Far Cry 3 Message Board older than one year ago
↕
↕
↕
↕
Far Cry 3 takes the ambitious background mechanisms of the last Far Cry game--things like roaming wildlife and dynamic fire--and wraps an immensely fun and rewarding open-world game around them, set in one of the lushest jungle environments ever seen in a game. Far Cry 2 felt as much like an experiment in mashing together a handful of self-propelling simulations as it did a shipping product, but this third one is a real, honest-to-God video game that restrains those dynamics in the spots where they might infringe on the fun you're having roaming around a tropical island, taking over pirate outposts, hunting rare game, and crashing hang gliders into the sides of mountains. If you like shooters and open-world gameplay at all, you will have a lot of fun with all this.
The story mode has one of the strongest starts I can remember in years, as your prep-school party boy Jason and his idly rich friends skydive onto the wrong tropical paradise and get themselves kidnapped by pirates and slave traders. The short introduction is wonderfully effective at both making you resent the privilege of the protagonist and his ilk, and filling you with greater revulsion at their inhuman treatment by the psychopathic pirate leader Vaas. This guy is one of the most genuinely and believably chilling video game villains in ages, leading a cast made up of pretty colorful and well-acted characters who play out the struggle between the pirates and the native Rakyat people for control of Rook Island.
What follows is a lengthy campaign comprising Jason's attempt to ingratiate himself to the Rakyat and other influential figures on the island, in an effort to spring his friends from captivity and get the hell out of there. The succession of story missions presents an uneven mix of great outdoor setups--where the kind of unpredictable mayhem and destruction inherent to open-world games prevails--and a few too many basic corridor crawls, which end up feeling a bit like a slog and are not where this game excels. The best part of Far Cry 3 is when you're running around out there in that enormous open jungle environment, where just about anything can happen. With pirates, mercenaries, native rebels, and both docile and predatory animals all going about their business (and constantly getting in fights with each other), a host of controllable vehicles from ATVs to trucks to hang gliders, an entire arsenal of military-grade weapons hardware at your disposal, and the ability to set practically everything on fire, hilarious and unique events aren't just an occasional delight, they're the norm.
The free-form combat really encourages you to play the way you want.Far Cry 3 takes some concepts whole cloth from other great open-world games like Assassin's Creed and Red Dead Redemption, but it's easy to look past the direct inspirations since the lifted elements just make this game way more fun. You'll need to climb and fix up a number of disabled radio towers, each of which acts as a unique platforming challenge unto itself, to reveal the surrounding map and side missions. Getting those transmitters back online also adds more guns to your ever-growing arsenal. Hunting and gathering herbs are important early-game activities, since you can craft the resulting items directly into better equipment and power-up items, and it's just fun to stalk your prey in the underbrush--and things get ridiculous quick when it turns out a tiger has been stalking you at the same time. There's even a leveling system and a full three-way skill tree that lets you spec out your character in ways that cater to the way you like to play. You'll probably end up with all the skills unlocked by the very end of the story, because Far Cry 3's prevailing ethos seems to be about making sure you're having fun in the open world as much as possible. All of these elements combine to give you a constant feedback loop of character progression that makes it really rewarding to get out there and do as much of this stuff as possible. Some of the formal side missions are pretty simplistic and don't stay entertaining for long, but there's so much else to do out there that you're not likely to get bored in this game.
Enemy-held checkpoints--one of the weakest points of Far Cry 2, due to their neverending stream of respawning enemies--become maybe the best part of Far Cry 3, since they're now a formal type of side mission. The enemy-tagging mechanic of the original Far Cry, and Crytek's subsequent efforts with the Crysis series, is especially useful here since you can now tag an enemy on the fly just by aiming at him for a second, and once he's tagged, you can see his movements clearly through walls. Each one of the roughly three-dozen outposts on the island thus becomes its own little self-contained combat puzzle, which you can approach from any angle and deal with however you want, whether by picking off enemies from a distance with a silenced sniper rifle, going in with a blaze of gunfire, or sticking the guards in the back with some amazingly fun combo takedown moves, better versions of which you unlock as you level up. There are even two levels of bonus experience if you manage to clear out an entire outpost without alerting anyone. Taking over outposts is one of the most interesting things to do in the game all the way up to the end, and they just get more satisfying the more special attacks you've unlocked.
