Idle Thumbs 88: Lacks Restraint

[coaxmetal]

This all has inspired me to reinstall Far Cry 2. Perhaps you have heard of it?

I'm going to see if I can cheat infinite diamonds or something, and try some mods. I've been through the diamond hunt, and it has merit, but I kinda just want to mess around in that world without having to worry about that.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any mod that removes the fire propagation limit. I really just want to let it do what it will. Apparently the tech is using cellular atomata, which is really neat to think about as a programmer. I bet this has been mentioned but the thumbs, but if not, see http://jflevesque.co...ns-and-spreads/

I designed a closed loop system where you feed the fire with spreading points and it consumes them to propagate. Here’s an example. The player throws a Molotov into a dry patch of grass. The Molotov gives,say, 60 spreading points to the patch of grass. The fire, by consuming the grass, requires 8 spreading point for each fire cell of the grid. Thus, the fire could propagate on 7 cells before dying

So basically, What I need to do if I want to try to mod it, is find where in memory (or ideally in a game config or data file) that point value is set, and make it way bigger. I've never really tried that kind of thing though, so I was hoping to find out if someone else had done it. Maybe I will give it a go, I probably won't succeed but it will be an interesting dive into something I have never explored before.

For me, an ideal scenario would be one where devs can release their internal tools and let the community do what they want, be that break the game horribly or make something awesome (or in the case of this fire thing, both). I guess thats kinda a no go for a lot of reasons though.

[darthbator]

I loved all the criticism of FC3 in this weeks podcast [face_shrug] I generally like when people are able to intelligently criticize a game that appears to be a pretty solid technically and competent in it's core player interface mechanics (runnin, shooting, etc). I have a harder time when the discussion turns to more emergent or experimental types of games. Lots of times I have a hard time putting a bead on how "good" many of those games are. They are all interesting experiments and that novelty will go a long way to someone fascinated with gaming as a medium but I have a hard time judging them objectively. When I play something like cart life something inside me says "I should really like this!" but in reality I'm bored to tears...

[BFrank]

If the systems aren't working together towards some meaningful harmonious whole, then they probably shouldn't be there.

This applies equally to Skyrim and FC3, even Dishonored and Red Dead. In my eyes it's an essential weakness of the open world formula and you can only hide it, not wipe it away entirely.

And though I'm not part of this camp myself, I know a lot of people who just don't think these things need to be a harmonious whole. They want a buffet, and they mostly consume the parts they're interested in. That's the strength of the genre.

[thainatos]

Here's the thing: Systems in games aren't arbitrary, isolated, and minor things. They aren't just annoying things for me to nitpick--they ARE THE GAME.

Hear, hear. I cringe a little every time I hear someone talk about gamifying something, because that's the exact problem video games have. You want to make a story about killing, so you tack on collectibles or crafting or photography? That's not what I want from a game--I want systems that work together for their own sake to help me create my own meaningful experience.

Which is why I care less about the games BFrank mentioned above, having played them all, and it's also why Miasmata is REALLY GOOD. Thumbs fans should definitely give it a try.

[twmac]

Damnit, I finished Far Cry 3 on Christmas and then spent 4 hours putting an article together about all of the things I didn`t enjoy about the game. I just listened to the podcast and now my article reads like a transcript of this podcast.

Fuck.

[Flynn]

Interesting to see a very similar split on Far Cry 3 over at RPS: http://www.rockpaper...alendar-day-24/

Game of the Year for some people, but with dissenters.

[Flynn]

Oh wow that RPS interview with the lead Far Cry 3 writer is bananas!

