Sunday, December 29, 2013

Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Disappointment of Far Cry 3!



I picked up a copy of Far Cry 3 a few weeks ago during one of Steam's holiday sales, and I've been eking my way through it over the last few weeks.  I'd read the reviews when it dropped and more or less come away from them happy: here was a game I didn't have to play, a product I could safely ignore during my last semester at graduate school.  But with graduate school finished and grading done for the semester, my curiosity loomed, and I thought to myself, why not spend ten dollars?  Why not give Far Cry 3 a few hours of my life, just to see if it captures even a little of the magic of Far Cry 2?

The answer, as it turns out, was a resounding wavy-palm sign: Far Cry 3 has some elements of Far Cry 2 in it, a few of the nicer ones.  It's fun to run around, it's fun to shoot things, it's fun to explore.  There's a sense of wildlife as a resource, rather than an occurrence, which manifests as a bit of a double edged sword (more on that later).  There's a bevy of weapons which you'll want to perform sidequests to access, there's a bevy of sidequests that will unlock various craftables, there's a crafting mechanic that you'll want to participate in because it'll be how you unlock all of the various elements you'd usually expect out of a first person shooter.  And therein lies the rub.

Far Cry 3's story aside, the gameplay of Far Cry 3 is all about progression.  It's rooted in a complex leveling system that alters the way the game plays in some pretty fundamental ways, increasing your ability to take damage, fire weapons accurately, explore the environment and perform various "takedowns," a stealthy and brutal means of attacking an eliminating the many opponents you meet in Far Cry 3.  Some of these abilities are unlocked through a progression tree (which might more aptly be called a progression flow chart) but many of the most game-changing ones are unlocked by progressing through the primary story.  The end result is three ability groups, none of them well differentiated, that you'll rapidly move through the most basic elements of until you hit a ceiling of sorts and find yourself play through the plot with points to spare to unlock new abilities.

It's clearly inspired by the Tomb Raider reboot's progression system, which is a great template to steal from: the Tomb Raider reboot used its progression system to forward a story, and over the course of its story it earned some pretty harsh twists and turns and delivered some great gameplay.  That's where Far Cry 3 doesn't deliver.

The gameplay the progression is running through feels iffy, sloppy even.  Not sloppy in the gritty way that Far Cry 2 did, with its brutal, bone crunching fights, hostile environs and nasty quick fix field medic cutscenes.  Sloppy in the Duke Nukem Forever sense.  Every element that has been transferred over from Far Cry 2 has something slightly off about it.  Far Cry 2's field medic animations made sense, and they had real impact.  They were also a response to an intense, panicked situation: you were almost dead, this was how you restored the last sliver of your health.  In Far Cry 3, they're just things you can do when you're out of medkits, and the context surrounding them is nonsense.  Bandaging your arm is fine, great even.  Patting out flames on your clothes?  Perfectly sensible!  But why are you fishing bullets out of your arm with a butter knife?  Why do you have a butter knife in the first place?  Who cares, check out this explosion!  Hurt yourself jumping away?  Just hold down Q until you pop your hand back into place with a quick flick.

There's a lack of attention to detail running through the entire game, from those improvised first aid procedures to the exploration through to the shooting, which is dicey and iffy and relies heavily on progression through a weapon tree.  The weapons you'll unlock later in the game will wholly replace all of the weapons you buy at the beginning of the game, the "signature weapons" you can buy for a hefty price tag after completing enough side quests are all the weapons you should be using.  Sometimes it's subjective: if you like shotguns, the Bull is the best shotgun, but you don't need it.  Sometimes it's very, very clear: the Shredder, a custom Vector you can purchase relatively early in the game, is a nasty piece of business, and has quickly become my default weapon.  In Far Cry 2, it was all a matter of taste: every gun, from the first one you purchased to the last, had a use, and even when the game unlocked a bevy of new weapons in a new area about halfway through, the basic weapons I'd already bought were still a critical part of my inventory (though sometimes this was because of the hefty pricetags associated with weapons, an issue Far Cry 3 doesn't have).  Even without considerations of balance, there's something slippery about how shooting works.  Sometimes you'll be firing clear and true, sometimes you won't.  Sometimes your abilities will work just right, you'll interact with the environment as you thought you would, sometimes you won't.  I'm not even sure I'd qualify these issues as bugs, they're almost quirks.  If you approach a jump a few degrees off, the game won't meet you half way.  If you come at an enemy in a chair from the wrong direction, you won't be able to perform a takedown, even if he doesn't notice you. There's also a chance he'll somehow see you through the back of his head.

