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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."
Wait. Let me understand this. They want a bunch of people to help them write a strategy guide, then they want to give it for free on the web ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H publish a book and make everyone (including those who contribute content) pay for it. Wow -- that's brave. I'll file this in the same place with folks who have a $100 logo contest. (of course, a professional would charge you more than $100 to produce a logo, but who's counting the dollars?)
Basically you drive around a lot and ambushed at every intersection.
That's the whole game, and you also look for diamonds.
I only managed to read the first few pages, then I had enough of the fawning, adulating questions like "How did you manage to make this game so awesome, when other games currently on the market are so much worse? Is it because you are so incredibly innovative, because you had so many great ideas, or is it just because this game cures cancer by being in the same room with it?"
I played Far Cry 2, and apart from pointing everyone I know at the Zero Punctuation review of the game, I have a whole litany of criticisms and bad design choices:
But it wouldn't be so bad if at least not EVERY FUCKING PERSON ON THE WHOLE PLANET hated your guts and went into murderous overdrive each time they caught sight of a pixel of you; which brings me to the enemies.
And because the clipboard is opaque you have a situation not unlike the latest Doom game: you can either see what you're shooting at or where you're going, but not both. Not to mention that, as soon as you use the ineffectual "sprint" mode, the character moves his arms at his sides and takes the map out of the viewfield, making it impossible to see where exactly you are trying to sprint to! Man, I can't tell you how often I had looked at automaps or HUDs in other games and thought how they were much too convenient and useful!
This game sucks, and the designer should IMHO spend as least five of the six pages of an interview apologizing for that giant piece of crap that is Far Cry 2...
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
This made me think of something. In order to support open source, and if people agreed as to the method ( a very large if ___ fi ), It would be interesting to see a book called SmashDot that took all the best of /. and incorporated it into a book. I would really like to have a reference to some of the [bash, net, encryption] savvy that is available here in the comments ( beyond Googling and finding it ). Certainly the collective understanding of the /. has some value. Just think of a Beowulf cluster of frosty postmen.
Do we really need to look back at Far Cry 2? I didn't even look forward to it, but aside from that, what are we looking back at? They innovated in the department of system requirements, but is it really innovation if they've done it once before already? I guess the thing is pretty and got good reviews, but so what? Where's the insight, the brilliance, the revolution? It's not Doom or Quake or Half Life or Counter-Strike or Natural Selection or System Shock or anything remotely like any of those - there's nothing to see here, move along.
Also, I think it's been three months since release - is it really the time to compile a detailed introspective and take a time out to survey the ravaged field of their accomplishments, or are post-Christmas sales merely slumping? Surely the legacy of their awesomeness will need a bit more time to accrue.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
From the interview:
The reality is that we certainly have struggled with accessibility issues with the game because the openness of it made us take a much more systemic approach, for one thing. But also, it has a rhythm -- the rhythm associated with the game is really different, because of the amount of objective-to-objective movement, and the way the player is invited to use the training, use the landscape as kind of a game ingredient.
The game is not open at all. It's frustrating because it pretends to be open, but isn't... it's actually linear (albeit with more lines from one point to another than some FPSs). I hated Crysis the first time I played it. The second time I played it, I had a lot of fun. I could go just about anywhere I wanted, climbing difficult mountains for awesome sniper positions etc. In Far Cry 2 you can go hardly anywhere you want; even places that look like you should be able to go.
And then there is the repetitiveness of FC2. All the missions are the same. You eliminate a guard post and 5 minutes later all the guards are back. The AI is crazy. You can be standing there with an (AI) opponent facing away from you and you can still be taking damage from him. Not to mention the AI are DUMB. "Huh, where did he go?" when one second before they've been shooting you and you have not changed position at all. Not to mention that sometimes the AI has super vision, spotting you 1km away even though you're wearing cammo and are fully prone and not shooting. And yet the same dudes will be unable to spot you 5 metres away.
I tried to like the game, I really did. But it's just not fun.
From Page 1 :
What you're describing, that sense of being in the environment and letting the environment kind of drive the experience, is a function of us building that foundation. We needed to build an infrastructure, a framework for supporting the player moving around the world kind of at his own will and using whatever resources he wants -- whether it's vehicles, boats, on foot, or what have you.
What the hell game is he talking about? The travel system they've implemented somehow creates all these magical stories out of nowhere?. The environment is basically empty outside of about three different types of checkpoints and maybe two types of safe houses. And nothing ever happens in the game without your influence. And even then, you don't actually have influence, basically you turn up somewhere, and people shoot at you. You run into people in cars who shoot before even getting a chance to identify you, or, you approach a checkpoint, and you will get shot at by before they even get a chance to identify you. All the main missions involve shooting guys that are in between you and the other thing you have to shoot, and every single assassination mission and gun running mission, which are the only two types of side mission, are the same. You shoot a truck or a person, either of which are running tight circles. It would have been interesting to see this endless repetition and respawning addressed.
They hear there are factions in the game -- that immediately implies a different kind of dynamic, right? They're like, "Oh, why is everyone shooting at me?" [laughs] Well, it's still a first-person shooter.