I thought we went so extreme in such a huge number of ways, that we had been totally exaggerated. I’ve played all of these games, so the shocking thing for me is that people would think this is serious.

he sex scene [at the midpoint] – first Jason is shooting at that gigantic monster. He kills the monster, and it jump-cuts to him orgasming with Citra! He’s firing sperm at this gigantic monster, and then suddenly he’s on this alter with Citra, having sex with her, and then he thinks he’s the leader of the tribe and makes the big speech, and it’s his power fantasy! That’s the other thing – it’s all from first-person, so it’s completely unreliable. There’s a reason why Jason is a 25 year old white guy from Hollywood – these are all ideas that are in his head. You’re seeing things through his eyes. That’s why the Alice quotes are there, and why Willis’s database entries are written from Willis’s perspective, and not written from a universal perspective. So the game is all from a series of perspectives, and I think it’s all there. And again, you could say to me, “Why isn’t this even more exaggerated?”, but why should it have to be? I don’t understand why what I did isn’t so insanely exaggerated already.

The crafting system intentionally makes no sense!

RPS: Yeah, but the way it’s delivered by the game, the mechanics of the game, don’t seem to be carrying the same satire. To the point where, when you ‘skin’ an animal its skin is left on and you seem to take a lump of guts. Do you think the delivery of the game in some places fell short of the message you were trying to convey?

Jeffrey Yohalem: To me that helped the delivery. Games are built by gigantic production teams. So even if everybody on the team doesn’t understand what the point of the game is, what I understood was: here’s the direction that these people are going to go in. So to me all that continues to support the message of the game. Because the message of the game is, look at all these systems that we’re creating, and if they’re illogical, and if they’re not challenging you as an individual but are just things for you to do that pass the time, then see how that makes you feel. The crazier the things that you’re doing are, the more interesting it is that you’re not going and helping the friends.

People who have looked at the surface of the game think that the story and the game are at war with each other as they are in most games, with the story just plugging potholes and the gameplay is going along its merry way. I think it’s very exaggerated that, “Oh, go save the friends! Go save the friends!” but most people are out on the island doing all this other crazy stuff and experiencing the gameplay. And that’s actually the point of the story.

It’s not a game about go save your friends. It’s a game about – doing a lot of picking skins from things, and wait, it’s just a pile of meat – this doesn’t even make sense, yet I’m still doing it instead of saving the friends.

Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3 have the same theme!

For me FC2, with the guns jamming and the malaria and all these systems that were considered not fun, it was about deconstructing the fun of a Video game. I thought Clint was very clear in a lot of interviews he did that that was what he was doing. He was trying to be philosophical about Video games, about their fundamental mechanics. If you have a gun that can jam at any point when you’re shooting it disrupts the flow. So he’s examining what makes a game fun, if I take away what’s considered traditionally fun.

So Far Cry 3 is actually doing the same thing – and I’m surprised that no one’s referenced that connection between the two of them – it’s just that Far Cry 3 is saying, what if I give you so much quote-unquote fun that it becomes uncomfortable. It’s a different approach to the same problem – they’re both trying to approach building the same building, I think. Everyone keeps saying how they’re so different, but in reality I think conceptually he approached it from the mechanical side by disrupting the mechanics, and I approached it from the story side by disrupting the story.

http://www.rockpaper...ure-and-satire/

[Jick]

But your wallet example is actually a perfect example of what's wrong with this game for me. You just described putting a system in a game as a decision that's basically within a vacuum. "Well, we have animals, and we want the player to fight all the animals, so let's have a crafting system. Well, I guess that means we need stuff to craft. A wallet I guess??"

I think part of the reason it doesn't bother me is that the crafting system is so rudimentary that it basically isn't a system. Maybe it's just a framing issue, but I didn't ever think "My goal is to make a wallet, I should go kill some bears." Instead, I thought "Oh, I got attacked by a bear and I killed it, and the game rewarded me with the ability to make a bigger wallet. Okay."

I also don't remember ever feeling like the interface was constantly sending annoying popups and whooshing sounds at me, but I guess it's possible I just tuned it out. That probably would have made a big difference.

It's just a style of unconsidered maximalist design that I really have no patience for at this point. I am perfectly happy to have a discussion with someone about why they think the game is good and I don't, but I'm not going to countenance the notion that I'm simply looking for minor things to pick apart in a game that I should otherwise love.

