Thompson

Far Cry 3

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I have gotten really cynical about developers announcing co-op for their games.

It seems like 90% of the time it's either completely misguided and actively harmful to the game, or just some token throwaway thing that does nothing but divert development resources away from what matters, all in pursuit of a bullet point on a box. (Or a way to justify a first-purchase reward scheme.)

Out of this year's E3, Dead Space 3 is the former, Far Cry 3 looks like the latter.

I share the same thoughts, a few years ago it became a thing to take a medicore game, make it coop, then it sold like hotcakes.

Here's hoping the industry is moving on and when coop is added it's actually good and meaningful. I think there has been some great examples that show this, but they are usually on already really good games.

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Co-op is never harmful! I can enjoy the worst goddamn games if I'm playing with someone, no matter how out of place it is.

That said, Dead Space 3 having co-op is fucking weird.

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Co-op is never harmful! I can enjoy the worst goddamn games if I'm playing with someone, no matter how out of place it is.

Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2 are two games that jump to mind as games that are utterly ruined as solo experiences by having been sloppily designed around co-op.

I mean, and now Dead Space 3. (Which unrelatedly also has cover shooting, human enemies, and simplified weapons; the plasma cutter doesn't rotate! Fuck!)

I don't want to play a survival horror game with a group of people, i want to be wrapped up in the atmosphere. (Left 4 Dead might be the rare exception, but that's such a different beast.)

There are kinds of games that are very demonstrably worse as co-op.

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Dead Space 3 looks like utter toss. A slightly different setting for Army of Two, essentially. That being said, coop survival horror can certainly work. See Left 4 Dead and DayZ. I guess it can only work if there is no single player to detract from.

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I feel like it's that same old problem, the old issue where multiplayer is artificially crammed into a single-player centric game as a misguided value add.

Just now it's co-op instead of deathmatch.

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On the other hand Watchdogs co-op/werid assed multiplayer things sounds friggen amazing. But I'm not anticipating that for Far Cry 3. In fact I'd say it heavily depends on how it's used and what the actual gameplay is like to begin with. If, as suggested by some interviews and such, it's just an advanced and hyped up take on Far Cry 2 it might work really well. And at the very least that they've even integrated a story into the co-op mode, which shows they're paying some attention and effort to the idea.

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Phew, turns out Far Cry 3 will address the issue of all video games being about shooting everyone.

One mistake that games can make is to simply not acknowledge the violence and pretend like it isn't important, that their protagonist is nonchalantly killing a ton of people. If you ignore what your core mechanics are asking players to do, if you pretend like players aren't being rewarded for killing, then it will undermine the narrative.

Oh!

The thing I hate the most is when you see people doing bad things and the player can say, 'okay I have the right to kill them in horrible ways because they are horrible'. If you kill Nazis with the same methods as the Nazis themselves then you are Nazis too, no?

Oh.

Read all about it!

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So, in the 4-player co-op, if one of the players is the main protagonist douchebag, then who are the three others? Clones of the same guy? How does that affect the Oscar worthy story of Farcry 3?

And how does it affect the heavily scripted scenes like those seen on trailers where the bad guy of the story captures the main protagonist?

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Nah, they're all different people in a separate story set earlier on the same island. Unfortunately the co-op seemed mission-based in a way that didn't keep any of the features I like in Far Cry 2.

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Misread one of the posts earlier, and now I can't stop thinking about four-player QWOP gameplay.

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Nah, they're all different people in a separate story set earlier on the same island. Unfortunately the co-op seemed mission-based in a way that didn't keep any of the features I like in Far Cry 2.

Yeah, Far Cry 3 looks like just another shooter, which I am more than done with at this point. The dream in my head was a cross between Far Cry 2 and Day Z that was more polished than either.

Unfortunately it looks like most every "Triple A" studio still wants to play it far too "safe" to try anything like that. Despite playing it "safe" killing off developers and dwindling their sales for something like a year straight now. But, then again, games take time. Maybe sometime next year or the year after we'll see the results of adjustments to all these failed, generic, "me too!" shooters and action games and get back to some sort of variety and innovation.

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It's unrealistic to expect anything to come of the sort of, design/consumer relationship revolution that DayZ has created for at least a couple years.

