Jake

Far Cry 2

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Well hopefully that will start to happen soon. The last one I did had me attacking the police chief's brother in order to get the chief to stop driving around in his convoy and return to his post. Except convoys are one IUD away from obliteration, and posts are much easier to defend. So that was kind of puzzling.

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Still enjoying most of the game though, the landscape is very cleverly designed. You get a great sense of exploration while taking the long way around checkpoints.

Yes, very cleverly designed! There are almost always mutliple ways to the mission, be it waterways or roads, and each time you have some motivation to explore along the way because the straight road isn't safe anyway.

I don't agree with whoever said the waterways were safer though. There may be less checkpoints, but you have way less options in approaching them when you're in a narrow river surrounded by cliffs. I also wish there was a more elegant solution than just stopping your boat or truck and switching to the gun, getting shot constantly while the animation plays itself out.

I might have said something along those lines recently. I didn't mean the rivers are safer than roads; what I meant was that the waterways in this game are at least useful (as opposed to Far Cry 3). Sometimes it makes sense to choose them instead of roads, even if they are not safer. Also, you have the option of swimming. Maybe not always, and I forget how swimming worked exactly -- could you hide from guys underwater somewhat?

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Not sure, the stealth system in this game is not the most consistent. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes every guard in a mile radius knows your position before you even got there. The best is the weird glitch where they're facing away from you but still shoot, and that bullet still hits you. Happens one in three times I get in a shootout.

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I'm with Tycho on this one. In general if they can't see you and you're not making noise they will lose track of you. I tend to only use silenced weapons so this may be more noticeable to me.

Great screenshots btw. I've been posting mine on Steam, I should take the time to put them in here also.

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Well I haven't started using only silenced weapons yet so my impression of it isn't fully complete. How I was going about things was firing from a position, then flanking and taking them out when they go to investigate the source of the noise I created from shooting. It all goes swimmingly except when it doesn't and they somehow know where I am even though I'm nowhere near my original postion and hiding in the shadows.

The 180˚ shooting thing is definitely a thing though. Maybe I'll record a video of it and post it later, it's pretty silly looking and totally throws off me off, as I can't tell whether or not I've been spotted until they start shooting.

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I have also started replaying it (played it on xbox last time and had bug that deletes all save games at 54% mark) and am about 5 or 6 hours. This time I didn't bother going stealth and just snipe as many people as possible and if anyone gets close I have a sub and light machine gun to deal with them.

The one thing I find annoying is that it is really hard to get off the boats into the water and involves a lot of jumping around hoping to get at the right spot. Nearly cost me my life today. The other thing I noticed is if you are in a building the AI will drive into the buildings trying to either hit you or get at you. They seem really psychotic sometimes when they are driving

I find the waterways handy cause it's easier than trying to drive through the jungle a lot of the time.

A damn that is some beautiful game. If it's sunset/rise I nearly always just stop and look around at the landscape.

Does anyone know what the buddy missions outside the main missions do for you ???

Also does anyone else wonder if at one stage they planned a female playable mercenary cause there are a few female buddies which I think would have required more work than changing how your arms look.

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i never get games where these aliens have far more suprerior technology, but are as dumb as shit in combat.

God i miss the Combine from Half-Life.

and how about some variety, if there are aliens maybe they have different coloured hair or tattoos or something they use to make themselves stand out for mating or whatever like all lifeforms.

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Ok ran into the shooting at me but not aiming at me glitch, took a screenshot:

 

Su0nCxr.jpg?1

 

bloody screen: so real!

 

Annoying glitch but thankfully doesn't happen much.

 

Man do I have mixed feelings about this game. It's got great atmosphere and intense, tactical firefights. But what happens after the firefight? There doesn't seem to be any reason to keep playing besides to continue to kill people in interesting ways. But that doesn't seem to be a good model for a single player shooter. Wouldn't a multiplayer game be a better fit here? Battlefield or Planetside-style, everyone trying to hold down their checkpoints and then go out and raid those of others? As good as the AI is it isn't dynamic enough to make the firefights truly unpredictable. And the story doesn't interest me in the slightest. It's tough, because when I'm in a battle I have fun but traversing around feels ultimately pointless as the few goals there are are simply variations of the gameplay loop of clearing checkpoints over and over again.

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If the game has a great atmosphere and intense, tactical firefights, why do you need some additional motivation to keep getting into those firefights? Isn't the fact that they are intense and tactical enough to make you want to get into them, and doesn't the atmosphere make the game a fun place to drive around in between the fights you get into? And you don't have to go around clearing checkpoints, you can just take missions from the factions or from the cell phone towers or from the underground.

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Well it basically limits my ability to role play or find a connection with my character. I have no interest in his mission, it seems pointless and destructive (which is surely the intended reading of it). So it's hard to look at the game in my Steam library and think "time to go feel shitty about myself for a few hours." Of course, it's a benefit that the game isn't feeding the traditional hero's journey to me, but it's a tough pill to swallow.

