EvaUnit02 on 24/2/2019 at 13:55
The Judge is such a shit weak character, he's always getting downed by enemies. Considering who he was in the last game the ludonarrative dissonance is ridiculous.
Quote Posted by Jeshibu
There's a few dudes out of place like that.
They're few and far in-between from my experience.
Tony_Tarantula on 25/2/2019 at 15:19
Quote Posted by N'Al
Numbers out of people's heads worked for me in Borderlands, but that's most likely because the game on the whole is deliberately cartoonish. Just seems out of place in something that's more grounded.
At this point, Rage 2 looks to me to be the more interesting Purple Apocalypse game.
The other key difference is that they're coming from different design spaces. Borderlands was designed from the ground to be Diablo except you're shooting enemies instead of pressing RPG hotkeys. Far Cry's design originates from open-level (NOT open world) shooters.
That said I still think that the first Far Cry was the best by a mile. The open level design did a much better job of presenting the player with problems and letting them solve that problem than did previous games and it had an AI that would do things like shooting the last location seen to make the play feel more dynamic.
EvaUnit02 on 27/2/2019 at 18:55
Finished it yesterday morning. Short but very fun game. I might go back in a few weeks time to play the rest of the expeditions and unlock more chieves.
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
That said I still think that the first Far Cry was the best by a mile. The open level design did a much better job of presenting the player with problems and letting them solve that problem than did previous games and it had an AI that would do things like shooting the last location seen to make the play feel more dynamic.
Far Cry 1 was utter garbage. The first approaching decent was Far Cry 2 and first truly great one was Far Cry 3.
Far Cry 1 & 2 had utterly broken stealth. FC1's AI had x-ray vision and bionic hitscan aiming. They could see you through several layers of shrubbery. It was artificially hard. Really poorly designed game.
Far Cry 2 was too flawed in its game design to call great. The story pretends that it has a faction system but they didn't actually code one. Everyone will try to kill you.
The game tries so hard to be immersive with its minimalist HUD and body awareness but crap game design decisions just take you out of the experience. I.e. rapid respawning outposts, weapon degrading after a few short minutes.
Crysis 1 and Warhead were the games that Far Cry 1 should've been.
froghawk on 27/2/2019 at 19:16
FC1 was lame enough that I made it all the way to the final boss and didn't even bother to finish it. Sure, the open levels had some good design, but the linear corridor bits were awful.
That said, calling FC3 'great' seems like a major stretch to me.
EvaUnit02 on 27/2/2019 at 22:39
Quote Posted by froghawk
That said, calling FC3 'great' seems like a major stretch to me.
They took all of the criticism received from Far Cry 2's questionable design decisions and finally delivered something truly compelling. Far Cry 3 is the epitome of concept iteration striking gold.
* WORKING stealth for first time in the series.
* The player's actions actually have an impact on the world. Eg by having enemy outposts that can be cleared permanently; the world is gradually depopulated of the enemy faction.
* Diversity in wildlife including predator animals vs. a just couple grazing herbivore species in FC2. Making them meaningful to the world by including Red Dead Redemption's hunting and crafting system.
All of the daydreams that game designers and journalists of the early 00s about having emergent gameplay moments? Those are highly regular occurences in Far Cry 3+.
EvaUnit02 on 28/2/2019 at 07:48
Quote Posted by icemann
An obvious nod to AC Odyssey there.
It's the starting region in AC Origins.
Thirith on 28/2/2019 at 08:01
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
It's a RPG. There's only so much that they make things skill-based and/or not governed by numbers to the point where it stops being a RPG.
It's an action RPG. As such, it can be as skills-based as it wants to be. The way it chooses to go for bullet/arrow/stab sponges as the main way of upping the challenge is lazy design IMO in a game that is still largely about action gameplay. (The
Souls games are no less action RPGs for offering a much more interesting range of enemy behaviours than Ubisoft's range of bullet sponge-'em-ups.)
catbarf on 28/2/2019 at 20:54
Quote Posted by EvaUnit02
They took all of the criticism received from Far Cry 2's questionable design decisions and finally delivered something truly compelling. Far Cry 3 is the epitome of concept iteration bearing striking gold.
* WORKING stealth for first time in the series.
* The player's actions actually have an impact on the world. Eg by having enemy outposts that can be cleared permanently; the world is gradually depopulated of the enemy faction.
* Diversity in wildlife including predator animals vs. a just couple grazing herbivore species in FC2. Making them meaningful to the world by including Red Dead Redemption's hunting and crafting system.
All of the daydreams that game designers and journalists of the early 00s about having emergent gameplay moments? Those are highly regular occurences in Far Cry 3+.
I feel like FC3's improvements on FC2's systems re: emergent gameplay are undercut by the overt artificiality of them. The game bombards you with tooltips, X-ray vision highlights, and hints about how you can use the systems they've put in to accomplish your goals.
FC2 is a frustrating game in its vanilla form, but with a mod or two becomes much better. I enjoyed Far Cry 3, but it felt like a much more constrained experience. I don't think I had any emergent gameplay moments on the same level as, say, misfiring an RPG in FC2, having it fall short and explode (setting the grass on fire), and fighting off mercs with my assault rifle as the fire spread and eventually consumed the hut I was trying to shoot with the RPG in the first place.
Instead, there just happens to be a tiger in a cage in the middle of the base I'm trying to take over. The game helpfully points out that I can shoot the lock, which I do, and then watch the tiger take out the encampment. At one point I worry that I might have been spotted- but I haven't, because there's a big inflating bar telling me exactly what detection level the mercs are at. It's not that it wasn't fun, it just felt more like a Skinner box and less like a simulation of an actual world.
It seems Ubisoft's gone all-in with the 'theme park' approach to open-world design, and I think their games lack that sometimes janky spark of real unpredictability that games like FC2 and STALKER have.
henke on 15/3/2020 at 19:06
After wrapping up The Outer Worlds I picked this up, since it's cheap. Aaaaaand yeah, the leveling up stuff is as annoying as many of us dreaded early in this thread. I felt like they ruined the Assassins Creed games when they introduced that shit, and the same is true for Far Cry now. In the starting areas your bullets will cut through enemies like a hot knife through butter, but drive over to the other end of the map and identical looking enemies are now unstoppable bulletsponges, bearing down on you like friggin terminators. Besides that, Ubi games usually have better characters than stories, but in this case neither are much to write home about.
On the plus side, I am enjoying the environment. I was afraid that basing it so heavily on FC5's map would make it feel cheap, but instead it's resulted in kinda a unique experience, where you get to visit a post-apocalyptic setting having previously been in the pre-apocalyptic version of it. I'm constantly stumbling into places, going "oh yeeeeeah, this place! wow!".
But yeah, naah, I don't think I'll play much further.
Jeshibu on 17/3/2020 at 17:34
Yeah. I didn't actually mind it much in AC: Origins, but I'm playing through Odyssey now and the leveling system is just a pain in the ass because it's only an exploration gate. In Origins, you could at least wreck the enemies you were struggling to put a dent in a few levels ago. Now they are all at most 2 levels beneath you. They also took out the universality of fire and poison damage, instead having to spec your gear loadout around dealing that type of damage for it to be anywhere near viable, even with fuel jars (!) standing around everywhere.
It's still a fun game but I don't understand these design decisions.
