Far Cry 2 goes overboard with conceits to realism
Digging the bullet out of the wound with pliers is an instant cure.
This is how we find ourselves confronted with Far Cry 2, a game that tries so hard to be realistic that it only succeeds in highlighting, with neon strobes, the differences between the game world and the real world. If Far Cry 2 actually wanted to be realistic, it could have easily done so. Look at America’s Army as a good example of FPS realism: there’s no respawning, and medics can’t cure wounds; the best they can do is stabilize your condition so you don’t keep getting worse. Far Cry 2 is no America’s Army: it’s a traditional FPS that tries to disguise the non-realistic trappings of the genre, and fails horribly at it.
Far Cry 2 uses the amorphous concept of hit points like pretty much every first person shooter, but doesn’t label it as such. Get dinged up in a fight? Simply inject yourself — the game doesn’t make it clear what it is, but it’s presumably something like epinephrine — and your wounds are magically healed. Unless you’ve been badly wounded, in which case you first need to use pliers to extract the bullet from your gaping wound before giving yourself the shot. Because, and this is a little known fact, when you’re shot with a bullet, all the damage is actually caused by the presence of the bullet in your body (not the huge gaping hole it ripped through it), and so all gunshot wounds can be cured simply by removing the bullet. And, logically, gunshot wounds where the bullet passes entirely through you are self-curing. The injection system fails so badly at conveying realism that the only way to really explain it is by using the trappings of the FPS genre: those syringes must be full of pure, uncut, unadulterated liquid hit points, much like how the injections in Bioshock could best be explained as liquid mana.
Far Cry 2 continues its attempts at realism by removing nearly all interface elements. Instead of pulling up a map in a menu screen, your character holds up a map in front of him. That’s cool, I guess. Except that, even though it’s a paper map, it somehow manages to have constantly updating markers for your location and the location of mission objectives. And in case you thought you could excuse it as your character himself keeping track of his position by constantly marking the map, all other maps in the game have the same indicators on them.
Also, every single vehicle in the game — even the beat-up cars and dingies — has a GPS unit in it that also conveniently blinks when it gets in proximity to diamonds. Little known fact: diamonds emit a special kind of radiation that makes them easy to track, and everyone in Africa can afford a GPS. It also leaves you wondering why all of the diamonds haven’t already been found because, you know, every person and their dog who’s driving around is readily capable of tracking them down.
I’m not nit-picking these failed attempts at realism to try to establish that Far Cry 2 is a bad game; it’s not. It’s a good game, it’s just not well-served by these ham-handed attempts at realism. Realism is simply fundamentally at odds with the established concepts in the FPS genre, and that’s something we’ve all come to accept. We don’t blink twice when running over a health pack instantly restores our health, because we’ve seen it so much. There’s no point in trying to dress that up as anything else. Trying to disguise it by making it pseudo-realistic actually just makes the flaws in realism a lot more noticeable. It’s an uncanny valley effect.
And besides, realism doesn’t necessarily make a game good. On the contrary, very realistic videogames are often not much fun at all. Let the graphics get as realistic as possible, but don’t let them impinge on the gameplay. At least Far Cry 2 doesn’t make that mistake.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:39 am
And I forgot to mention the most obvious glaring flaw in realism: apparently there’s a bolt at the front of the engine block that goes from “broken down” to “working condition”, and repairing a vehicle is a simple as tightening the bolt. Who knew?
Seeing as how they couldn’t come up with a good animation for repairing vehicles (and I don’t blame them, that’d be hard to do), it would’ve made more sense just to fade to black to imply the passage of time while your character repairs the vehicle, then when it comes back, the vehicle is repaired.
October 26th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Regarding the diamonds, apparently the tracker is tracking the diamond cases themselves, not the actual diamonds. Still, how convenient that every diamond is in a case, that every case is tagged, and that every vehicle has a GPS unit that can track said cases. It leaves you wondering why there are any diamonds left laying around by the time you get to them.