It's a good thing Far Cry 3 gets so much mileage out of just about every aspect of its gameplay, because by the time the credits rolled I felt extremely let down by the squandered potential of the plot. At the outset, the game goes out of its way to stress what a pampered scaredy cat Jason is, but then never justifies why he's immediately able to skin animals, operate high-level military hardware, and gun down hundreds of soldiers like some kind of special forces survivalist. The game repeatedly relies on that tired old video game cop-out, the dream sequence, to avoid actually having to address major plot points, which usually leaves you asking "What the hell just happened?" But you never find out. And the story has a fundamental problem with momentum. There's a protracted sequence in the middle made up of repeated fetch quests, and the whole thing really starts to run out of steam in the last third or so, after it prematurely wraps up some story threads that should have formed the basis of the entire game right up to the climax. The only reason I care enough about the story's failures is because it's so darn good early in the game, and if it had matched that quality evenly through to the end, we'd probably be talking about this as one of the best games of this entire console generation.
You'd be surprised how often the wildlife does your job for you.You sure can't accuse the game of lacking for content, though. In addition to the massive open-world story mode that you could spend dozens of hours in, there's a healthy suite of multiplayer modes too. The developers set out to include a full cooperative campaign that's more than a little similar to Left 4 Dead, right down to the four stereotypical characters (such as an Eastern European mobster and a Trainspotting-esque Scottish hoodlum) you can play as. There's a neat story justification for all this, with a lengthy CG cutscene setting the whole campaign up, and the .
The scenarios in the co-op campaign are linear, standard first-person shooter affairs that don't offer the sort of open, varied gameplay that the main campaign is so good at. You're basically moving from one area to the next, fighting off a bunch of enemies, and occasionally completing some objective. There's some amusing variety here and there, though, like a sequence where all four players are positioned up on a ledge and can only use an unlimited supply of grenades to take out a horde of enemies rushing in (and a player ranking afterward awards bonus experience based on how well you did). There's quite an elaborate loadout and class system here that lets you unlock not only new weapons and attachments but basic passive bonuses and even some team area-of-effect buffs like you'd see in an MMO. That leveling system also carries over to a perfunctory competitive multiplayer mode replete with its own leveling system, unlocks, and ability to prestige. It's fine that this mode is in here if you're really looking to wring as much time out of this game as you can, and there's even a pretty easy-to-use map editor in here if you want to make a map where you dig a big hole in the ground and fill it with sharks. But none of this stuff is required for me to recommend Far Cry 3. The game more than justifies its existence with the single-player mode alone.
The player progression makes it really satisfying to keep doing side activities and leveling up.You'd be remiss when talking about Far Cry 3 not to mention how good this game looks on the PC, with the sort of DirectX 11 features that will stress any hardware currently on the market. I had plenty of those "Wow, games look like this now?" moments while creeping through the brush or sailing over the island on a hang glider. It also scales quite well; I was able to get perfectly acceptable performance out of my nearly three-year-old machine at home on above-average settings, though I was having so much fun with the game that I couldn't resist upgrading my video card just to max it out. The console versions retain a surprising amount of the PC version's fidelity, down to the density of the island's foliage and the shafts of sunlight peeking through tree branches, but they do so at a terrible cost to the frame rate. The game is generally playable, and if you haven't seen the PC version you won't know what you're missing, but with performance well below 30 frames per second that dips down to 20 or worse in the heaviest action, you shouldn't play this game on a console unless you have no other choice. Even a modestly equipped PC will offer a much better experience.
Ultimately, Far Cry 3 left me a little conflicted. It's a smartly designed open-world game with a ton of stuff to do, and the random acts of hilarity that occur out in the jungle will constantly leave you with unique stories you'll be desperate to tell your friends. If the story had made good on the strength of its initial premise, Far Cry 3 would have been shoo-in for best game of the year. As it stands, it's still the most fun I've had in an open world in ages, a game that plays so well and looks so good, I wish every other piece of it reached the same high bar. But you should play it anyway.
↕
↕
Yesterday I celebrated what is definitely a really fantastic game. A game that deserves celebration, a surprise treat from a series that never promised anything this involved, mad, and genre-busting. It is, overall, a very positive experience. And as I said yesterday, such experiences come at a price – when stuff is wrong, it looks very, very wrong. But in the case of Far Cry 3, this isn’t about picking up on issues that would pass in a more mediocre game – this is about really wantonly stupid mistakes, issues that defy the belief that any human being can have played the game before it was released, further evidencing the theory that this was indeed a game coded by tigers.