I'm sorry I came across that way. I absolutely don't think you should love it, and I don't think any of the individual criticisms leveled against it were off base. I just really walked away from the episode feeling like you guys felt like you were under an obligation to feel strongly about Far Cry 3 because of the cast's history with Far Cry 2, and that it turned into you just savaging the game in ways that you wouldn't have bothered to savage a similar game. I don't remember ever hearing you guys just rail against something for 20 solid minutes before, and it was just a little jarring.

I don't agree that it's "Skyrim with guns," at least not beyond the kind of funny observation whose response is either "Haha yeah it kind of is", or a goofy tangent about dumb shit like wizards with semiautomatics, which is certainly in our wheelhouse.

I think this is probably the core of it, because I honestly think it's a pretty apt comparison. I didn't play either Skyrim or Far Cry 3 to have any kind of meaningful games-as-literature experience. I played them both to explore cool-looking environments, find hidden shit, power up and unlock new verbs, overcome obstacles, shoot dudes with either guns or fireballs. I expect so little in the way of story and characterization from AAA games that I guess I do kinda treat them as collections of isolated systems, and I'm fine with that as long as I'm having fun with the systems.

Do all of the systems in Red Faction: Guerilla work towards some meaningful whole? That game has a lot of narrative nonsense in it, but it's a case where an open world game with a whole bunch of what I viewed as arbitrary and disconnected systems resulted in an experience that I very much enjoyed, and that felt similar to Far Cry 3 to me. It's less open-world than... big map with a series of big obvious checkboxes on it, each of which is some fun minigame about blowing stuff up or flipping a truck. I can't recall off hand if you guys ever talked about that game.

[TychoCelchuuu]

None of the Idle Thumbs criticisms of Far Cry 3 were for its failure to live up to any idea of games as literature, though. They were all about the extraneous shit piled on top that covered the genuinely good shooting and movement mechanics or about the ridiculous gun vending machines and UI popups that ruined the beautiful island aesthetic. Nobody complained about the story or the characterization much at all, aside from the first impressions stuff about not being able to stab a dude, and there was disagreement about that even.

The "Space Asshole" song about Red Faction is pretty much all I can remember of the Idle Thumbs discussion, but that's a pretty good summary of what I remember them having said - being a space asshole is a ton of fun, blowing up buildings and stuff. Presumably what made that more fun than Far Cry 3 for them was that the aesthetic wasn't ruined by an intrusive UI and a bunch of "build a better space wallet" mechanics.

[Chris]

None of the Idle Thumbs criticisms of Far Cry 3 were for its failure to live up to any idea of games as literature, though. They were all about the extraneous shit piled on top that covered the genuinely good shooting and movement mechanics or about the ridiculous gun vending machines and UI popups that ruined the beautiful island aesthetic. Nobody complained about the story or the characterization much at all, aside from the first impressions stuff about not being able to stab a dude, and there was disagreement about that even.

The "Space Asshole" song about Red Faction is pretty much all I can remember of the Idle Thumbs discussion, but that's a pretty good summary of what I remember them having said - being a space asshole is a ton of fun, blowing up buildings and stuff. Presumably what made that more fun than Far Cry 3 for them was that the aesthetic wasn't ruined by an intrusive UI and a bunch of "build a better space wallet" mechanics.

Yes, I think this nails it. Red Faction Guerrilla is hardly a masterpiece in a lot of ways, but it is a lot more honest about what it actually is than Far Cry 3 is.

[Jick]

None of the Idle Thumbs criticisms of Far Cry 3 were for its failure to live up to any idea of games as literature, though. They were all about the extraneous shit piled on top that covered the genuinely good shooting and movement mechanics or about the ridiculous gun vending machines and UI popups that ruined the beautiful island aesthetic. Nobody complained about the story or the characterization much at all, aside from the first impressions stuff about not being able to stab a dude, and there was disagreement about that even.

