Thompson

Far Cry 3

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So this is out in Australia this week, a week before the US for some reason, and I've put a few good hours into it so far. Wanted to write down some thought points on it and figured I'd share it with Thumbs guys.

Initial impressions are pretty good. I'm enjoying it. The open world aspect of the game feels very much like Far Cry 2, and the first thing I did was jump off a cliff and make sure there were still the gross "heal from critical state" animations. There were.

But there were a bunch of things that bugged me, most of which are the 'game-venient' changes that slap you out of the zone every so often. Things like no diegetic map (a huge travesty), lots of mission notifications, the ability to watch dozens of enemies through fucking walls (completely shocked me), a persistent minimap, and fast travel from anywhere you are to main hubs (teleport out of danger zones what).

I also didn't realise that there was an RPG-esque skill tree system. You get EXP for killing dudes and you spend it in the three different trees to unlock various buffs and abilities, such as sprint-sliding around everywhere like a dork. It's weird.

The best things by far have been the pleasant discovery of how well the game is built for stealth. There's the Dishonored-esque dark vision which you activate by tagging dudes on the DSLR camera you're apparently lugging around, a detection indicator, silent takedowns and the ability to drag bodies (both of which you have to unlock, unfortunately). To top it all off, the game rewards you extremely generously if you manage to take down an outpost without being detected, something like 3x the EXP from just shooting all the mans.

Also, the bow is rad and somebody mentioned cold beer and I smiled.

Anyway, if you guys have super specific questions about Far Cry 3 I'll try and answer them.

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Can you pet any of the wild animals?

Do grenades still roll down hills?

Ok real question: what are the camp respawn times like? That was the main thing that bugged me in Far Cry 2.

Things like no diegetic map (a huge travesty), lots of mission notifications, the ability to watch dozens of enemies through fucking walls (completely shocked me), a persistent minimap, and fast travel from anywhere you are to main hubs (teleport out of danger zones what).[/Quote]

All of this is pretty sad to hear but I guess I'm not so surprised.

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This is looking great to me, I'll definitely give it a go. There seems to be a disproportionately high number of Far Cry 2 fans on here so I'm sure our perspective is very different as I didn't get on with that game very well. Conversely though, I absolutely loved Far Cry 1 (which this looks startlingly similar to) and Crysis 1 which it also looks like Ubisoft have taken some cues from. In many ways this seems like the kind of game that Crytek would have made if they were actually good at writing, albeit not quite up to the same technical scratch.

As for the marketing, Far Cry 2 didn't exactly have brilliant marketing either — in fact I recall it being very similar to this, albeit with less dubstep. But it still made out it was a lot more action-packed and structured than it really was. I think it's safe to say that the current developers understand what the spirit of Far Cry is and are doing a good job of keeping that in place despite the thematic roundabout.

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Can you pet any of the wild animals? Do grenades still roll down hills? Ok real question: what are the camp respawn times like? That was the main thing that bugged me in Far Cry 2.

You can pet them... with your machete. Grenades still roll down hills. As far as I can tell there are no more camp respawns. Once you clear out an outpost, your buddies roll in and take over, and it becomes a safehouse/fast travel point/bounty board hub. You'll still have hostile groups in the area, so you might stumble on a small scouting group while you're hunting or something which is actually kind of cool and feels organic.

Actually, something I love the feeling of is walking down the road, hearing a vehicle in the distance, thinking 'oh shit' and running into the bushes and hiding, watching and waiting for it to drive by only to see that it's full of friendlies and sighing a gasp of relief.

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Ubisoft, producing the worlds best bag making and dead-body-looting simulators since 2010.

(This game is really good.)

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I'm enjoying it so far. The worries I had about the increased gaminess and the awful story are confirmed to be true though. Although in case of the story, I should say "so far", since I have been forgoing the story missions for exploration. Still, Jason Brody, the frat boy with his douchebag buddies, the chosen hero... It's just too ridiculous. At the moment, Jason Brody is just that guy that I play during the story missions. When I'm trouncing through the jungle, in search of prey, I BECOME STEALTH MASS MURDERER-MAN. It feels great to be peering into an enemy camp from afar, making all these little plans that may or may not work out.

On the gaminess side of it, it's just this whole visual layer of information I'd rather just have hidden, but it's not. It's always there, splashing things on the UI left and right, reminding you what you could be doing. There is very little left to the imagination and it's a little obnoxious. The radio towers are a good example. You climb them and once you flip a switch at the top, it reveals everything of interest/collectible on the map. The camera pulls out and is all like "check out all the cool stuff in this area!" showing things like ruins and little outposts, things like that. Sometimes it shows stuff like a crashed WW2 era fighter plane somewhere on a mountaintop and I am left thinking how cool it would've been to just stumble across things like that myself.

But dammit if I wasn't goddamn pleased with myself after the enemy sprung my carefully planned out trap. There was one guy left. No biggy, already aiming for his head. But then I noticed he wasn't shooting at me and then I got mauled by a tiger. The end.

