Far Cry 2

[Arboris]

Malaria and gun jams could be characterized as distracting as well. And yeah, I remember that statement and am not nitpicking the messenger, but I think it reflects a bit of confusion as to what made the game awesome (which is not uncommon among developers).

Are there mods available to remove the Malaria effects from the game?

[Erlend_Grefsrud]

Or the testing made it obvious that no-one but a hardcore shooter enthusiast looking for a world simulation would be able to cope with a game as hostile as the one you imagine. If the testers or participants in a focus group are negative towards a feature, it’s kind of hard to justify it being there. Sort of like test audiences leaving theatres grumbling and muttering after a particularly unconventional ending.

[Roy_Ziegler]

Well, they also didn’t have a problem with the checkpoints or cars randomly ramming into you guns blazing, so what the fuck do they know?

But for the record, I imagine hostile animals would just be an annoyance after the novelty wears off. I imagine being assailed by a crocodile every time I dip my toe in water the same way I am with the slaughterfish in the Elder Scrolls games.

[Jonathan_Crane]

But for the record, I imagine hostile animals would just be an annoyance after the novelty wears off. I imagine being assailed by a crocodile every time I dip my toe in water the same way I am with the slaughterfish in the Elder Scrolls games.

I didn’t miss the hostile wildlife at all - setting up a sniping spot was engaging enough without distractions. Someone many pages ago mentioned that looking through the scope reminded them of the opening of No Country For Old Men.

Maybe there’s a market for a separate title for the hunting simulation crowd? You could swap out the checkpoints with more savannah and stock the game with predators. Call it ‘Cabella’s African Safari’ or something.

[Jonathan_Crane]

Yeah, the final act didn’t have any emotional resonance with me either. But then neither did the rest of the game. What with the voice-acting being so poor and the story delivered the way it was, I didn’t think the performed narrative was ever above mediocre at best in Far Cry 2. The emergent narrative that came from chaos on the battlefield was obviously the focus of the game, and it’s strong point.

Was there ever any explanation of why the plot related voice work was done with such an odd, fast cadence? It seems to have stuck just about everyone who played the game as odd, and I would imagine it was a conscious choice by the voice director. It struck me as particularly strange since the encounter voice work was fantastic, eg “He got the new guy!”. Strange to have some of the best and worst voice acting in the same game.

[Dufresne]

I didn’t miss the hostile wildlife at all - setting up a sniping spot was engaging enough without distractions. Someone many pages ago mentioned that looking through the scope reminded them of the opening of No Country For Old Men.

I’m wondering if there’s some confusion about what I mean by “hostile wildlife.” I’m not talking about bloodthirsty, man-eating lions that will track you relentlessly, but more in the sense that they are pretty docile unless you threaten them somehow. You can observe lions in the wild without them immediately getting up and chasing you.

But imagine this scenario: There’s a heavily-armed checkpoint you need to destroy. Nearby is a herd of cape buffalo. Tossing a few molotovs, you spark brush fires behind and to each side of the buffalo, instigating a stampede and funneling the herd directly at the checkpoint. Enjoy the carnage.

[DoomMunky]

But also imagine all the other scenarios that have been posted, where wildlife becomes a constant annoyance and presence, regardless of the occasional awesome moment it presents. If the game isn’t about dealing with wildlife, having it be anything more than really occasional would be distracting.

As for the voice work, I like the approach in general. It certainly moves you through the story beats more quickly. And I like the character it brings out in everyone; hurried, hushed, slightly bored and distracted. I think the main problem with the voice in the game is how soft it is; combine the speed of delivery with inaudibility and you can’t understand much at all. If they’d turned the gain up on the voices a bit, I think it would seem like less of a problem.

[Gabe_Lewis]

Jim Rossignol explains more eloquently than I ever could the reason Far Cry 2 doesn’t work for me as an open world experience.

The very notion of it being an open world seemed to suggest that the game would support more life: civilians, passive enemies, the illusion of a wider world. I think about this, and I think about Outcast, the voxel sci-fi adventure. Right there, back in 1999, was a game brave enough to say: “here’s a world, it’s full of life, politics, danger, go deal with it and save your own world in the process.” You traipsed out into its pixellated valleys and did precisely that. Thanks to the freedom of movement and general neutrality of much of the world of Outcast, when combat occurred it was an moment of high drama. Combat in Far Cry 2, meanwhile, is often reduced to a kind of road-clearance. The Outcast player’s experience of being in a particular, although virtual, place was therefore (despite its incredibly lack of visual fidelity by modern standards) incredibly potent.