That was less a point about the criticisms than an examination of why the things that bothered them didn't bother me. The overall meaningfulness of the game wasn't spoiled for me by gun vending machines and bear wallets because it was never there in the first place -- this isn't the kind of game I go to if I want to find a meaningful emotional experience. Maybe I'm just setting my sights too low, but I really only expect that from games made by one person, or at least games with a very dominant auteur.

I'm kind of afraid to play it any more, because now that I have it in my head that the UI popups are annoying, I probably won't be able to unsee them. Such a weird thing. Maybe it's like a frequency of sound that only certain people can hear.

Anyway, I think it's especially important to look closely at really divisive works, because the specific attributes that make one person hate a thing and another person love it can point us toward... I dunno... pressure points, I guess. Specific things about how relationships to a work can vary across individuals.

Games aren't piles of systems, and meals aren't piles of ingredients, but sometimes you can invent an awesome new kind of meal by throwing together some seemingly-random ingredients and seeing what happens. I think maybe that's what happened with Far Cry 2. 3 took fewer risks on the accessibility, and I think it paid for it in terms of critical reaction.

Red Faction Guerrilla is hardly a masterpiece in a lot of ways, but it is a lot more honest about what it actually is than Far Cry 3 is.

I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on this. Was Guerilla was especially honest, or Far Cry 3 especially dishonest?

[TychoCelchuuu]

That was less a point about the criticisms than an examination of why the things that bothered them didn't bother me. The overall meaningfulness of the game wasn't spoiled for me by gun vending machines and bear wallets because it was never there in the first place -- this isn't the kind of game I go to if I want to find a meaningful emotional experience. Maybe I'm just setting my sights too low, but I really only expect that from games made by one person, or at least games with a very dominant auteur.

I didn't really get the impression that any of the Idle Thumbs guys were looking for some kind of deep emotional experience either, though. They just wanted a fun game where they could shoot people and they were frustrated that Far Cry 3, which could have been that, instead covered up that fun game in layers of shit that for whatever reason, they didn't feel like fighting through.

I'm kind of afraid to play it any more, because now that I have it in my head that the UI popups are annoying, I probably won't be able to unsee them. Such a weird thing. Maybe it's like a frequency of sound that only certain people can hear.

I think the latest patch lets you turn off some of the stuff.

Anyway, I think it's especially important to look closely at really divisive works, because the specific attributes that make one person hate a thing and another person love it can point us toward... I dunno... pressure points, I guess. Specific things about how relationships to a work can vary across individuals.

If you think it's really important to look closely at really divisive works, I don't know why it would feel jarring for you to hear Idle Thumbs spend 20 minutes doing precisely that. "Look closely" doesn't mean "praise effusively" and if they didn't like the game then they can either talk about why or they can just shut up about it. I'd much prefer to hear their reasons, because I don't give a shit whether anyone likes or dislikes any given game, I only care why they like or dislike it.

This is a point I brought up earlier in the thread and it's why I feel like a lot of the time posts like yours, which seem to spend so much time talking about whether you liked Far Cry 3 or didn't like Far Cry 3 rather than focusing on the specific criticisms, aren't really helpful. It's not a fruitful discussion to say stuff like "well I didn't go into Far Cry 3 looking for an interesting narrative experience" because that has nothing to do with any of the criticisms Idle Thumbs leveled at the game, as far as I can remember based on what they said.

You seem to be defending the game in general by saying "well, games don't need to be X to be fun" instead of having an honest discussion about the specific mechanics. At the end of the day does it matter whether Far Cry 3 is good or bad? Or is what we're really talking about the mechanics of the game, and which succeed and which don't for various people, for whatever reason? As I said, I've made this point before in this thread but I think it bears repeating since it doesn't seem to have sunk in. Your only real talk about the UI is to say "well maybe now that they mention it, it's going to bug me too" which, far from addressing their criticism, just validates it and in effect says "me too," which is a little interesting but not really what you seem to be going for.