But yeah, enough nitpicking of realism. My overwhelming complaint about the game is all of the driving you have to do to get from mission to mission. It isn’t much fun, the driving isn’t great, and woe is you if you accidentally flip your vehicle over in the middle of the wilderness. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, but not executed as well. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep playing before I just get utterly bored of all the driving.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
[...] Far Cry 2 goes overboard with conceits to realism [...]
November 15th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Um the GPS is not there till you get in the car… I think its you own one that he puts on the dashboard… not animation for it but it only there when he gets in and when you pull out the map in the car he only pulls out the map so I think that is wat he does…
I still agree that this not very realistic… but it does feel like Africa with the scenery…
November 27th, 2008 at 6:53 am
Sorry Cyde, you would be over looking the all-you-can-eat gun shop and the teleporting gun cases about obvious flaws. I could be wrong, but I don’t think guns physically break into pieces at the end of their usable life.
Obviously the game is trying to be realistic, without being real, otherwise you would be locked out for weeks till the game deemed your wound had healed, then there would be weeks of physiotherapy. Maybe a new peripheral could deliver a fatal electric shock when you are killed in the game?
Depending on what we assume is wrong with the car. If we assumed holes in the radiator, then a simple, realistic, animation could be done, along with another assumption that when we entered a building somewhere in a town or even a gun shop, the vehicle was fixed by a mechanic, but this would require something in the game to indicate it was going to be repaired.
I think the self-healing animations were just trying to be cool. I certainly got a good laugh at them, especially where he pokes the bullet out with his finger. I think it is safe to say the people at UBI never thought anyone would think it was realistic.
I don’t know if you have hung around long enough , but the AI will heal each other.
I did witness one coming to another’s aid, the wounded fellow remarked “What are you doing, digging through to China!”, (or something to that effect). Witnessing this camaraderie, I had a tear in my eye - fortunately it didn’t affect my aim…
Also a wounded AI can breathe underwater. I wounded a guy who fell into shallow water during one of the buddy missions. One or two weren’t quite dead and were taking pot shots at me. I finished off all of the ones I could see, and it took me ages to find out who was still shooting. Eventually I saw the tip of a pistol waggling about just under the water…
I think the problem is that realistic looking scenes impress people more easily, that seems to by why everyone is raving about this game - the jungle looks great etc, all of the other elements have been done before. I guess UBI didn’t want to break up the flow of the game by having a fade to black scene, unless it is your buddy who can instantly rescue you - LOL!
Don’t forget, this is really a console game.
P.S. there could be an animation for putting the GPS in the car, but it may be very, very quick. I know the first timer a gun broke in my hands, it was so quick I though it was a bug and the gun had been ripped from my hand. The same thing happened with one of the rocket launchers, but that animation was a bit slower so I could see what happened.
December 21st, 2008 at 12:51 am
a few of my favorites are how…
those magic brief cases…. also come standard equipped with speakers…that are proximity activated.. but only by you.
which makes it easier to find them of course.
also… being a master mechanic myself
there actually is a bolt in the car that just fixes everything. we mechanics refer to it as the “easy bolt”. yep… blown gasket? no its cool really lemme just give this a quick twist…. oh whats that? you have a flat tire and are running low on wiper fluid? i’ll throw an extra twist on it for ya.
piece of cake
and my last favorite…. your buddy? i think the term super hero would be more appropriate. because they always seem to know when you’ve been shot to death (by just one bullet) and they come flying in with a desert eagle at just the right time to save you, all while single handedly killing an entire army of guys with that same pistol and carrying you to safety.
why cant my “buddy” just kill the jackal?
January 7th, 2009 at 8:17 am
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May 7th, 2009 at 8:37 am
Okay, seriously, all of you guys need to come down to earth from whatever pretentious version of cloud nine you’re on. It’s a goddamn video game, it’s not going to be “realistic” no matter how hard you try. Yeah, America’s Army is a good example of an openly realistic combat simulator, but that’s why it’s purely an online game (and yes, I know there are expansions or whatever that have story modes, but they suck so bad I’m not even going to qualify them as games.)