Given how tight Far Cry 3 wants its action game play to be, it's a pretty loose game.  I frequently have trouble with the most basic of Takedown maneuvers because it's unclear just how close you need to be to chain Takedowns.  Sometimes the Takedown follow-ups simply won't work.  Sometimes you'll be able to hurl knives at enemies you can't see.  It can be downright infuriating since, as messy as the gameplay can be, the Takedowns are actually pretty satisfying when they work right.

But there's still the issue of story to address.  Far Cry 3 has one, and it wants you to know about it.  It's got a massive, sprawling heavy handed story with a massive cast of characters.  These characters have little bios and personalities, and they'll tell you elements of backstory about yourself before informing you of how you've changed.  And boy, will you ever change.  There's some pathos going on here in the cutscenes, some real grim consideration of how tough it is to become a killing machine, and a consideration of how violence is reshaping you as a person into something monstrous.  But all of that emo bullshit is clumsily executed as all get out, emerging through heavy handed dialogue and telegraphed plot twists standing in for actual character development.  Even if it was well executed within the "narrative" portions of the game, it's wrapped up in a gameplay model so concerned with power fantasies that it would be absurd on its own: Far Cry 3 is a game where you fight dozens of people with the help of plants and murder sharks with a machete and a bow.  All that action is wrapped up in some problematically fratboyish patter addressed at no one in particular.  I've never longed quite so much for a voiceless protagonist as I have in Far Cry 3.  I'd find Jason's prattle irritating enough under ordinary circumstances, but his narration as he mows down dozens of people is way too much.  Hearing him describe the experience of being near a bunch of flaming marijuana fields was likewise asinine.  Far Cry 3 seems to celebrate being an ugly American, and goes so far as to push you into each form of ugly Americanism it can think of.  From America's callously problematic relationship with race to its celebration of ribald violence to its utter inability to deal with issues of class from its insane attempts to process these issues with ridiculous, asinine platitudes; it's all on display.  The fact that there are, at most, five different "models" of native citizens on Rook Island adds a layer of awful to the whole thing: Far Cry 3 seems to believe that brown people can effectively be divided into five subsets: men, old women, women you want to fuck, insurgents, and speaking characters.  It's going to make you wallow in these distinctions while you navigate its sloppy gameplay.

Its laughable engagement with drugs (and its portrayal of both hallucinogen and marijuana use) is another topic altogether: Far Cry 3's world is immature in every conceivable way, possessed of a child's perception of adult themes, and navigating it will make you feel like an asshole just for being there.  This is mirrored, in a sense, by Far Cry 3's hunting system which, in and of itself, isn't a bad idea.  It makes the act of stalking and killing wildlife purposeful (in Far Cry 2 it was just something to do when the tedium of the savannah started to get to you).  Alas, the way the hunting grounds actually map out, and the relative shallowness of the crafting trees associated with hunting (particularly when they're compared to the weapon and character progression models) leaves me with a sense of dissonance.  I've exhausted my need to hunt and I'm not even halfway through the game yet.  Hell, I'd exhausted it within my first few hours of starting the game; hunting is actually quite a bit of fun, and many elements of Far Cry 3 simply aren't.  Hunting is simply underutilized as a mechanic: it could be much more than it is.  Rare hunts are too few and far between, and the cost-benefit of selling pelts simply isn't worthwhile.  It wouldn't be hard to make it worthwhile: pelts of difficult to kill creatures would just have to sell for a higher price than most of the average loot you find in treasure chests scattered throughout the island.  If they were really ambitious, they could've made pelts into a kind of secondary resource, for trade to specialized vendors for weapon upgrades or experience.  Instead they're mostly on par with trash loot.  If you don't need them for crafting, you're better off discarding them.  It's frustrating to see.  When Far Cry 3 tries to engage with new things, when it tries to push boundaries, it does so in a way that undermines its own efforts.  Sophomoric is the defining adjective for this sequel.

But as I say this, I still haven't finished Far Cry 3, and I plan to finish playing through the game.  That says something, either about Far Cry 3 or me.  I'd prefer to attribute it to Far Cry 3: there's something running through the heart of this game that understands what was good about Far Cry 2 on some level, some nugget of what made that game so great, and I'm hungry enough for that brand of play to wade through the mire of Far Cry 3's story and world to get a hold of it.  The sloppiness feels so off somehow, so iffy in a way that it just doesn't need to be, and the progression, oh god the progression...  But within all of that, a core game persists, a fun, dynamic suite of systems that promote a particular brand of kinetic, frenetic play.  The Takedown system, when it works, is great: even if it makes zero sense, story wise, there's something wonderful about getting your machete on in a camp full of baddies, running in and out of cover and hiding bodies in bushes.  There's something there still, even if it's rooted in some problematic non-politics, even if it represents a step backwards in design, the magic of Far Cry 2 remains present on some level.

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