(more…)
↕
Hey, gamers! The studio that brought you Far Cry 3’s online experience is preparing something big to kick off the new year: the co-op DLC pack, High Tides, exclusively on PS3 for console gamers. This January, we’re releasing two entirely new co-op chapters, Jailbreak and Redemption. These new chapters feature the culmination of all the hard work we’ve put into the main co-op campaign. They’re truly the best of the best.
High Tides will take place where the original six co-op chapters left off. These are the gang’s final moments, and we’re really challenging ourselves to go all-out. We’ve got new missions, tougher fights, bigger competitions, some great up-close time with your favorite characters, and explosive moments unlike anything you’ve seen before. Can you tell we’re excited?
We want everyone who loves Far Cry 3’s co-op to get even more quality time with the whole gang – Leonard, Tisha, Mikhail and Callum. So pick up your copy of Far Cry 3 for PS3 today, and find out in January what happens when the gang tries to escape the island in these final chapters.
↕
↕
↕
↕
Far Cry 3 is a game of enormous juxtaposition. Overall it is undoubtedly an absolutely stunning game, ridiculously fun and utterly engrossing. And in there are some real extremes. I argue that Far Cry 3 contains some of the features for which we’ve spent our years screaming at the sky, a real understanding of why fun can be more worthwhile than realism, emergent play, and angry, angry tigers. And I also argue that Far Cry 3 contains some of the stupidest mistakes imaginable – in fact, beyond imaginable, because there’s no understandable way they could reach the finished game unless it were in fact coded by angry, angry tigers. I argue the first half of this below, with the second half tomorrow.
(more…)
↕
Thanksgiving came went without a big ol’ purchase of PC parts, but it’ll be soon, promise. I know, I said that before, but but but. I'm just waiting on something to clear up before I can hit buy, and I finally learn what a headache it is to own and maintain a PC. Plus, watching Far Cry 3 on a PC versus an Xbox 360 has been...painful.
Then again, I’ve gotten used to dealing with the minimum. My Xbox 360 is launch era machine, makes noise the equivalent of a space shuttle, and only has 20GB of space to work with. I do not go back to old games often, though, so I don’t have a problem with having a single game installed to the hard drive at a time, with only a handful of Xbox Live Arcade games. Memory management is just a quirk I’ve gotten used to, though I wouldn’t exactly get upset if that Xbox 360 finally bit the dust and I was forced to upgrade. I might as well deal with it and wait for the next console. (If you feel like red ringing, though, it's okay!)
That’s all just part of my cheapish nature, which both works for and against me. I would probably be happier with a quieter Xbox 360, but I’m usually playing with headphones on, so...eh.
Worth Reading is bigger than normal this week because I was actually collecting material for one during the Thanksgiving break, even if I knew I would ultimately have no time to put it together. I’m starting to feel like this feature needs a bit of a shake up, only because it feels a bit routine at this point, so if you have any suggestions...
Hey, You Should Play These
- The Message by Jeremy Lonien and Dominik Johann (Browser, Free) -- www.ludonaut.de/the-message/
Another situation where the less said the better. Just make sure to follow the developer’s instructions and have the appropriate spaces noises (which I converted into an MP3 and now have on my phone--seems great for naps on flights) while playing through The Message. It won’t take you more than a few minutes, start to finish, and you’ll want to immediately go back and see the other options when it’s all over. The Message does a terrific job of setting a grim, disturbing mood for the state of the emotional state of planet Earth, and by the end, well, you’ll understand why.
(The Message was part of *crag* This Jam, which leads me to...)
- *crag* This Dungeon by rlygh (Browser)
- Totally Accurate Toilet Simulator by Trashgames (PC, Mac)
- Dear Esteban by Travis Chen & Nolan Fabricius (PC, Mac, Browser)
The above three are selections from the recent *crag* This Jam game jam, where participants made games in genres they hated. I don’t know if that’s actually what happened in most instances (though the enormous amount of faux football games in the database does suggest otherwise for some people), but it doesn’t really matter, since *crag* This Jam resulted in a whole lotta awesome nonsense. Rather than just including one, I plucked three from a quick overview of the submissions, but if you have some favorites, send 'em over with a link, and I’ll highlight another set.
(And, yes, that’s really all there is to Totally Accurate Toilet Simulator. What, you wanted more?)
