Slasher on 28/3/2018 at 23:40
Quote:
Because since FC3 fighting larger than life, nutter villains has been part of the formula. Religious cults are often lead by larger than life nutters. Rural America is an interesting location to do virtual tourism, which to date has been untapped in AAA gaming. Virtual tourism is exotic locales is the backbone of the Far Cry franchise.
Come on man, these answers are as plain as day.
I don't think fumbling the execution is plain as day, but hey, Ubisoft! :D
Starker on 29/3/2018 at 00:46
The Ben Kuchera review is pretty good, actually:
Quote:
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https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/26/17164878/far-cry-5-review-ps4-pc-xbox-one)
The "everyone is bad!" argument pops up often. In one jaw-dropping sequence, you leave a scene of torture perpetrated by the bad guys, only to end up in the bunker of the "good guys." Guess what they're doing? If you said "torturing someone to get information," you win. These two situations literally happen back to back, without anyone in the game remarking on it. You can be in a cult, or you can fight a cult, but torture is worth it and effective either way!
Equally flabbergasting is that many of the peggies are taking part in this violence because of a drug called "bliss." You can tell when characters are under the influence of the drug from the green cloud around their heads; bliss is used as a shortcut to get away from realistic storytelling and dive back into tired video game tropes. A boss fight with a character who warps around the level, complete with a health bar, is as ridiculous and pointless as it sounds. The drug is meant to dehumanize the characters, so you feel more like you're gunning down zombies than humans. However, the game totally fails to recognize the horror of shooting American drug addicts while the nation deals with a very real ongoing opioid crisis.
[...]
For now, we're left with the core campaign. Far Cry 5 uses the religious and isolationist divides in America to set up a story without ever addressing their history and their very present danger, and the story seems to give most of your enemies a get-out-of-jail-free card to explain their actions.
They weren't bad; they were just drugged! And the main antagonist, well. if you hadn't picked a fight, maybe none of this would have happened! This sort of argument — that you are complicit in the violence that the game portrays and the villains take part in because you decided to play the game — was interesting when Spec Ops: The Line did it back in 2012, but has grown tiresome in the repetitions since.
Far Cry 5 makes fun of everyone on the political spectrum, without ever taking a clear stand except to say, with toothless confidence, that murderous cults are bad. But maybe fighting them makes you just as bad, and in the end none of this matters anyway! It's a story that goes nowhere and ends with a whimper, at least in the ending I saw. There seem to be two endings, although I doubt there's a way to salvage the narrative in the last minutes after so many blown opportunities.
Nothing about wanting to see right-wing Americans demonised, though. Maybe alt-right reactionaries simply can't read and make up their own review in their head?
Slasher on 29/3/2018 at 01:54
I have a pretty low bar for story quality in games, and as long as the story and storytelling aren't so awful they're distracting I can usually have fun. FC5's story sounds bland and aimless but not so much I wouldn't have fun.
The deal breaker for me is how they apparently haven't extended the active gamespace. I shouldn't be able to move through an empty area, then turn around and backtrack ten seconds later only to find a pack of dingos that wasn't there before, or a broke down car and some NPCs that weren't there before, or a full-fledged road block and half dozen baddies that definitely weren't there before. I could evade roadblocks in FC3 by just backtracking out of the active cell, then continuing on my original path once the game had dumped the previous area from memory. Poof, no more road block. Enemy patrols and NPC vehicles should not magically materialize, or dematerialize, just beyond visual range, or sometimes within visual range.
It's like the game has the object permanence understanding of a five month old puppy. Doggy treat goes in left hand! I have not opened my left hand! I have not dropped anything from my left hand! Which hand is the doggy treat in?? Oh good grief.
How they managed to fumble this again, in this here Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eighteen, is fantastic. It's not like they had to support previous-gen consoles.
henke on 29/3/2018 at 06:10
Yeah I don't disagree with the text of the Polygon review that calls it "a very enjoyable game with a horrible story", tho I do disagree with the score. I guess it all comes down to expectations. Honestly I don't know how anyone who's paid attention to open-world Ubigames in the past decade
could expect the narrative to be anything but drivel. At their best they manage to create some great atmosphere(Far Cry 2) or have likeable characters(Watch Dogs 2), but the last time the storytelling was a Ubisoft game's strong point was 15 years ago with Beyond Good & Evil. Not holding my breath waiting for them to return to that form, especially not with these huge games that have (
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6967966/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_wr#writers/) 7 different writers and 3 directors.