 

I've been ruminating on how FC2 compares the the Stalker games. I do think they share a lot in common. The inhospitable landscape, the roving bandit factions, the sense that you're no hero you're just a merc trying to survive a world that's doing its best to see that you don't. The thing is, the Stalker worlds feel far more fleshed out and interesting to me. The fact that you can journey with other Stalkers, trade with them, find various loot and artifacts to sell or use. I can properly role play and think about survival and strategize around that. Far Cry 2 has none of the peripheral elements of a sandbox game. Its streamlined nature is both a benefit as it does feel very pure of purpose, but also a curse as there's not very much to it and after 10 hours or so of playing I can't imagine it has much more to show me.

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I'm not sure I'd fault a game for only being interesting for a limited period of time. Most games are like that - if Far Cry 2 tops out for you at ten hours, then so be it. Surely there are some times when you do want to feel shitty about yourself for a few hours in the context of an exciting, visceral FPS, though, right? And Far Cry 2 is for those times, because you can just load it up, grab an assassination mission, and bet it (this is how Chris Remo seems to play it, judging by some comments he made a while ago on an episode of the podcast). So just because Far Cry 2 doesn't make you feel like you constantly want to play it so that you can earn the next bit of loot or whatever doesn't mean it's lacking something. It just means it's the kind of game that isn't supposed to be constantly played forever.

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While I do agree that the game can totally be played that way, I don't think it is narratively set up to be played that way. There is a big bad boss character that I'm ostensibly supposed to find more about by completing missions. I've completed 11 hours of missions and still don't know who anyone is or why anyone is doing anything. I think that is absolutely a fault of the game. The explicit narrative stinks. The emergent narrative is great, but only if you completely ignore the explicit narrative. And that's clearly what many people have done, but I don't think that discounts my own problems with it.

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There is a big bad boss character that I'm ostensibly supposed to find more about by completing missions. I've completed 11 hours of missions and still don't know who anyone is or why anyone is doing anything. I think that is absolutely a fault of the game.

 

I thought that was an attempt to evoke a Heart of Darkness feel from the game, which I believe Clint Hocking has talked about before. There's a mission you're on and a bunch of shit you should be doing, but instead you're just wandering around and killing people. I can see how that would feel aimless to some.

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If you have the Fortune Hunter's GOTY Edition or whatever the fuck (which is, I think, the only thing for sale on Steam) you can find the Jackal tapes which tell you more about that guy's backstory. Aside from that, you're limited to just finding the tapes from the reporter if you want more backstory. I don't know if the explicit narrative stinks - there's just not a lot of it there, and certainly I don't think the game's "narratively set up" to be played in any specific way, let alone the way you don't seem to enjoy. I think the whole point of open world games like Far Cry 2 is that you can play them however you want and have fun however you want. Beating the main story is optional. I don't know many people who bother beating the GTA main story, for instance.

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Random anecdote: I played all the way through the PC version without discovering that you can arbitrarily save at any point, not just the safe-houses. And honestly, I'm glad I did; Far Cry 2 is a great example of the immersive and creative power of restrictions, and it was always gripping to try and survive long enough to get to a safe house after a mission, or to unlock safe houses out of necessity because I needed a nearby save-point.

 

Consoles are limited to safe houses only, though.

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Obviously I enjoy certain parts of the game a great deal. Otherwise I wouldn't have sunk nearly as much time into it. It's true, the aimlessness is the main thing that bothers me. But I've enjoyed the heck out of the Stalker games which are arguably as aimless and I'm just trying to figure out what makes them more interesting and more enjoyable in my mind, if only to figure out my own personal tastes.

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Surely it's not the explicit narrative, though - in the STALKER games the narrative is weird sci-fi bullshit that doesn't even make sense.

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No, I think it's more the personal interactions that sell the world to me. Seeing a group of soldiers sitting around listening to a guy play a guitar, witnessing a lone Stalker get jumped by a pack of wild dogs, participating in the robust trade economy (as opposed to just buying tons of guns I don't want or need). Actually the trade economy is probably a huge part of it. At least in SoC there'd be tons of missions that were just: "I need a rare artifact, I don't know where it is, go find it." It's self contained, and suits the self contained gameplay style you describe better than the missions FC2 gives you which seem transparently setup to create cool shootouts and don't really make sense otherwise. First of all, why is your character doing any of this? Surely you don't need diamond stockpiles to go after a renegade arms dealer. How does no faction ever recognize you out in the field? Surely someone would tell someone else about a lone gunman massacring literally everyone in the country. At least set it up like Fallout NV where helping one faction hurts your standing with another.

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I think your character needs diamond stockpiles to be really fucking rich which is a motivation that I think we can safely attach to someone without the narrative explicitly saying that your character is greedy. Like, I don't need my character's voice going "sweet, some diamonds, now I will have more money" or some other character saying "gee, you seem to do some horrible things to other people for the sake of getting diamonds, you must be very greedy!" If you play Far Cry 2 as a diamond-grubbing kind of character, then that's the narrative: you're a greedy mercenary, in Africa to make a fortune. As for why no faction recognizes you out in the field, I guess maybe they all recognize you as the guy who has killed a bunch of their fellow faction members.

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I think the STALKER comparison mainly reflects one thing - the desire to be unsure whether an encounter will turn out hostile or not. I can definitely second this.

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