Looking forward to other stories of local wildlife ruining your well thought out plans.

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It's a shame that the plot seems so off-putting to me. For me, your friends being imprisoned, tortured and/or threatened to be sold into slavery (I don't know how accurate this actually is, but this is what I gathered from the trailers etc.) is just about the worst premise for open-world fooling around that I can think of.

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It's a shame that the plot seems so off-putting to me. For me, your friends being imprisoned, tortured and/or threatened to be sold into slavery (I don't know how accurate this actually is, but this is what I gathered from the trailers etc.) is just about the worst premise for open-world fooling around that I can think of.

I'm intrigued by this hatred for the story. They've clearly gone with the "average dude thrown into a crazy situation who emerges as a hero" trope (see: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Die Hard, Total Recall, Alien, etc. etc. etc.). That's usually a pretty great story, if you ask me, so I'm confused as to why you think it's the worst story you can think of?

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"The average dude becoming a hero" part does not bother me at all. I'm just personally sick and tired of the standard "we are going to do horrible stuff to your friends" motivation at this point. The little I have seen of the game so far suggests that this might actually be handled in a somewhat nauseous manner too. My fear is that I'll find it very hard to enjoy the open-world wackiness (i.e. actually playing the game) with the thought of my friends being tortured/raped/whatever constantly in my head. As a plot device this sort of thing is of course very powerful. Unfortunately, it kinda makes me not want to play this game.

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Everything I've heard about the story thus far has me totally interested, although it sounds like the emphasis soon wears off 'saving your friends' and becomes more 'I am going fucking insane in this climate' which is cool. Kind of 28 Days Later. Definitely going to pick this up soon, although I'll wait for a technical analysis before choosing my console platform. I suspect the 360 version will run a bit better but who knows.

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in the UK its not on steam and im having so many problems with UPlay.

i think the new slogan should be "UPlay, because i can't"

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Just seen it for Xbox/ps3 in sainsburys (uk) for £30. Bargain! Mines in the post, should get it tomorrow

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"The average dude becoming a hero" part does not bother me at all. I'm just personally sick and tired of the standard "we are going to do horrible stuff to your friends" motivation at this point. The little I have seen of the game so far suggests that this might actually be handled in a somewhat nauseous manner too. My fear is that I'll find it very hard to enjoy the open-world wackiness (i.e. actually playing the game) with the thought of my friends being tortured/raped/whatever constantly in my head. As a plot device this sort of thing is of course very powerful. Unfortunately, it kinda makes me not want to play this game.

Ah! Yes, that does make a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining it to me.

Is this the general consensus as to why people don't like the story? I really am intrigued. Thanks!

EDIT: You know, you make a really good point. In books and movies it works great if the story moves along at a thundering pace, making the viewer want to keep up. But with games, it actually gets annoying. I remember experiencing this feeling with Fallout, Oblivion and GTAIV. I just wanted to leave the main quest and go exploring, but doing so required me to disconnect a little from the game world: Yes, X needs to be completed immediately... but I want to wander around first, so I have to pretend that X isn't happening. Interesting.

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I actually have no idea what aspects of the story other people take issue with. That was just something that I immediately found off-putting when I first saw the trailer for this game. It's a shame because Far Cry 3 sounds like an excellent game in many respects. I will probably pick it up eventually and somehow try to distance myself from the story or something.

Incidentally, it never bothered me that the reapers were killing millions upon millions of people while I was hunting for bargains and solving petty crimes.

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I think Sleeping Dogs did this pretty well, the plot elements were being driven by your involvement for the most part. The more you poked your nose in the hornet's nest the more the story kicked forward, sometime brutally. It was rare that you had a mission that was like 'come save me, now or at your earliest possible convenience!' The examples Thunderpeel mention drive me nuts too. Fallout 3 especially: it's just ridiculous that at the end you're basically the one dude everyone is waiting on to start a giant land war and you can take days or years to get there.

Then again, there was no rush in Far Cry 2 and I never beat it. I tend to need some kind of overarching even vague sense of urgency to continue playing a role playing game. Once I finish the main story in most of these games I lose the will to go back and finish side quests. So it's a very fine and problematic line.

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I wish more games would create that sense of urgency by having things happen on an actual timeline, a la Star Control II, Dead Rising or X-COM.

I also like the system in Persona 3 and 4, in which time jumps forward in increments when you decide how to spend a chunk of it. (Like, going to the movies will eat up your evening, meaning there are other actions you won't be able to perform until another time, some of which are only available at certain times.) Major events happen on set dates, and you must spend the intervening time wisely.

I know it's scary to design a game with time constraints like that for variety of reasons, but man, it can be so great. Imagine how much more tense Mass Effect would have been if the Reapers were actually coming.

