PC Game Fun Time

Unlike Grokmoo, I somehow didn’t end up giving up Far Cry 2 for Fallout 3. Having just beaten it earlier today, I’m ready to give my final impressions, as I won’t be playing it again.

My Far Cry 2 experience was a bit uneven. I wouldn’t say that I genuinely loved the game, but I felt a strange compulsion to keep playing it. I would feel this compulsion even after the game succeeded in frustrating me immensely (like never failing to put objectives on the diametrically opposite side of the map, on the opposite side of many manned guard posts), so it was not uncommon that I’d play the game for a half hour, take a short break, and then end up playing it again in another half hour after the frustration faded. These repeating cycles of frustration and compulsion occurred several times in some days.

It finally hit me what the Far Cry 2 experience feels like: an MMORPG. I wrestled with World of Warcraft around the time that it came out (and haven’t played another MMORPG since finally quitting it). Far Cry 2 shares a lot of the same game mechanics that make an MMORPG so addictive: the free-form roaming, the slow grind of achievement (earning scarce diamonds to purchase/upgrade weapons), and the side missions. I kept playing through Far Cry 2 even when I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much simply because I wanted to keep getting to that next “level”.

But thankfully, unlike World of Warcraft, Far Cry 2 does indeed have an end, an ending left me really dissatisfied because — spoiler alert — like much of the rest of the game, you are given a false choice between two “alternatives” that result in the same outcome. The final outcome of the game? Your suicide (and in one of the options, your completely unnecessary suicide). It’s like, after an entire game full of wanton mercenary killing, the developers want to jam a moral lesson into your head and force you to atone for your sins by paying the ultimate sacrifice. Except it’s not really atonement if you aren’t given a say in the matter.

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I have now completed the vast majority of the missions in Far Cry 2, and given that Fallout 3 is out today, I am unlikely to come back to Far Cry 2 for quite a while.  So, now is a good time for a full review!

The bulk of this review is going to be pretty negative, so let me just start out by saying this:  Far Cry 2 is a pretty decent game.  Not fantastically great, as many of the professional reviews would have you believe, but decent.  Indeed, the last time I checked, metacritic had the various review sites giving it an average of 88 out of 100, while the user score was a slightly less impressive 6.5 out of 10.

Ultimately, Far Cry 2 suffers from its own scope.  It is just too large.  The game world is to big, and getting through all the main quests takes too long.  While there are some genuinely fun moments, much of the game is just a drag, and there just isn’t enough interesting stuff to do to merit the 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.  I feel like they could have taken out a lot of the “filler” and been left with maybe 10 hours of actual decently fun gameplay.  Unfortunately, even these parts can be very formulaic.  Virtually all the missions boil down to “go there, kill that guy or blow that thing up”.  The Buddy missions are presumably supposed to add some variety, but they instead feel even more run of the mill (not to mention pointless).  At first, the Buddy missions tend to have something to do with the main mission that they are branching off of.  Later on, however, it feels like the developers just got lazy.  One mission in particular I remember involved going to a village and blowing up some medicine production.  For some bizarre reason, the Buddy “sidebar” to the mission was to go to a completely different village and kill everybody so my Buddy could get some drugs!

While the “kill that guy” part of the missions is usually fun, the “go there” part is almost always boring.  Driving is not very engaging, and you will do a lot of it.  Also, a lot of the time you spend just trying to get somewhere will actually be taken up by traveling through guardposts.  These little annoyances never take more than a minute or two to clear, but you can’t just drive through them, because enemies inevitably come after you and they will take out your vehicle quickly if you ignore them.

So, the fun parts are usually the battles at the various mission locations throughout the world.  However, even these sequences generally only take a few minutes to complete.  The ones that are longer are the most fun, but these are unfortunately very rare.  What this game really needs are some nice “dungeons”: longer, more linear combat sequences, where the developers can lead you through the action.  The open ended combat sequences are just not enough.