Games aren't piles of systems, and meals aren't piles of ingredients, but sometimes you can invent an awesome new kind of meal by throwing together some seemingly-random ingredients and seeing what happens. I think maybe that's what happened with Far Cry 2. 3 took fewer risks on the accessibility, and I think it paid for it in terms of critical reaction.

The fact that games aren't just piles of systems is precisely why they seemed to dislike Far Cry 3; it "gameified" a ton of systems (by making you skin various animals to build various wallets, by poking its UI into your face all the time, etc.) instead of just letting the game be a game. They thought everything had to be a mechanic when they could have left most of the stuff (like the wild animal encounters) as systems. This was the whole "mechanics vs systems" discussion that they had in relation to Spacebase and Far Cry 3 in the podcast and that I talked about back on page 2 of this thread. And as for the critical reaction, well, as even Idle Thumbs pointed out, they're way in left field, aren't they? Most critics LOVED Far Cry 3. It got amazing reviews.

I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on this. Was Guerilla was especially honest, or Far Cry 3 especially dishonest?

Probably because Guerilla is a game about breaking shit and pretty much just gives you a bunch of points for breaking shit, whereas Far Cry 3 is a game about shooting stuff and exploring and island but you get a game over screen when you leave the mission area, you get a UI popup directing you to the next mission whenever you try to just chill out and explore, and you get a thousand cascading inventory popups warning you about your excess of leather and plants and your lack of wallet space when really you should just be shooting people. Far Cry 2 did this well - pretty much nothing got in the way of shooting people. You barely even had a UI, and most of the UI faded out when it wasn't needed. Far Cry 2 is all about just shooting people.

[brkl]

sometimes you can invent an awesome new kind of meal by throwing together some seemingly-random ingredients and seeing what happens. I think maybe that's what happened with Far Cry 2.

This is such a strange sentiment. Far Cry 2 is one of very few games where every moving part has been carefully chosen to present a very particular experience. I can't relate that expression to Far Cry 2 in any way.

[TychoCelchuuu]

The best metaphor for Far Cry 2 is that they looked at other meals and decided to take as much out as possible, leaving only the bare bones. Then they infected the meal with malaria.

[Henroid]

I just now tried out Cart Life, having somehow missed the fact that it's a free download. And my immediate reaction is that I feel extremely overwhelmed by it. The game is very unkind to you if you're trying to carefully read things so you make sure you're doing it right. And coupled with how complex (in its simplicity) things as simple as buying food to eat is, for a video game at least, it just feels... I basically feel like I have no time whatsoever to do anything. Before I know it it's night time and my guy is just hungry and pissy about sleep. Time passes way too quickly for me it seems.

[osmosisch]

Just like in real life!

[TychoCelchuuu]

Exactly.

[Henroid]

Alright, I gave the game another try. I'm starting to get the hang of it. The problem is memorizing all the information and having to discover things like where the hell you can eat. Right now my least favorite thing is the inability to fight sleep. I get to my cart at about 10am and by 3:30pm my guy is tired as hell. And if I break away from the cart to handle other things, like eating or smoking, he won't open the cart again because he's too tired. My days are wasting away in the worst way.

As much as one can argue about how "that's like real life," I kind of refuse to agree. I've gone back to work from breaks even when exhausted because I have to. You can't do that in Cart Life. The rate at which fatigue sets in is probably way too hyper-exaggerated for me to feel like I'm actually trying to live out this guy's life.

I'm trying to enjoy this game, and the idea seems like it should be. But I'm kinda having to fight to get my way to that so maybe I have the wrong impression.

Edit - I may be resenting this game because I'm currently not in the best position in reality and playing it is only a constant reminder of things.

[TychoCelchuuu]

Cart Life is not good at imitating real life by having a perfect 1:1 mapping between what you do in the game and what you would do in that situation. Cart Life is good at imitating real life by making you think and feel the way you think and feel in these kinds of situations. It makes you worried, frustrated, confused, overwhelmed. You have to figure things out and memorize things and make choices and learn and it's not helping you. Nobody is helping you.