I personally think that the wound stabilzation animations looked brilliant, and were a lot more realistic than walking over a medkit and having that heal all your wounds (and not to mention wash all the blood off your clothes. I’m looking at you, Half-Life 2.) Obviously, if you try it in real life, it’s not going to heal your wound, and it’ll hurt worse than the worst hemmorhoid you’ve ever had. But it’s a video game. They’re trying to be as realistic as possible without ruining the experience, which I think weeks of game time spent “healing” would do.
I can’t help but notice none of you have mentioned that you can absorb an uncountable chunk of bullets, probably equal to your body weight, without dying. Oh, but wait, being killed in one shot would make the game a lot less fun, and a hell of a lot more frustrating. Huh. Maybe the game would be a lot more frustrating too if you didn’t have that real-time map, or those sensors showing where the diamonds are, or if every car stopped running after a bullet through the engine block, or whatever else you all decided to nitpick at.
Making a game with realistic components is all about balance. What’s real versus what’s fun. No one will play a game that has you dying every three steps. Think they made bad design choices? Make your own damn game.
P.S., a very bad misfire (one that would probably happen if your weapon is in the condition it is in the game) could blow it in half. More likely than not though, it’ll kill you. Keep your weapons clean, kids.
July 19th, 2009 at 11:38 am
NonStopWarrior is completely right, you guys think that they would have made a game with complete realism? No. Ubisoft could have but then it would be shit. plain shit.
November 5th, 2009 at 10:08 am
The GPS in the vehicle is always exactly the same as the one you hold in your hand with the map, the only reason there isn’t as much to the GPS is because it’s most likely like a keyboard kind of thing, you can detach it when you need to. (there are actually GPS systems out there that can do that) I can’t say anything about the healing process that hasn’t been mentioned already, except that the animations make you want to injure yourself on purpose just to see another. The bolt at the front is obviously to the radiator, which is usually the problem when you start seeing smoke pouring from beneath the hood(the dune buggy bolt IDK I don’t know anything about dune buggies) It’s true, not all firearms blast into pieces at the end of the road, but that exploding into pieces is because the weapons (except the machetes) in the game degrade over time the more you use them, this is realistic because their are no cleaning kits, or cleaning material, or anything for that matter that you can use to take care of the firearms at all in the game. (Hints the jamming and rusting etc) Besides, someone who knows enough about there firearm, can make it work untill it goes “kablewee” and explodes into pieces, regardless of what breaks on it.(But you can replace parts in the game now can you?) The constantly updating map is more or less ridiculous, they could have at least made you press a button that would show an animation of the character updating the map them self. The GPS tags on the diamond briefcases are explained to you in the game, and why all the diamonds are in briefcases in the first place. Sure the infinite supply of guns n’ ammo at the armories and gun shops are pretty unrealistic, but it makes it a lot easier then trying to get as many diamonds as possible just to buy another gun of the same exact one you just got last time you were there. There is only so many diamonds in the world you know. Sure it’s a great game and all, but come on, did you even try? Although it is kind of the first game to try these kinds of extremes, it doesn’t hurt to at least get put a little common sense into it. Just don’t forget, it’s just a game, it can’t be completely perfect… Not like whats really real.
December 23rd, 2009 at 9:19 am
relax cyde its just a game, not a reality program
December 29th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Counter points to this problem with reality are stalker and crysis. Both looked fairly realistic, but this uncanny valley effect wasn’t present. The scifi elements and obvious video game cliches were part of that reason. Certain aspects of FC2 were very realistic. The character models and environments. The way the player character is visible and all actions are done with his hands. The problem arises when mixing ultra realism with run and gun gameplay. You see different levels of realism in the game at the same time. The health system is the part that catches me off guard every time. The player character does brutal first aid on himself but shooting an enemy wearing no armor in the chest with an AK47 and he only flinches. I still can’t understand how an outpost of people will just open fire immediately on you.
January 28th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Morning I was surfing through the internet and wanted to let you know of my new blog over at Buggies Dune. please feel free to take a look at and leave a comment