Far Cry [split topic]

[bgmnts]

Replaying Far Cry 2. Still my favourite of all the Far Cry's, and I'm trying to actually complete this time!

Good god it hasn't aged well. Fucksake.

[samadriel]

Tell us more! (I want to see if my specific distaste for FC2 is shared).

[bgmnts]

Driving slow cars round roads in the same very dull environment for aaaaaages. There are five fast travel points in the very centre and the corners of the maps, but that's it, it's all very slow. I must have liked that realism before but hate it now. And vehicles will smoke up if someone throws a wet sponge at it, which reduces the already glacial motors to milk float speed until you get out of the car and manually repair it. FUCK THAT.

Enemies seem to never end and sponge bullets. You'll slowly rock up to a guard placement, sprinting every 3 seconds before getting winded by malaria, and you'll stumble about killing 3 guys and wander around the same 20 square foot until a bad guy appears from the ether and you shoot him, 'scouting' the outpost. In fact, I still don't even know what constitutes 'scouting' and outpost.

I do think the premise is great: find and kill the JACKAL - the arms dealer with delusions of being Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now and is perpetuating this pointless conflict (one of the factions even says something like 'if these guys go we'll have nobody to fight' or something). There are no characters in the game, though. That can be said of every Far Cry though. At least Jack Carver wore a Hawaiian shirt! Oh and yeah you have to keep on top of your malaria, booo.

So yeah, just really slow, the guns are crap, the enemies are relentless and stupid, the world map is dull and the missions are repetitive. Fire spreads though when you burn stuff so 7/10.

[oggyraiding]

The only Far Cry 2 feature I wish would return is the choice of protagonist. It's not a major change, but I liked having the option to play an IRA dude or a former IDF fella.

[Pink Gregory]

I don't know if that's a matter of ageing badly or more that those were issues in the first place.

Haven't played it recently but in terms of how it plays and looks it's maybe not chock full of particles effects and up to the minute physics modelling but I could imagine playing it tomorrow and it feeling current.

I also did like the vagueness of the 'buddies', the theme of the games does go well with 'they'll help you out, but these are absolutely NOT your friends'.  I think I only had to euthanise one of them throughout the whole game, and it did feel fairly affecting.

Also somehow I seem to have avoided the experience that everyone else had with the guns because I went back to the dealer fairly often, almost always had shiny new ones.  Could never get the mortar to work properly though.  Also any version you play now is the Fortune's edition which gives you a free explosive crossbow and a silenced shotgun so unless you ignore them the game is basically broken.

[bgmnts]

To be honest it might just me being low attention spanned and crap at the game.

I do like the buddies though, and pulling bullets out of wounds. There is some good stuff in it.

[Pink Gregory]

Plus I've only touched later Far Cry games and they kind of feel like shite to play, so you could hardly say they've improved mechanically, there's just more stuff (and the whole complex outpost thing is an improvement)

[samadriel]

Driving slow cars round roads in the same very dull environment for aaaaaages. There are five fast travel points in the very centre and the corners of the maps, but that's it, it's all very slow. I must have liked that realism before but hate it now.

Good call,  i forgot how tedious simple travel was.  And if your car got completely trashed,  you were looking at the better part of an hour to get anywhere.

So yeah, just really slow, the guns are crap, the enemies are relentless and stupid, the world map is dull and the missions are repetitive. Fire spreads though when you burn stuff so 7/10.

Let's see,  what did I cite in my post last year... crap game economy (the breaking down of weapons), the shit identikit allies, the absolutely ridiculous regenerating enemy outposts, the endless trudging (as you mentioned), the malaria "mechanic"... oh, and the 28-Days-like murder craze that every single character in the countryside has for you, including whichever group you've allied yourself to (is it really that hard to program certain characters not to shoot at you?). It's not looking good for Far Cry 2!

[Pink Gregory]

I feel like they might have been trying to make a thematic point with A - everyone shooting you all of the time and B - the identikit factions, which you just roll over to the opposite side of when one runs out of jobs; but it trades so heavily on the trope of 'War Torn Africa TM' (which country?) and does basically nothing else.

[samadriel]

I feel like having everyone come after you dehumanises Africans a bit; heck,  with the endless regeneration of outposts, black bodies swarm like ants.

I think the rollover to the other faction actually would've been more thematically impactful if your allied faction actually left you alone -- you could take over the whole map for your faction, triumphantly rolling back into town... and then you find out you have to switch sides, and all your old buddies manning the outposts are suddenly out for your blood. You'd start with a sense of gameplay progression, then you'd trade it for narrative progression a quarter of the way through. You couldn't really pull that trick on the second map, I guess,  but there's no rule saying the second map has to repeat the tropes of the first.

[Ferris]

Far Cry 6: so big and dumb it's hard to dislike. I'm only about an hour or so in, so maybe it drops off a cliff but it's basically exactly what you'd expect.