the story or with Yohalem. Interactive storytelling happens in the gunfights of FC3, and are only hindered by the scripted sequences or shoved aside altogether for the story sequences.

I haven't had a single crash in 30+ hours.

That RPS article pretty much confirms my suspicion that Yohalem cannot see the wood for the trees(or maybe jungle).

He may well have started out to make the game he describes and defends, but the actual work itself does not support his suppositions.

I don't think he really understands the criticisms of the game either, For example,

But the reason (some) people think the game feels racists is because the native people are a melange of a bunch of other cultures, none of which is taken seriously, and the natives are used purely as scenery onto which the game projects a story of a white protagonist. Yes, the Rakyat are lazy and made up and fake: that's why people think your depiction of them is racist. I don't see how "it's all Jason's fantasy" is a defence to that.

oof his response to John Walker's question about Barthes is painful. I mean, it's a tough question, but there's no shame in admitting you haven't read Barthes.

Yo, hold on, the bow is objectively awesome and if you don't like it you're wrong and you should feel bad.

Really tangential, but all the craaazy Alice quotes migrating double-visioned around the screen for chapter transitions made my brain leap to the Old Man Murray review of American McGee's Alice in American McGee's Wonderland of American McGee from days of yore. Especially this bit:

I haven't finished the game yet and I have no idea how close I am to doing so, so I haven't read any of these story breakdowns or responses. Still, I would like to say that I appreciate a writer who has something to say and tries to say it, since that's oh so rare in games writing and shooters in general. So good job! As a person who creates things for a living myself, I can understand the knee-jerk reaction to defend his work. That said, in any creative endeavor, if the great majority of your audience (and critics) fails to "get" the message it's not because they're not being critical enough; it's because you failed in your delivery. I got thrashed in a critique once in school because I spent ten minutes telling a jury all about my thought process and metaphors and whatever else went into my building design, and they said Terrific; none of that stuff is on the page so fuck you (paraphrasing). I was indignant, but they were right. Same thing.

I'm trying not to spoilerfy myself too much - I'm about to finish the northern island, so I'm probably a little more than halfway through the game, maybe? - so I haven't read everything Far Cry 3 writer has had to say about this. But the bits I have read reminds me of that insane commentary track Richard Kelly did for Donnie Darko, where fifteen minutes in I was like "Wait, THAT'S what this movie is about?"

Is it wrong that I only really want to play this game if I can bow and arrow my whole way through it?

No, this is what that movie is all about, and no after-the-fact meddling from Richard Kelly is going to ruin it.

There'll be times when the game script-forces you to use other weapons, but outside of those, it'd be doable, especially after picking up the special arrow recipes and a couple bow-specific perks.

Now, I think it would be wrong primarily because it really seems a shame to not put your machete through meth-crazed pirates' spines as well. Putting your machete through spines is part of the spirit of giving.

So now I'm playing an escort mission, where the guy I'm supposed to be escorting keeps running forward into enemies and getting killed. If I run forward with him, I either get shot up as I'm moving between cover or blown up by landmines as I run between cover. I just want this guy to chill out while I deal with the enemies from a distance, but nope, that's not how he's scripted. Thanks game.

e: Oh I see, I have to follow the escort guy's footsteps exactly or I step on a mine and game over, or he dies and I game over. Which is actually a pretty good metaphor for the game's appreciation of open-world gameplay. Is this great satire or idiotic design?

I'm honestly curious - does anyone think the mandatory stealth missions and escort missions were a good idea? They are not very fun to me. I don't play many mainstream single-player FPS games, so maybe people enjoy this, but I certainly don't.

I'm also curious about some of the mechanics that Ubisoft dropped from FC2. I get leaving the respawning guard posts -- I didn't have a problem with them but many people did -- but I don't understand why they changed some other things that I thought were universally seen as successful.

For example, the minimap in this game is, to me at least, inferior in every way to the minimap in FC2, which was the best implementation of a mapping system that I think I have seen. Another example was the buddy system, which gave me an in-game, systemic reason to care about the characters, rather than being told by the game designer that I should care about characters. Why did they get rid of the free-form assassination missions, and why did they get rid of the convoy missions? The assassination missions and convoy missions were some of my favorite parts of FC2, it seems like they would work fine in this game, and I don't really understand why they got rid of them.

It kind of feels like they sanded off all the interesting edges from FC2.

It is strange that there is C4 in this game with absolutely no reason to use it due to lack of convoy missions. What's funnier is that there are also useless mines (well, nearly useless).

For the mission you're talking about, I never actually died from a mine, but I did trigger like 4 of them one after another and had to heal up each time. Perhaps I had more health bars than you (or you were playing on Hard mode, I didn't switch to that until I nearly got to the 2nd island).