And You Should Read This, Too
- "Who spilled Hot Coffee?" by Simon Parkin for Eurogamer -- www.twitter.com/simonparkin
Simon Parkin files what might as well be (for now) the definitive piece on the Hot Coffee scandal that nearly brought down Rockstar Games, even if Rockstar itself chose not to comment. (Sam Houser did talk about with author Harold Goldberg for a book--read his comments at Wired.) Parkin dug up a series of incredible emails from within Rockstar through legal filings, and it paints a very detailed picture of the reasons why sex mini-games became a thing in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, what prompted the company to remove them, and how they were discovered.
But the commercial imperative was clear: fail to make the cuts and the potential audience for GTA: San Andreas' could be restricted by the ratings board. The question now was how to extract the explicit material without breaking the wider game's functionality so close to release. An emergency meeting was called so that the senior managers could discuss a solution. During the meeting Houser explained: “You can't always take a thing out of a game."- "Allow Natural Death" by Jenn Frank for Unwinnable -- www.twitter.com/jennatar
When I finished reading Jenn Frank’s piece about her mother’s recent death, I cried for two reasons. One, it’s a heartbreaking story told with such vivid and breathless detail that one cannot feel crushed by the end. Two, I haven’t found the will to write something about my own father. Writers have an itch, and there’s something about being a writer that compels you to write about your experiences. Maybe you think you can help others by talking about what most people will not, maybe it’s an ego thing related to talking about yourself, or maybe it’s just a form of catharsis that comes very natural. Whatever the case, I don’t know when I’ll end up doing the same for my own experience, but Jenn’s story is special, sad, and soul-crushing. We all have to say goodbye, even if we don’t really mean it.
My game ended quickly. “Well, okay, that’s that,” I said, putting the phone down and fumbling for something else. “Remember my story? My story came out in the magazine. Um, in August.”I opened a chapbook in front of her, and she touched its pages, and then she took the magazine from me and shut it and kind of massaged its cover with her thumb. Then she dropped the magazine into the folds of the bed and reached for my hand, and she took my hand and squeezed it.
And squeezed it again. And then I cried, and she squeezed my hand another time, and I looked up and right into her eyes, which were wet and meaningful and so clear, and her face was obscured by the breathing mask but her eyebrows were furrowed the way they always are when I cry, and I apologized to her for hurting her and for being so sad, and I looked down again at our clasped hands, and then I folded myself in half and cried into both our hands.
Some Thoughtful Words From Others About This Week’s #1reasonwhy Hashtag
- Games writer Katie Williams on why she was afraid to say anything, anything at all.
- How the Dragon Age team uses a combination of male and female writers to spot issues.
- Interviews with the people behind the hashtags, and how they spontaneously came to be.
- Rock Paper Shotgun on how all of us are responsible for making the situation better going forward.
- A problem is nothing without a solution, and Be The Solution hopes to help bridge the gap.
- One hell of a poem.
If You Click It, It Will Play
I Don’t Know About This Kickstarter Thing, But These Projects Seem Pretty Cool
- Well, for one, it's called Fists of Awesome. And...wait, you need more reasons? (It looks fun.)
- Peter Molyneux is proposing a return to the genre he invented with Godus.
- Pro Wrestling X wants to bring back the awesome N64 wrestling games, and I will not stop them.
- There's a sequel coming for Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, and it's already well on its way.
Valve Just Launched Greenlight, So Here’s Some Games That Don’t Look Terrible
- Famaze isn't promising much more than what it's selling as a retro puzzle adventure, but it works.
- Point Perfect tries to think of some more inventive uses of the mouse as an input device.
- People keep convincing me zombies are okay. Zombies does that. (Also, the soundtrack is baller.)
Oh, And This Other Stuff
- The video games industry needs to open its books. We don't disclose enough sales information.
- Home creator Benjamin Rivers writes a love letter to the Mass Effect series.
- An exhaustive postmortem on the creation of The Binding of Isaac, and it surprising success.
- Excellent "where are they now?" examination of the most successful gaming Kickstarters.
- Brendan Keogh has released Killing is Harmless, his book length examination of Spec Ops: The Line.
- Possibly the best review of a video game you will read all year long.
- Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward discusses his love of video games.
- Remember that politician shamed for playing World of Warcraft? Here's an interview with her.
- Digital Foundry goes into the guts of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 on Wii U and comes back with results.
- The creators of QWOP and Canabalt on what it means to be an independent developer.
- Nintendo's archaic, frustrating approach to DRM and how it can lock out all of your games.
