I quite dislike being right sometimes. And, sure enough, Far Cry 4 proved me right over the course of the last two
weeks. Far Cry 4 got stale.
It's not fair to say that the gameplay got stale. The gameplay, in the Bungie-derived
"fifteen seconds of fun" sense, is still very fresh. There's a rush that comes from chaining
together takedowns, pulling a pistol off the last man standing and unloading it
at a crowd of enemies. Chasing down
trucks from a gyrocopter and raining grenades down on them is tremendously
enjoyable. The climbing, the dodging and
shooting, the exploration, it's all great.
Well, maybe not the exploration.
While the world is varied and splendid with narrative, some
of it has started to feel stale. It's
not entirely fair of me to say that; so much love has gone into crafting the
"history" of each place in Far
Cry 4. A random cave I stumble into,
filled to the brim with loot, will have a pair of intertwined skeletons in it,
or a tiger pinned under a dead bear, or a set of paintings paying homage to an
old, dead god. It's a dense kind of
semiotic storytelling, where a handful of symbols, presented in an offhand fashion,
tell a narrative as complex and interesting (sometimes more complex and
interesting) than the one illustrated by the main story of Far Cry 4.
But the doodads in these configurations are getting repetitive. Even after I broke through the northern gate
in a pulse-pounding action sequence (that was actually less difficult than some
side-quests I did) there wasn't too much new stuff to see. A little more snow, which was nice, and some
new posters, but for the most part the art felt like a color shifted version of
things I'd already seen, a slightly dimmer pallet casting all the scenes I'd
visited in a light that reduced their vivacity and increased their brutality. It makes perfect sense, in one light: the
northern land is colder and more brutal, got it, got it. But here's the thing that Dragon Age: Inquisition taught me: even
the most brutal kind of landscape can be rendered beautiful. DA:I showed me desert after harsh desert and
swamp after stinky swamp, and managed to make each and every one gorgeous and
distinct. Far Cry 4 has trouble make mountains sufficiently majestic at
times, or cave paintings interesting enough to catch my eye.
Perhaps some of this is owed to the way exploration
works. There are so many collectible
items in Far Cry 4, and so little
incentive to pursue them, that I find myself no longer caring when an indicator
shows up telling me I should check an area out.
I'm 70% through the game, maxed out on experience and karma and, for the
most part, have all the weapons I want, so at this point I'm really just
ticking boxes when I explore, trying to uncover interesting bits and pieces of
the world around me so I can roll around in them later. Some of the collectibles are pretty smart and
savvy: my dad's old journals, for example, tell a story about this land before
I came to it, and the British soldier's letters do a much better job of the
same, though with a more "drug trippy" bent oriented around the
Shangri-La side-quests. But there are
far, far fewer of those collectibles than there are masks illustrating cute
little bits of murder scene work. And
there are even more propaganda posters littering the landscape, some of them
lovingly arranged, some of them haphazardly throw into locales where they're
difficult to see, let alone find to destroy.
And therein lies the rub: there's meat on these bones,
interesting bits and pieces to Far Cry 4's
narrative and the ambient narrative of the world in which that narrative sits,
but there's also a tremendous amount of associated fat. As grand as Far Cry 4 can be in moments, for every real and passionate debate
that occurs between Amita and Sabal, I've got a cartoonish fight-sequence where
someone tells me not to fight a particular enemy because this isn't the
appropriate narrative moment, followed by a follow-up sequence where I fight in
a slightly different context, because the person whose murder would've
inconvenienced the narrative has fled the scene. And those Amita and Sabal arguments aren't
even that interesting anymore. Their
nuanced positions are growing to cartoonishly extreme proportions. Amita is becoming an avid drug smuggler. Sabal is a sexist asshole. The most interesting character has, in recent
times, become the fashion designer living in exile that I murder rare animals
for. With his stereotype defying speeches
on the nature of "being fierce," and his quiet rage at both his presently
reduced stature and Ajay's shit eating side commentary, he's got some chops
going on, and I'm genuinely excited to see if I get to have any moments where I
really get to know him a little better.
But all of this is couched in a samey narrative that seems
to play out through the same emaciated patterns. And here come the spoilers. When you capture the first
"mini-boss," a sociopath named Paul, there's no question, you're
going to kill him. He tortures and
murders people, taunts you as you drive him to be executed by the Golden
Path. He's a nasty character, and
there's nothing redeeming about him. His
weird relationship with his daughter is perhaps his only distinguishing feature,
but that does little to soften him and more to reinforce his stature as a
monstrous kind of righteous-minded devil.
It makes sense, and it's fine - there's no complexity there, and no need
for a choice to be presented. It would
be like choosing between shooting a rabid dog and letting it go on a
playground, a non-choice aimed at exciting the worst in players and doing
nothing to forward the narrative. But
then there's another mini-boss, a complex woman named Noore who works for The
Big Bad because her family was kidnapped.
She introduces herself in a profoundly odd way that casts her as a
potential ally. Relatively little about
her makes any sense, but she is sympathetic and, on the face, your resolution
with her gives you a choice to kill her or spare her life. It's fair (she's kind of a war criminal but
she seems capable of genuine good) but it's essentially a non-choice: if you
don't kill her, she jumps to her own death.
That little turn took all the narrative oomph out of the
campaign. It's clear now: I'll be making
a series of decisions about who should live or die, and they'll end up dying
anyway. There's a slight chance that the
next mini-boss might just lose her mind instead of dying. That wouldn't surprise me at all, though it
wouldn't change the central issue: the narrative of Far Cry 4 made up of a series of non-choices dolled up as choices. There's nothing wrong with that if you're clever
about it and execute on that concept for a purpose, the way Bioshock did, but there's no evidence of
that here and, given that I'm 70% through the game, it's reasonable for me to
assume that no such moment will occur as I continue to limp through the
narrative.
I'm having trouble caring.
The same way that Far Cry 3
more imposed than encouraged when it came to finishing up the game, Far Cry 4 is making me feel a disconnect
from its systems. Not because it isn't a
fun game; it is a thoroughly fun game.
But it lacks the sensibility of Far
Cry 2, wherein the narrative really was unpredictable, right up to the
last. The betrayal that unfolded in the
final moments of Far Cry 2, where
your every friend from the game turns on you and tries to murder you for the
blood diamonds you've spent most of the game acquiring, was a real shock, as
was the slow burn realization that you'd be sacrificing yourself, in one way or
another, to make a real change. Far Cry 4, in trying to introduce
narrative convention to a gameplay form that disdains narrative, and in trying
to highlight its collectibles to encourage exploration, has essentially made me
walk through places I've already been, again and again, until they begin to
lose meaning and I begin to lose steam.
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