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It's a complex problem, which I don't think is solved simply by putting a timer on everything. Dead Rising for example, was a big theme park full of fun things to play with, and then you got a contrary message from the game telling you to hurry up and complete a bunch of objectives before an arbitrary deadline, which really grated. I don't think I would have been happy if I had to rush through Mass Effect either. Open-world games designed around exploration seem mechanically at-odds with that kind of linear timekeeping. I like tenseness based on danger and overcoming challenges. I dislike tenseness based on a countdown timer or a deadline. Feels like work, not game.

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Imagine how much more tense Mass Effect would have been if the Reapers were actually coming.
Mass Effect could have gone a step further and kept the clock ticking over the course of all three games. Shepard is too late to save the galaxy because he spent too much time disco dancing four years ago.

youmeyou is right: this system turned Dead Rising from a fun sandbox into a stressful game that required tactics, but I respect it for that. You had to make choices about who (if anybody) you saved.

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Right, you TOSSERS. After ruining my desire to play AC3 this had better be good! Going to pick it up after I've finished crying tears of laughter about it being priced at £59.99 on PlayStation Store.

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Right, you TOSSERS. After ruining my desire to play AC3 this had better be good! Going to pick it up after I've finished crying tears of laughter about it being priced at £59.99 on PlayStation Store.

Yikes! That's a bit stupidly priced.

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Allow me to elucidate upon my time with Farcry 3 with an anecdote. It is a bit "Grenade rolled down a hill" like...but what good thumbs community story isn't?

I was planning to hit an enemy base because it provided a good foothold for some future endeavors. I had a silenced sniper rifle, and a standard SMG incase things got a bit hairy, which I was hoping they wouldn't do. After an exhaustive search of the perimeter, I was happy that I had tagged the entire base. (Think of tagging as planting a big old skull over the enemy heads so you can be aware of their location at all times). I snuck in and knifed the first guy, dragging his corpse away and revelling in my success as a super bad ass stealth murderer. After a few more choice knifes and sniper kills, I could see the ranks of guards being easily whittled down. After shutting down the alarms, I forsaw it to be an easy victory.

Little to my knowledge, the eco system within the game decided it was not to be this way. As I was approaching a guy,out of nowhere, I saw a tiger full on BOOK IT towards him, pouncing upon him and killing him in one hit. I was so shocked and flabbergasted by this tiger appearing that I turned tail and absolutely legged it one. The tiger then, weirdly enough, turned around and went off on his own business. I guess the tiger had it out for that one guy, right?

Due to this, a patrolling guard found the corpse of the tiger mauled man, and everything went a little bit tits up. A passing convoy full of guards came, and started trying to flush me out, even though it was totally that tiger that did everything!

5 minutes later, I killed the enemy commander, took his keys, and went about my life. I was running, mind you, from an absolute hail of bullets as they opened up on me as I was trying to run to glorious safety (I'd ran out of bullets by this time). Thinking to myself "Oh I'll do a totally sweet escape manoveur", I ran and lept into the water, under the assumption that I would get the cover of water to protect me. I landed in the water, and a crocodile ate me as soon as I hit it, killing me instantly.

I breathed out, and took my hands off the keyboard.

You should play Far Cry 3

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Allow me to elucidate upon my time with Farcry 3 with an anecdote. It is a bit "Grenade rolled down a hill" like...but what good thumbs community story isn't?

I was planning to hit an enemy base because it provided a good foothold for some future endeavors. I had a silenced sniper rifle, and a standard SMG incase things got a bit hairy, which I was hoping they wouldn't do. After an exhaustive search of the perimeter, I was happy that I had tagged the entire base. (Think of tagging as planting a big old skull over the enemy heads so you can be aware of their location at all times). I snuck in and knifed the first guy, dragging his corpse away and revelling in my success as a super bad ass stealth murderer. After a few more choice knifes and sniper kills, I could see the ranks of guards being easily whittled down. After shutting down the alarms, I forsaw it to be an easy victory.

Little to my knowledge, the eco system within the game decided it was not to be this way. As I was approaching a guy,out of nowhere, I saw a tiger full on BOOK IT towards him, pouncing upon him and killing him in one hit. I was so shocked and flabbergasted by this tiger appearing that I turned tail and absolutely legged it one. The tiger then, weirdly enough, turned around and went off on his own business. I guess the tiger had it out for that one guy, right?

Due to this, a patrolling guard found the corpse of the tiger mauled man, and everything went a little bit tits up. A passing convoy full of guards came, and started trying to flush me out, even though it was totally that tiger that did everything!

5 minutes later, I killed the enemy commander, took his keys, and went about my life. I was running, mind you, from an absolute hail of bullets as they opened up on me as I was trying to run to glorious safety (I'd ran out of bullets by this time). Thinking to myself "Oh I'll do a totally sweet escape manoveur", I ran and lept into the water, under the assumption that I would get the cover of water to protect me. I landed in the water, and a crocodile ate me as soon as I hit it, killing me instantly.

I breathed out, and took my hands off the keyboard.

You should play Far Cry 3

sold

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