- PopCap discloses a bunch of rejected game ideas from deep within its laboratory.
↕
↕
↕
So, like many others, I’m very excited to play Far Cry 3. After Jim’s review, and many similar elsewhere, I’ve been dying to play it and finally have the chance. Today is my day off, hooray! And so far I’ve been treated to a horrible, horrible time, and all at the hands of the technical mess that is Uplay and idiotic mechanical choices. And right now? Ubisoft’s servers are down. On launch day.
(more…)
↕
↕
Beyond the reach of civilization lies a lawless island ruled by violence. This is where you find yourself stranded, caught in a bloody conflict between psychotic warlords and indigenous rebels. Struggling to survive, your only hope of escape is through the muzzle of a gun. Discover the islands dark secrets and take the fight to the enemy; improvise and use your environment to your advantage; and outwit its cast of ruthless, deranged inhabitants. Beware the beauty and mystery of this island of insanity… Youll need more than luck to escape alive.
↕
↕
Scottish people are awfully sweary. “Fookin’ shite” this and “wee bastard” that. I don’t know. It must be all the batter. One of their potty-mouthed number narrates the Far Cry 3 co-op trailer, which is a grisly mix of explosions and neck stabs, narrated by a man who’s angry with me for something I must have done.
(more…)
↕
↕
Do map editors normally have trailers nowadays? Far Cry 3′s has one. I know that some trailers have trailers and it’s only a matter of time until someone makes a trailer for a logo, so I guess something as functional as a map editor can appear in a video and say ‘hello’. The most notable thing about the editor for Ubi’s Jimpressing open island shooter is that it looks simple enough for an idiot like me to use. Terrain can be generated randomly, objects are dragged and dropped into position, and the whole thing can be populated with wildlife and AI baddies for solo play.
(more…)
↕
What a difference words can make. If I’d seen this new Far Cry 3 video last week, my first reaction would probably have been to chortle about magical tattoo abilities. After reading Jim’s thoughts on the game, I’m too giddily excited by watching those abilities in action to spend any time laughing at minor bits of silliness. Far Cry 2 was a mess but it still managed to produce some of the finest moments I’ve ever experienced in an FPS, so when I see the words “it has kept what was good…and builds on everything else”, damn straight the lens through which I view the trailers changes. Very excited.
(more…)
↕
The third game in the Far Cry series has arrived, bathed in sun, populated by sharks and murderers, driving too fast along a dirt track, with the grass on fire all around. But is this a holiday of a lifetime, or a trip to the wrong side of the tracks? I pulled on a scratched pair of aviators and scavenged a shotgun from the body of a fallen games journalist to tell you wot I think.(more…)
↕
In a fashion not entirely dissimilar from real-life games like croquet and sex, first-person shooters have recently started adding “multiple players” modes. Far Cry 3 – in spite of its focus on “singular players” and the islands who love them – is no different. But how does it even work? I mean, we know that its servers are of a fickle, wayward nature, but will it be worth the possible hassle in spite of that? Let’s investigate. Machete your way through the break’s overgrown jungles to see some footage. Oh, but do keep an eye out for wildlife. We don’t have any tigers roaming these parts, but Alec is startled by sudden movements and has been known to attack.
(more…)
↕
I wanted to make a picture of one of Far Cry 3‘s tigers crying gigantic crocodile tears (or maybe one of its crocodiles crying tiger tears – or just tigers) for this post, but I’m rubbish at Photoshop. So, um, use your imagination. Awww, isn’t that sad? That tiger – in addition to the fact that a gun-toting madman is cavorting about his island home and burning everything to the ground – now has to worry about inconsistent connection speeds and host disconnects. Truly, there is no worse fate. But perhaps there’s hope? While Ubisoft tied cinder blocks to dedicated servers’ shoes and hurled them into the ocean, it was fairly upfront about why it thinks its alternative solution will be just as good.
(more…)
↕
Admittedly, Jason does other things in Far Cry 3‘s new story trailer aside from punching a shark. But really, is there any tale more gripping or universal than that of one dude, one shark, and one fist? The biting, the panicking, the punching as beady little eyes register no pain. In that moment, we find the truest definition of the human condition: not shark. And then, after that brief spasm of profundity, we get Jason talking about his captive friends and such. He speaks with conviction, too, but I think we all know what’s swimming around in the back of his mind: he punched a shark, and he liked it.
(more…)
↕
↕
Chat