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I’ve played Far Cry 2 a bit more since the last time I wrote about it, and naturally, greater familiarity with a subject begets more things to say about it to a blogger. I’m still enjoying the game quite a bit and don’t anticipate stopping playing it soon; it’s just not quite as great as most of the major review outlets seem to think. In particular, the game has some annoying aspects that can really hinder enjoyment of the game. Here are the top ten annoying aspects of Far Cry 2:

10. Everyone’s out to kill you. Any time you are outside of the game’s one main city, the first, last, and only thing you should do upon coming across any other person, regardless of whether they’re driving in a military jeep, civilian coupe, or are simply on foot, is to immediately kill them, because given half a chance that’s exactly what they’ll do to you. Far Cry 2 borrows a lot of its gameplay from the pioneer sandbox game Grand Theft Auto, except that it removes pretty much every non-combat element of interaction with the NPCs that litter the world. Imagine Grand Theft Auto where you’re always stuck on a six star wanted level and the only other characters in the game are police, and you get the general idea.

9. Having to schlep across the whole map repeatedly. The game world in Far Cry 2 is big. Too big, some might say (me included). Destinations are spread pretty far apart, with only jungle/desert trails between them livened up with the occasional guard post encounter/diamond tracking. As a result, you’ll have to schlep across the game world a lot. It gets repetitive pretty quickly, and it’s not a lot of fun because the driving isn’t particularly enjoyable. Thankfully, there are bus depots scattered around the map; there just aren’t nearly enough of them.

8. Lack of jogging. Your character in Far Cry 2 only has two movement speeds: walking and sprinting. Since the game world is so big, you frequently have long distances to travel. The game is (thankfully) laden with vehicles that can be stolen at every destination, but when you overturn your vehicle in the middle of nowhere while trying to read your map (which happens surprisingly often), you have to head out on foot to the nearest beacon of civilization. Unfortunately, traveling on foot is slow and annoying, because your character will sprint for about five seconds, then pant while walking for about five seconds, then repeat ad infinitum. It’d be useful if your character could travel at a sustained speed between walking and sprinting for long distance travel — like, say, jogging. Oh, and you can’t sidestep while sprinting, and good luck if you’re trying to get anywhere on the bottom of your map, because you can’t see it while moving.

7. Guard posts that respawn instantly. Let’s face it, guard posts just aren’t very interesting. They’re only manned by a couple of NPCs, so they’re not much of a challenge. I usually just drive my jeep within forty feet of them, switch to the mounted turret, and mow them all down while they stand there staring blankly and uncomprehendingly, somehow having failed to notice me approaching. It’s more chore than fun, but I have to do it every time I come across an inhabited guard post, because trying to drive around one frequently leads to vehicle damage, vehicular chases, and/or death. And the absolute worst part about it is that every guard post is pretty much always inhabited, even if you just cleared it five minutes earlier. The game simply doesn’t save state very well. Clear out a guard post on the way to talk to a buddy to pick up a mission? It’ll be full again coming back the other way, even though you just passed it minutes prior. On the plus side, guard posts just about guarantee that you’ll never run low on ammunition, grenades, or HP syringes, because the supplies are restocked just as often as the ineffectual guards.

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The videogame industry is in the midst of a booming trend towards realism in games. In the first few generations of videogames, the graphics were sufficiently bad that they couldn’t come close to mimicking anything real anyway, so designers didn’t even try; hence Italian plumbers jumping on side-stepping anthropomorphic mushrooms. But shortly thereafter, rotoscoping lead to the first generation of videogames that tried to be realistic, and the trend has continued picking up pace to this very day.

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.

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Far Cry 2 has now been out for a few days and I have had a chance to put in a few hours with it.  There is as yet no indication that I have yet made any significant progress with regards to the main storyline (and it seems that this game will be a long one).  However, I believe I have gotten a bit of a feel for some elements of the game.

From a players perspective, Far Cry 2 is related to its predecessor in name only.  The game is set in a war torn country in Sub-Saharan Africa, and features open ended style gameplay reminiscent of Oblivion or Assassin’s Creed.  So far this seems to be working fairly well, but I must confess that even in my few hours I am starting to see something of a repetitive formula emerge.  Hopefully, the developers keep mixing it up as the game continues.

Far Cry 2 was developed by Ubisoft, in contrast to the orginal Far Cry and Crysis, which were developed by Crytek.  Perhaps as a result, the game feels very different than Far Cry or Crysis.  Unfortunately, many of these changes are not for the better, at least from a PC gamer’s perspective.

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