Looking Back At Far Cry 2

Gamasutra has an interview with Ubisoft's Patrick Redding about the development of Far Cry 2. He explains his team's reasoning behind some of the decisions they made while trying to innovate in the very well-established first-person shooter genre. Ubisoft is also trying to crowdsource a guide for the game. "We don't want to be necessarily spoon-feed everything to people, because that gets insulting. It's also tiresome if you're constantly interrupting them to remind them things about that system. I like to learn things through trial and error, and I know a lot of players are like that. But accessibility isn't just about it being easy to pick up the controls. It's also making sure that you're supporting a certain kind of readability, giving the player a certain kind of feedback. Maybe the way to put it is that it might be less a function of the kind of low-level mechanics of the game at the control level, and more about how you're using the output of the game as good feedback for the player, so they at least are clear on the causal link between what they're doing and what's happening."

Comments

Hype

[YourExperiment]

The really frustrating thing about Far Cry 2 was the hype beforehand. I read a very interesting article before the game was released, where the developers talked about the amount of effort they'd put in on the narrative flow of the game, to make the storyline truly dynamic, allowing the player to influence the plot. Thanks to this, I was expecting a lot from the game.

What I actually saw the first time I played was a sub-standard FPS, with some very bad design decisions, and literally zero noticeable innovation. I gave up after a few hours play. I was extremely glad that I played it at a friend's house, I would have been most annoyed to pay good money for it.

Maybe it's a reasonably fun game once you get into it, but I was expecting so much from it that I was bound to be disappointed. This kind of hype does no-one any good in the long run.

Re:This. Game. Sucks.

[larry bagina]

A couple weeks ago, Best Buy was selling it at 50% off.

FC2 gameplay formula

[ternarybit]

1. Accept a mission from one of a few places that offer them, always to kill Mr. X.
2. Travel to the location of Mr. X via hoverboat or jeep, stopping at every guard post along the way to kill the guards, even at posts you've already cleared. Optionally you can blaze through the posts and take nominal spray damage. Also kill the kamikaze jeeps that stop right next to you so you can more efficiently waste them with the .50cal gun on your jeep.
3. Kill Mr. X.
4. See step 1.

Yawn.