[DoomMunky]

I just came here to post a link to that same thing! Fucking amazing writing, incredibly well summed up:

So to come full circle with the sense of dissatisfaction with open world games: I think the way we experience them, by comparison with linear games, says something about how our gaming imagination functions. We seem to understand that when linear games point us in a certain direction, that’s the way to go. When an open world game appears, its very structure suggests something about how we should behave, or want to behave, and predisposes us to judge on the basis of how it entices us to go somewhere that the game itself hasn’t suggested, and on how it then deals with that action.

Some guy (Sam C) in the comments section has an excellent suggestion for mission structure in Far Cry 3:

I think you hit one of the main problems with Far Cry 2 right on the head: the lack of persistence in the game world. There was really no point to clearing out the checkpoints. Supplies were common enough that I never seeked out a checkpoint, since I’d probably use up more resources than I’d gain clearing it out. Since there’s no reason to return, it’s the equivalent of making the player retrace their steps in a linear game – it’s a chore, and even the brilliant, substantial combat didn’t save it from being tedious at times.

Besides just making it a corridor shooter, they could have saved it by adding a more dynamic mission system – instead of forcing you to go back to the city for missions, have one of the groups call you when you near one of their objectives . They lay out the plan for you right there, and now you have a reason to wander the map. The main points could still be obvious (the marked areas where you got a zoomed in detailed area map, like the airport or slaughterhouse), with hidden side missions to make exploring more worthwhile. This would save the other annoyance – finding awesome villages and combat areas, and seeing that they’re completley empty and pointless.
Then if they added faction relationships that mattered, checkpoints that you could capture and hand over to friendly factions, neutral civilians going about their daily lives, and maybe even hunting mini-games, and they could have had something truly compelling.
I would be very curious why the developers didn’t go that route.

[TimJames]

That obviously sounds fine but they would have to broaden the map a little bit. Otherwise you’d be tripping over major quests every 30 seconds driving along the road.

[Rock8man]

That obviously sounds fine but they would have to broaden the map a little bit. Otherwise you’d be tripping over major quests every 30 seconds driving along the road.

Right. Plus the first thing you could do was go around the map and take over all the checkpoints for friendly factions, and then the rest of the game would be a cakewalk.

[BobJustBob]

Jim Rossignol is nuts. “It looks like an open world game but plays like an FPS, therefore it’s the game’s fault that people play it wrong because they’re too stupid to learn anything that isn’t easily pigeonholed into a genre. Also GTA4 is the best game ever.”

[TimJames]

Right. Plus the first thing you could do was go around the map and take over all the checkpoints for friendly factions, and then the rest of the game would be a cakewalk.

They should also be aware that most of that sounds like Clear Sky, so execution is more important here.

[zengonzo]

I don’t think taking out the checkpoints entirely would be a great idea, but there ought to have been more options to interact with them. Same with the dynamic missions, which could have only been triggered under certain conditions, perhaps still maintaining a structure. There’s little reason calling in a mission by cellphone wouldn’t have worked better than having to go to back to town each time. Certainly when you already had to do so much driving as it stands.

Even if the guy isn’t hitting the marks with his wild throws, I agree with him about the general corrective directions. I love, love, love the game but it could’ve been ten times what it was.

I’d certainly like to see more DLC for it … Weren’t they discussing adding the option for predators back in with some future patch.

[Sam_C]

Hey, I’m the Sam C from the post DoomMunky quoted. Thanks for the quote and linking back! Now for responses.

Right. Plus the first thing you could do was go around the map and take over all the checkpoints for friendly factions, and then the rest of the game would be a cakewalk.

You’re right there, but I was thinking there would have to be attacks by the other side to recapture checkpoints, enough to keep you on your toes. Far Cry 2’s map is too big to have you rush to defend checkpoints like the gang warfare in GTA:San Andreas, but maybe the factions could call you in to help out with a checkpoint that’s being overrun if you’re close. Probably difficult to script and debug, but I think it would be worth it to make it feel like there’s actually a battle being fought for the country, as opposed to just the player going around blowing stuff up.

They should also be aware that most of that sounds like Clear Sky, so execution is more important here.

I haven’t actually played Clear Sky yet, but it sounds fairly similar, now that you mention it. Also similar to Stalker, like where you’d get the mission to defend the junkyard from bandits when you wandered by. I ordered Clear Sky today since you mentioned it, so we’ll see how it handles outposts/factional combat, although I’ve heard it’s buggy, which would be more evidence that these kind of factional battles are hard to program, and the details of execution would be very important. I remember Stalker developer interviews, and they mentioned how hard it was to balance the A-life system in that game, but I still think it would be worthwhile.

That obviously sounds fine but they would have to broaden the map a little bit. Otherwise you’d be tripping over major quests every 30 seconds driving along the road.