As if somehow the two are mutually exclusive? The reason that people question this is because yes, the inclusion of factions does imply a different kind of dynamic. But it's completely ignored; in every. fucking. mission. you are told that you are working on the sly and that even the guys who you are working "with" will shoot you because they don't know you. But it's all a moot point, because for the vast majority of the game YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON THAT ANYONE EVER SHOOTS AT. There are factions? You could have fooled me, I've never seen two people from opposing factions run into each other and start a fire fight. I've never seen someone from faction A approach a checkpoint of faction B and get shot at. I find it hard to believe there is even faction related code in the game so far. Either that or no faction member has ever encountered It's given lip service in the intro, and mentioned by the mission descriptions, which are little more than first person, in engine cut-scenes.
I like to question some design elements. Why can't I run while reloading? Or at least interrupt the reload by running so I can reload again when safer. Why can't you interrupt the animation to yank out a bullet? The most frustrating way to die is to stand stock still and start pulling out a bullet only to realize you aren't quite as covered as you thought and then hammering everything trying to move away to cover.
In early discussions the game was touted as being in specific development for PC. Yet while you can save anywhere in the PC version, the little save boxes that are console-specific are still there. The field of view was the console style nose-against-the-screen crap that makes it hard to play for PC snobs. There was no out of the box widescreen support, why is this still happenning? Why does the game have a seemingly endless supply of mercenaries that are restocked magically every 5 minutes, yet approximately 14 zebras for the entire world? Did they ever consider implementing dangerous animals? Anything at all interesting outside of empty savannah?
He is right though, the game is a first person shooter. Of the most generic kind. It's just that they spread the limited variation of the design incredibly lightly over a large, primarily empty game, gave the impression that it was going to be an interesting adventure, and then made every one simply shoot at you.
It's a Far Cry from a classic (boom tish), and given the brilliance of the first game (ending area of that game aside), it honestly didn't deserve the Far Cry name.
For what it's worth, Far Cry 2 has enough flaws and enough gems that the player's enjoyment is influenced more by personal experience than linear games.
Far Cry 2 has problems. The blur effects that simulate heavy breathing after a sprint practically require you to keep a vehicle on hand at all times, especially when your malaria condition worsens. This made me feel like an unhealthy, obese assassin that used a scooter as a primary means of locomotion. The AI can sometimes shoot you through brush that, on similar engines such as Crysis, you might expect to conceal you. There are three (four including promotional content) side mission categories, and the dozen or more missions in each category are identical. The AI appear incapable of using stairs or ladders. The PC version of the game has a far better save/load system and allows you to use it at any time. Console players and critics will likely become frustrated from retracing their steps after a bullshit death. This makes the game feel like a good engine that has yet to become a good game.
On the other hand, I liked the open-endedness of Far Cry 2. To put things in perspective, before I tried Far Cry 2 I played games the Half-Life 2 series, Prey, FEAR, and Gears of War. These games were good in their own respects, but to me it felt like it was one step up from watching a movie. Some locations might be larger than others, but in general the gameplay was the same. You initiate some sequence or find some lever to open a door, follow the path to kill something and repeat. Decisions about combat style and routes to a target were often made for you. For me, Far Cry 2 was the complete opposite. Later in the game, you can amass enough weapons to decide how you wanted to engage targets. For example, you could buy a camo suit, silenced weapons and sleep until darkness. You could purchase a high-powered sniper rifle and a flamethrower to snipe, set the landscape on fire around you to conceal your position, move, and snipe again. You could purchase explosives and assault weapons. You could scout the surrounding areas of posts to find good locations to snipe, or locations that could not be easily flanked. The open world and the open gun market let me actually play a game and have fun the way I wanted, rather than replay a campaign only to take a path, to open a door, to kill something in a manner that was designed for the situation.
So, you either play the game and find out that the missions are repetitive, the AI can be frustrating, and the storyline is unengaging until the ending. Or, you might look past those problems and enjoy the graphics engine while you have fun doing whatever the hell you want to do.
i'm 27 for whatever that's worth, but the game was just so tedious. almost the exact same pattern of stuff over and over. One of the cool parts was the different guns, but so many were worthless anyways. I dunno, i regret dropping 50 for it. My main beef was perhaps the fact that those checkpoints always respawned people and clearing a checkpoint did nothing as far as i could tell.
My beef with the map implementation is that the designers pretend to make something more realistic (it's not a glowy floaty map but a real, wood-and-paper object!) but then remember that they need the unrealistic component (hey, the character (as opposed to the computer AI) can't see through the dense jungle - we need to give him location markers for the bad guys!) and just slap that on, resulting in something like that magical map from Harry Potter. Why couldn't they have done it completely realistically, with a non-scrolling top-down map with the general topographical features and maybe a separate motion tracker gizmo with the enemy positions on it? Why did they have to significantly downgrade the usability of a feature and use the excuse of "realism"? It's this pretense that really bothers me, the arbitrariness that serves as an excuse to make the game unnecessarily complicated.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
What happened is, professional reviewers played the game for a few hours and then reviewed it. Hence, they don't know it sucks.
Players either played through it, enduring the mindless repetition and crappy gameplay, or quit because of it. So they do know it sucks.