[Gormongous]

Cart Life worked best for me by making me paranoid that I was in a failure spiral and just unable to recognize it. It hit a bit too close to home, even then. I didn't play the story through, but I got the picture.

[Henroid]

Richard Hofmeier Tweeted me some advice so I'm definitely giving the game another go. That was pretty neat of him to do!

[Vorlonesque]

The wallet thing just makes me think of the wallets in Zelda. Are there Gold Skulltulas in this game?

Actually that's sort of why I was ok with it the wallet thing...Farcry 2 always felt like "Zelda 1 the FPS game" to me with the respawning enemies and huge world to explore and discover. So the wallet thing really made sense to me in that same weird sort of way. I also sort of accidentally kept stumbling across the animals I needed to kill and skin to make my next thing...its kind of hilarious that I will crash my vehicle into a tree on my way to something else and see an animal and shoot it and be all "oh fuck this is the thing I need to make this...I'd been meaning to go looking for one of these!"

My biggest gripe about this game so far is that it doesn't handle ESDF very well...I end up having to use WASD when I drive and I have to use 'V' for my 'use' button (I normally use 'A'...but that means that whenever I'm driving and turn left I get out of my vehicle). Its weird because Farcry 2 had weird control issues as well and it seems that's the one thing they really remained faithful to! Though to Farcry 3's credit I didn't have to use an external program to make aiming with ironsights a toggle thing rather than having to hold down the button (I had to do that with FC2 along with an additional script for crouch toggling).

Edit: I would add that the thing that really bothers me is the whole "leaving the mission area" thing...if there was a way to mod that out I'd do it in a heartbeat and enjoy the game more, I don't dislike this game so far...but its weird...it feels like there are a lot of weird and bad decisions in there on top of a game that like...and if I could get around all that shit I'd enjoy it more. I'm not going to give up on it (hell I'm enjoying parts of it)...I almost did that with FC2 and came back to it months later because of Chris Remo's article on it being a slow burn that was worth sticking to and a lot of other stuff...and after giving that game a second chance I realized that it just took time for me to *get* that game.

[jonbro]

In regards to resound tracking things with more ambient music, David Kanaga (of Proteus) did a

. It isn't the ambient soundbed that the thumbs were talking about, but it is certainly stranger than the original.

He has a bunch up there, which he calls Let's Score. My favorite by far

, but there is also dark souls, psychonauts, and an

.

[Merus]

The think the idea that Far Cry 3 is intentionally trying to make the open-world stuff ridiculous to heighten the conflict between exploration and achievement in an open world - if you can go wherever you want, you can't also have a pressing reason to go to a particular location, like someone to rescue or a camp to destroy or something* - but I think the way they handled it is the wrong way. Mocking players for participating in a system is counter-productive because by building the game you're implicitly inviting players to participate in the system. Not doing so is not playing the game. Honestly it feels a little churlish to take that gift the medium has - by definition the player is participating in whatever action you put in front of them - and searching for ways to spurn that. If you don't want player participation, don't make a game.

(By 'participation' I don't mean 'choice'; choice is overrated, and the classic JRPG false choice is a perfect example of participation without choice. Players tend to get annoyed by false choices, if they notice, but it can be used to great effect; for instance, some of the choices in The Walking Dead aren't particularly important but providing them allows players to feel invested without needing to give up much control. Being able to pick Mass Effect's Commander Shepard's first name, gender, backstory and appearance does a lot to endear the character to the player, but in terms of consequences there's some minor dialogue changes and some romance branches are closed off.)

* The traditional argument is 'well if you don't do something the bad consequences should happen: the hostage gets killed and the mercenaries start their war' but what you're asking for is everyone blaming you for tooling around instead of doing the mission thing which doesn't solve the fundamental problem of there being an unresolvable conflict between the joy of exploration and the desire to provide goals and a story and suchlike.