It wasn’t for lack of trying. Anyone who’s interested can read my log of the first few hours of Far Cry 2 here:
One hallmark of a broken game is that nobody wants to play past the beginning. Because it’s broken. The godawful random number generator game design was just one aspect of the broken-ness.
edit: it’s interesting to read that and see how much of the specific things I complained about were actually addressed in Far Cry 3… glowing objects that tell you what to interact with… non-respawning enemy outposts… etc.
You don’t have say nobody – there’s a lot of people who enjoy Dwarf Fortress, a game in which you always eventually lose as your fortress collapses into chaos and a single dwarf can randomly go mad and murder everyone.
I love Day Z and so do a million other players even though I can lose hours of work to a single sniper I could never have possible seen and most of the game is mundanely walking around with nobody in sight.
Good talk on Far Cry 2, and how weapon jams were intended to force you to improvise and the buddies were in place to let you recover from such disasters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3c01oG5MKI&t=14m
I bought a gun from a shop early on, realized that gun was much less prone to jamming than the junk I could loot off random bad guys and never shot a looted gun again. My decision was of course reinforced every time I saw an enemy gun jam, which made the jamming mechanic a net positive for me as a player. wumpus’ experience is so bizarre I have to wonder if this is all an elaborate troll.
Same here. Swapping out weapons every 10-15 minutes at a gun store made jamming a non-issue. As in, it is literally impossible to pick up a fresh gun and have it immediately start jamming. Most of the fun in FC2 came from trying different weapon combinations, so I was swapping out my weapons all the time anyway.
edit: Also, I remember maybe four or five times I had to get malaria meds. Pretty much a non-issue as well.
Also also, I’m pretty sure items you could pick up would shine, and under any circumstances in which enemies respawned the med and ammo boxes would be refilled as well.
Wumpus repeatedly states that everyone agrees with his position on the statement. I generally find that people who claim everyone agrees with them in order to make their statement more legitimate…tend to not have that strong a position.
PS: "No responsible game reviewer should advocate, much less espouse, game mechanics that take control away from the player and put it completely in charge of a random number generator. "
Either you’ve never played a computer or a board game, or you’re being incredibly obtuse.
If I recall correctly, guns had a durability rating so if you disliked jamming you could choose the tougher guns.
The dart rifle and the flamethrower were on the low end of the durabilty rating, even new ones could jam a lot. On the other end, the high end sniper rifle was a tank and could be used for hour after hour without jamming.
Wumpus is correct that FC2 was riddled with flaws (the endless kamikaze pinto drivers were absurd, the checkpoint respawning, the failure to implement any meaningful territory control or faction allegance system, the brain dead convoy AI, the entire Jackal storyline sucked, the zombie mercenary bit at the end was laughable, etc), but I felt the good mostly outweighed the bad (great music, great sound design, great lighting, great explosive and fire effects, funny NPC banter, excellent sniping, etc).
Do I roll dice to determine if my first person shooter… y’know… shot someone?
Sure, there is some randomness in there in terms of bullet spread, drop, reload time, moving obstacles in the way… but is it completely random? How much agency does the player have to influence where the bullets land? Does the player feel in control?
Exactly. The game set the rule upfront that used guns were unreliable and prone to jamming. It was not a random thing.
I thought FC2 was very good and definitely one of the most immersive shooters ever made. The system was there, but in the end the game was little more than a string of unrelated missions; an open world that was all structure with no content. There was a huge unrealized potential there. I’m having similar problems with Far Cry 3. I get the nagging sense that yet again we have this wondrous open world ready to be filled with countless stories of - say - warring factions fighting over key sections of land, where outposts and little villages have strategic value and conquering them has a meaningful impact on a larger scale. All powered by this absolutely beautiful engine. But maybe that’s a different game, or genre, and for now we have to settle on picking up collectibles in a luxury playground.
Pro: voice acting and character animation are astonishing, probably the best I’ve ever seen. Cons: immersion-breaking popups, intrusive HUD, menus. Quibble: the bits of hip “humor” they felt compelled to force into every.single.description in the handbook. Groan-o-rama.
Well to be clear it’s not completely random – it’s a stat on each weapon like every other attribute. Weigh it against the other stats: damage, clip size, range, noise, recoil, etc. Weapons you pickup rather than buy the absolute worst jamming rates. In many open world games you can’t pickup enemy weapons at all because it breaks the economy, Far Cry 2 took a kind of middle road there – you can pick them up in an emergency but they don’t work well enough that you would ever use them over stuff you unlock.
Use only guns that essentially never jam if you like. Or use a lower quality but more powerful one, but make sure to have a secondary weapon ready to finish someone off, or that cover is nearby so you’ll have time you need, or that have a rescue buddy ready, or whatever.
Even if it were completely random… like if every single bullet had a flat 50% chance to jam for a minute, you wouldn’t be playing a random number generator, you’d just deal with it the best you can.
The problem comes from characterizing some really brave design choices as “flaws”. Many of the things you list are intentional design choices. The convoys drove around in a circle so you could set up ambushes. The lack of territory control and the respawning checkpoints were because this wasn’t your country, and you couldn’t stop its spiral into failed nationhood. The zombie mercenaries – and, yeah, they were silly – drove home the point that you couldn’t trust anyone.
And while I can certainly understand that you might not like these design decisions, it’s unfair to call them “flaws”, as if they were inadvertent or oversights. Clint Hocking and Ubisoft accomplished some truly remarkable things, and they didn’t do it by accident.
By the way, I love that we’re talking about Far Cry 2 in this thread. Give me a game that sparks interesting discussions about design choices over a safe game any day of the week. :)
The real point here is that Far Cry 3 has as much in common with Far Cry 2 as FC2 has with FC1. That is, the name and the jungle.
It’s really all about this very bad practice of having brands separated from the actual people.
So FC3 isn’t a real sequel to FC2, as it has different goals and probably targets a different audience. If they went for a different name entirely maybe it was better.
FC2 was made by a completely different team than the one who made FC1. In the case of FC3 I don’t know. The main designer is certainly not the same guy, and I suspect that the two games have very little in common.
Open this link. Skip to 58 seconds. See the glowing save station? Now skip ahead to 1:09. See all the glowing weapons on the table?
Swap out your weapons regularly and you will never have to deal with jams, even in the beginning. I used purchased weapons and swapped them out every couple missions and I had maybe two jams throughout the entire course of the game. The only thing that’s random is malaria, and it’s exceedingly uncommon.
I think there are valid reasons to not like the game. Harping on the easily solved or non-existent ones just makes you look like you have an axe to grind.
And thank you for mentioning that. So grating. Assassin’s Creed treads a fine line in that regard, but it’s because the entries are written by a smug dickhead character from the Desmond sequences. I have no idea who was talking at me in Far Cry 3.
The point isn’t whether or not FC2 had a perfect design.
The point is that FC3 doesn’t improve that design as much as discard it completely for a wholly different game.
Instead of fixing the rough parts, it discarded them and replaced them. So, all these discussions comparing the game have been the result of MISDIRECTION due to the use of an inappropriate name for the game.
I think it would be unfair to call them bugs or oversights. I think it’s entirely fair to call them flaws if their implementation was poor. I mean, ultimately its semantics, if you like I can call them “brave design decisions that I don’t think worked very well.”