Played the first 3 hours of the game last night. Liberated the town to the south and got Nick his plane back. So far, so good! PC port seems solid, even has a FOV slider. The only bugs I've seen have thankfully not been the game-breaking kind but rather the hilarious AI kind, like when an enemy drove his car into a lake and had to swim out.
Judith on 29/3/2018 at 06:36
I always found it funny that since Assassin's Creed Ubisoft boasted that their studios are embracing employee diversity, and having people of many different beliefs, as none of that resulted in anything other than just okay games with meh stories, great architecture, and nothing meaningful to do. I haven't bought a Ubi game since AC 2, and it still seems like I haven't missed much.
(Damn, I forgot I bought SC: Conviction and Blacklist. Now that was a mistake made twice.)
Sulphur on 29/3/2018 at 06:47
Seems a fallacy if you're equating the workforce makeup (which is hundreds of people per game) with creative direction, or really anything at all. It's not like your ethnicity or religious beliefs are a guarantee that your work on an AI pathfinding subroutine is going to be different in any appreciable way -- or, in fact, a guarantee that you have an interesting story to tell or mechanics to prototype. Anyway, I did a quick skim of the creative directors at Ubisoft worldwide, and it's almost all men, the majority of which are white, which shouldn't be surprising.
Judith on 29/3/2018 at 07:07
Exactly, that's why I found those messages funny. On another note, I work with internal HR documents of misc. companies on quite regular basis, and there's a lot of that attitude there too, i.e. diversity is a must, we have to listen to every employee and treat them as equals, everyone is a potential source of innovation in a creative environment, across all structures of organization, etc. Ubisotf already proved none of that matters against a "yeah... nope." of the safe-playing higher-ups. Heh, even white males have problems with getting their ideas across. There's this GDC presentation about For Honor, and the guy who was pitching it seemed like really passionate, awesome guy, yet we've all seen how it ended up.
Sulphur on 29/3/2018 at 07:24
Well, that's important for brand and image management at any company at the end of the day. The outfit I have experience with has affirmative action for the differently abled, but while they do have different perspectives, it's not like the work changes in and of itself. I've never taken those proclamations at the beginning of a Ubisoft game as anything but a self-congratulatory note for inclusivity that made me go, 'aw, that's nice', and then proceeded to forget all about it.
Judith on 29/3/2018 at 07:52
Yup, thus the story controversy that was present in marketing content only. I agree with one of the comments below the Polygon review though: I also played tons of really good shooters already, open-world or not. There were and are plenty of good options out there, and I really need a good excuse to play yet another game of this genre. That could be the story, as hinted in first trailers, or maybe different gameplay or some other unique ideas. But, as any other AAA studio out there, Ubisoft relies too heavily on formulas taken from industries outside of games. All the stuff like AGILE or LEAN are actually automotive manufacturing templates, and that was indeed helpful for having more order during production phase and making assets. For gameplay, it seems more like they mimic processed food industry, where all it counts is a proper ratio of sugar, salt, and fat to keep customers "engaged". The thing is, I need food (and preferably not fast-food) to live, but I don't need formulaic 100-hour open-world games roughly twice a year. And I have an impression Ubisoft convinced themselves that this is what people need, based on their success with titles like AC or FC, that this is scalable in linear fashion, so let's open another studio, etc. I don't think so, but that bubble hasn't burst yet.
Thirith on 29/3/2018 at 08:52
I don't have any problems with Far Cry being a mile wide and an inch thick. Not every game has to be according to my tastes. If there's an audience, it's fair enough to cater to that audience, added to which Ubi tends to do strong work in some respects (I usually love being a tourist in an Ubisoft world, and it seems that Far Cry 5 would be great in that respect if it didn't keep throwing enemies and dangerous animals at you all the friggin' time). If you don't like hamburgers, don't eat 'em, but there's still an audience, a place and a time for a well made hamburger.
For me, the critique of Far Cry's storytelling is different in that it addresses what the game purports to be, and that's where it falls short. I don't think it's even a matter of bad stories so much as an utter lack of coherence and conviction. I don't think that Beyond Good & Evil had a fantastic story, but it knew what story it was telling and what it wanted to say, and it stuck to its guns. Far Cry does this thing where it goes, "How 'bout <issue X>, eh? Eh? Oh, look, shiny stuff!" That doesn't bother everyone, nor does it need to, but I find it tiring - more so than if it decided to be a first-person Saints Row rather than something that aspires to wacky satire but rarely goes beyond the couple of bullet points it brainstormed at the beginning.