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Yeah, now that they're talking about the open world stuff, FC3 is way more interesting to me.

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I dunno, turning Komodo dragon skins into ammo bags is just weird. And there's a perk that gives you the ability to kill dudes by jumping on them. Like Mario.

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Hm, I dunno... the fact that cleared roadblocks stay cleared and weapons don't jam all the time and not everyone wants to kill you means that the devs have been paying attention to the complaints of those that had serious problems with Far Cry 2. While I appreciate the randomness and wide-ranging possibilities of Far Cry 2 I don't appreciate the grueling arbitrary difficulty attached to much of it. So I'm kind of happy with the way things seem to be moving.

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Hm, I dunno... the fact that cleared roadblocks stay cleared and weapons don't jam all the time and not everyone wants to kill you means that the devs have been paying attention to the complaints of those that had serious problems with Far Cry 2. While I appreciate the randomness and wide-ranging possibilities of Far Cry 2 I don't appreciate the grueling arbitrary difficulty attached to much of it. So I'm kind of happy with the way things seem to be moving.

Oh no, I'm great with all of that!

I've just found that someone's overall impressions, point blank, are much more telling than anyone trying to "puzzle out" why a game isn't fun. And it doesn't sound like he was having fun. It sounds like it's a lot of "go here, do this (fantastically simple and easy) task, you did it yay! here's small reward to get on with doing a thousand, trillion other pointless tasks with no challenge or interest or ultimate goal."

I certainly hope I'm wrong of course. I hope the AI is good, and shooting stuff is fun, and the game isn't to the rafters with "easy pointless task no. 5,238". But I'm certainly not pre-ordering it.

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Yeah I agree with that. I've become pretty tired of filler content in open-world games. I've been playing Sleeping Dogs which seems to be mostly composed of easy pointless tasks like driving a dude's truck off a pier or beating up a group of dudes and then surveilling them for a prescribed period of time. What seems like a lot of content is really a tiny dose of content cloned out infinitely. (Which Skyrim is certainly guilty of)

Far Cry 2 had a lot of repetitive tasks too, when you think of it. Most missions were about killing someone or wiping out a camp. When you add randomness and large possibility space, that becomes fun. So I think the ultimate test for Far Cry 3 will be whether it has stripped out its possibility space in addition to all the crappy annoying stuff. Thrown the baby out with the bathwater, if you will.

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I'd love to see Clint Hocking's Far Cry 3 as much as I'd like to see Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 3, but the Far Cry 3 as it is might still turn out excellent, just like Curse of Monkey Island did. The "playing it safe" thing mentioned by RPS is a bit disappointing, though, but I am not surprised as I never expected those elements of Far Cry 2 to make it into the sequel. I'm rather surprised the fire propagation stayed. I'll wait for reviews, but I expect this is a game where fun can be had, although it probably won't leave as lasting an impression as Far Cry 2 did.

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In my fresh playthrough of Far Cry 2, which I haven't played for a month because of other games and other stuff, I've had one gun jam in ten hours of play. That's Hardcore difficulty. So I don't really get the criticism. The guns that jam are the ones that look like they should jam.

Road blocks staying cleared is suspect too. It wasn't perfect in Far Cry 2, but it's weird that the bad guys can't spare anyone to replace the people they lose. Or maybe they just never find out because they suck at communicating? In Far Cry 2, they definitely got replaced too quickly if you decided to backtrack, and it would probably have been nice if they got replaced with a fewer people than originally, but at least someone cared about keeping those road blocks occupied.

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Backtrack? It's a sandbox game, you can't -not- backtrack! The gun jamming wasn't as annoying an issue as the roadblocks and random drivers stopping, pulling over to the side of the road, and opening fire. Even in a hostile situation that doesn't make a lot of sense. If I saw a foreigner and I was some bandit I would call back-up and wait to attack as a group, not just go insane and start shooting at him not knowing if he was armed or not.

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Just go towards the next thing, not the previous.

If I saw a foreigner and I was some bandit I would call back-up and wait to attack as a group, not just go insane and start shooting at him not knowing if he was armed or not.

So there's your solution, a similar way GTAIV dealt with police trying to catch you. Not just removing the whole thing.

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