Yeah, I'm playing on hard because for the most part I find the game very easy. The only reason I found that mission difficult is because the guy you're escorting has a serious death wish.

You can feasibly shoot the mines too, but with all the other gunfire going on it is pretty tough.

One big annoyance I find is the complete lack of body armor in the game. They barely ever give it to you in the environment, and on Hard you're going to have to remember to keep buying it.

And done. Random stuff, in no particular order.

C4 kills heavies easily before you get the takedown perk.

Also on that mission the mines are visible on the ground, just shoot em.

True, but the signature sniper rifle (unsilenced .50 caliber) was my go-to for heavies until the takedown. That or hitting them in the unarmored part of the head with a silenced pistol (it works).

The silenced submachine gun works fine too. Distract with rock, sneak up behind, shot to the head, done.

I am really not enjoying this game at all. Failing a mission because I killed a man-eating bear or a pirate with the wrong weapon makes me want to explode with rage, as does "mash button to escape alligator". None of the story missions are fun, and the story itself is terrible. The game world feels incredibly fake to me, with little groups of animals hanging around like mobs in an MMO. Even the outpost takeovers are getting boring.

Anyway, I will stop posting in this thread now because I'm sure you are all going to hate me if I keep complaining about it every night. The worst thing is that I traded in Assassin's Creed 3 for Far Cry 3, they're both Ubisoft Montreal games, and I hate them both for pretty much the same reasons. They burned me twice in 30 days! Just one more reason to resent French Canada, I guess.

Yeah it doesn't sound like you're enjoying yourself. I gotta pick on you for bitching about using the wrong weapon on a hunter quest, it states pretty obviously that you have to go pick up the weapon they have set out for you.

I think the complaint is more that it's a fail state in the first place, not that the game doesn't explain it's a fail state.

The hunting missions are pretty much disposable, outside of the handful that give you materials for the best wallets and whatnot. I skipped most of them after that point.

On the other hand, I liked the Wanted Dead stuff. I have no objection to needing to use a knife, because creeping up behind people and doing unfortunate things to people with my machete never got old. (As always, grimly intoning, "What have I become?!" and "Curse my student loan debts and rudderless direction in life! O Gen Y Woe!" for the gravitas.)

I can see the dislike-comparisons to some of the flaws of Assassin's Creed 3, of scripting/forcing/gating trodding right on the world's toes. And hunting in AC3 was better in the act of it, if only because it had bait. (I should have been able to lurk in bushes on the island in order to jump out and kill cassowaries with my machete, is what I'm saying here.) But the most irritating moments in Far Cry 3 for me didn't nearly come to AC3's most irritating moments for me; personally, much of the game was an antidote to the overall bad taste AC3 left me with.

All your criticisms will be answered with the end of the game. Trust me.

There is a method behind the madness.

Yohalem has convinced me that he was trying to do something interesting with the game, although I'm not certain even he knows what it was. Sadly, he's clearly not actually any good at writing, so the effort fails and he's left with the last resort of the incompetent author--blaming the reader for not understanding his genius.

What? I haven't finished the game by a long shot but I've encountered plenty of good writing so far.

Sterling is full of shit.

I don't think we played the same game. And it's not supposed to be an "exaggerated commentary" - it's supposed to be pretty damn serious with its comments on games and the people who play them.

You want to talk about someone missing the forest for the trees? Look no further.

I'm really not buying the "but it's NOT racist because it's the opposite! It's subversion of any kinds of racist stereotypes!" line of defense presented there. So they've effectively replaced "the natives are all incompetent" with "turns out the natives are all manipulative assholes using the dumb whitey" but that does little if anything to remove actual racism -- that being broad brush (negative) characterization/stereotyping applied to entire group. Just a different paint.

I'm VERY frustrated by the mission design of the main missions. They completely fail to take advantage of the open-ness of their world, and create huge cognitive dissonance.

There's a boat idling at the end of that pier. You have to destroy it. If you run up to it, it will putter away after several seconds. Then you have to blow it up with the provided rocket launcher before a timer runs out. But what if you approach the boat from the water? You avoid all the enemies, and are a sneaky badass, so you should be able to blow it up and get out before they even know you were there, right? Nope. The second you touch it, it zooms away, so you can't climb up into it to lay a C4 charge. Also, you can't chase it with another boat and try to board it or blow it up in another way. Once that timer starts, you have to blow it up with that rocket launcher or you fail the mission, even if you manage to stay right on the boat's tail as the timer counts down.

Horrible, horrible mission design. Insulting and limiting and incredibly poorly-thought-out. Or maybe they thought of it and just said, "nah, we don't want to make a game for those kinds of people..."

Completely agree, that part in particular really exposes the gamey GTA4 nature of the missions.