I didn’t think about this, that’s a good point. I guess what I was thinking about was when I stumbled upon the Shwasana village in the first half, and it was completley empty. No enemies, no civilians, nothing. It just seemed like a waste that there was nothing to do there, and I’d have to wait until I took a mission to do anything fun there. And if a mission had dynamically popped up when I’d wandered in, that would have been great. There’d be a sense of discovery, almost like you’d stumbled on a secret.
And if you don’t feel like exploring, I’d think they could keep both ways of getting missions, going to a faction and stumbling upon one, so you don’t end up wandering about, hunting for that last trigger needed to find the last mission and move on in the game.

Just some ideas, it’s not a perfect solution, it’s just what I thought it could be, with just a little more depth. Thanks for the responses.

[Gabe_Lewis]

Jim Rossignol is nuts. “It looks like an open world game but plays like an FPS, therefore it’s the game’s fault that people play it wrong because they’re too stupid to learn anything that isn’t easily pigeonholed into a genre. Also GTA4 is the best game ever.”

You’re completely missing the point. What he means by “plays like an FPS” is that anything you can see has to be killed or avoided (I found trying to avoid these, in any other way than driving through as quickly as possible to be extremely tedious), which is damaging to the idea of an “open world.” I find it hard to want to explore a world in which there is absolutely no compromise or peace - ever. To me, it makes the world worse than lifeless. Where’s the drama? I know everybody wants to kill me, so there’s no surprises, excluding maybe the first 2 times you get rescued by a buddy, after you grasp the mechanic there’s nothing exciting about it.

I’m curious to hear what I have to learn while playing this game that can’t be easily pigeonholed.

But the article isn’t about whether or not you like Far Cry 2, because there is lots to like. The article is about what makes effective world design. What I take from Jim and agree with, is that the less control the devs try to exert on how you explore a world the better. In an ideal open world game, the dev’s would spend the majority of their time building a convincing world, then building a cool way for you to interact with it (Red Faction I’m looking at you) and then letting you have at it.

A while ago, Pentadact was posting on here, and the idea he mentioned on his blog was by far my favorite. Rather than having a series of missions that only have tangential relations to Jackal, have the game consist of 1 single mission. Find the Jackal, and kill him. He’s somewhere on the map, and you have to find out where. Maybe he’s even moving around. Go.

Obviously, this about 100-billion times easier to type than it is to create, but surely it’s a type of game that nobody has really experimented with. I’d love to see someone take the risk. If I had a 20 million dollars I’d totally spring for it :P.

[Dr.VanNostren]

I find it hard to want to explore a world in which there is absolutely no compromise or peace - ever. To me, it makes the world worse than lifeless.

Pretty much sums up my problem with Far Cry 2.

[WarrenM]

A while ago, Pentadact was posting on here, and the idea he mentioned on his blog was by far my favorite. Rather than having a series of missions that only have tangential relations to Jackal, have the game consist of 1 single mission. Find the Jackal, and kill him. He’s somewhere on the map, and you have to find out where. Maybe he’s even moving around. Go.

That sounds really compelling actually. Here’s your ultimate goal - have at it. You’d have some intel given you from your superiors and you start talking to people, trying to put together the pieces to find the guy.

[Rock8man]

It does sound compelling, but in a world with much more interaction and dynamism. Factions, interactions, etc. One place where it wouldn’t be compelling is in the world of Far Cry 2 as it exists today. One in which everyone outside a cease-fire town is hostile towards you on sight, and no one fights each other, they all have their sights set on you and you alone. In a world like that, looking for the Jackal doesn’t sound compelling at all.

I guess what I’m saying is, putting together a world like that, with factions fighting one another, interactions more than just “I see the player, get him” is much harder to build, and not all that simple. I agree that I also would love to see such a game, but I still thought Far Cry 2 was very interesting for what it offered. If someone had told me that there was an open-world game where every single person in the world is hostile to the player, I’d have thought it would be the most boring game in the world. But it isn’t. It’s actually quite compelling. And that’s also impressive to me, that despite not having a very deep interactive open-world, Far Cry 2 still manages to be interesting based on a system of organized chaos.

[Brian_Rucker]

Where’s Waldo but with rocket launchers.

Could be fun too if they build in some randomness as to who has which bit of information so you could replay it often as you like. Maybe even create some dynamic factionalism along the lines of Pirates so you can play different factions against each or for the win to access information (prisoners rather than, perhaps, uncooperative potential contacts). I was almost going to say “along the lines of Mercenaries” but there the factions were anything but dynamic.

Edit: It might also be fun to have NPC buddies actually running around with you as a squad if they had decent AI and responded to orders. The rescuing stuff was neat but also kind of a bummer. I wanted my supposed pals to actually come out with me on missions ya know?