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Tag: ubisoft montreal

  • Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft, 2012)

    Far Cry 3 (Ubisoft, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: Ubisoft Montreal (+Ubisoft Massive/Red Storm/Shanghai/Reflections) / Ubisoft
    Released: November 29th, 2012
    Completed: 16th August, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the story missions and did a fair smattering of everything else in the game.
    Trophies / Achievements: 635/1000

    A few years ago, and it must be several because apparently this came out in 2012, I saw the writer of this game give a talk at the Montreal International Game Summit. I was actually pretty impressed. He talked about something which I completely agree with, which is that if you’re going to make a narrative video game, you have to treat the player as an actor, consider their interactions as diegetic to the story, and invite them to play the role, not merely cast them in it.

    (I’m wildly paraphrasing, and probably even inserting my own ideas there. But you do that when you listen to someone you think you agree with.)

    Anyway, Far Cry 3 came out some time later, and it got a lot of coverage based on what the writer said the story was about, and I thought “I should probably play that, see if he just talks a mean pie, or whether he can actually bake one.” (I don’t think that’s a saying.)

    If I consider Far Cry 3’s story as a pie (let’s stick with this) our writer chum has essentially described a pie with a really interesting, even surprising flavour, and then given me something that looked ok from a distance, but as soon as I stuck a fork in it, a crow flew out smoking a huge blunt revealing absolutely nothing under the crust otherwise. Meanwhile, he’s going “you know, 4 and 20 blackbirds, man! Like… 420! GET IT?”

    What I’m saying is that Far Cry 3’s story, even within the context of a talk that I thought was quite good, makes the person who wrote it look like an actual idiot.

    But let’s stop picking at this poor guy who I don’t want to name because it’s mean even though you can google him in like, less time than it took me to write this sentence. Let’s talk about Far Cry 3.

    Far Cry 3, the game, is fucking great. Like, super super fun if you’re looking for an open-world shooty mcstealth-me-do. Ignore all of the story guffins and you’ve got a great environment that’s stuffed full of things to do. Things like hunting animals, which I avoided almost totally, but most enjoyably loads and loads of enemy outposts to capture. There’s little to beat sneaking up on an outpost, marking all of the enemies, planning and executing how you’re going to take it, and then sneaking up on every enemy, one by one, and silently murdering them.

    It makes me sounds like a psychopath, I know. But I haven’t played a modern stealth game in ages, and apparently Far Cry 3 nails it. By making it easy to see enemies by marking them, they get around that “not aware of my surroundings totally” FPS problem. Enemies react to deaths and hunt you down, but there’s so much foliage, and it works perfectly as a hiding spot, that as long as you keep moving, you can evade them. It feels right; like watching an 80s action film, the bit where they go into an enemy jungle camp and slit dudes’ throats. And as the game progresses, you get more skills (faster stealthy walking, new silent takedowns) that make you feel more and more powerful, so it’s always rewarding.

    It’s so good!

    Which makes it weird that most of the main game missions are awful mayhem with a million (sometimes spawning) baddies that you more or less have to grit your teeth through. Several missions, actually, I didn’t even get what direction to go in, I was so busy being shot to pieces. Ultimately, they were a slog, leading to me cheaping out on a lot of them (usually by going around the mission zone rather than through.)

    And most of them don’t really make sense why you’re doing them, anyway. Lets go back to that blunt-smoking crow, the story.

    Basically, Far Cry 3 says “I’m going to be really clever rumination on the nature of violence, ok. Like, all this violent shit you do in a video game, right? I mean what would happen if an actual normal guy had to do that stuff, right? I mean, what would happen then, right? I mean he’d totally go Colonel Kurtz, right? You’ve seen Apocalypse Now, right? Total classic.”

    It does this by setting up that you’re some trust fund twat (Jason Brody) on an expensive holiday with his awful, shitty, garbage friends and brothers, they land on an island, all get kidnapped and when your capable military-trained brother (not super important but he does make a point of mentioning it in the first 5 minutes) bites a bullet you are rescued, given the “Tatau” (tattoos) by a magic kindly black man (yeah!) and set loose to rescue your friends. Which across time morphs into getting revenge and/or trying to become the Ultimate Warrior (you know, that guy from WWF) on the island at the behest of a sexy native princess, Citra.

    To be honest, the story just made me angry, and not in a way where the guy who wrote it would be like “yes, it’s what I was trying to do” because if he was trying to make me angry by, for example, making his native leader a sexy barefoot woman who’s also wearing a crop-top and short skirt, well, fuck him. If he’s trying to in some ways critique the “white saviour” idea by arguing Jason Brody is a pawn, it doesn’t work, at all. Considering it barely comes up.

    You see, there’s something interesting about the story in Far Cry 3, and it made me reflect upon what (apparently) I think game publishers think the player expects from their open world games. Basically, in Far Cry 3, you have a variety of “mission givers.” At first it’s the magical black guy, but then it’s like, some junkie white guy, then it’s a really, really bad and gross Australian guy apparently meant to engender homosexual panic in the player (probably a worse character than Citra) then it’s… look, basically it goes on. You get passed between these thin caricatures who you never really get to know.

    And it’s apparently because, like, video games have a variety of mission givers? I mean, is this sort of thing literally because of Grand Theft Auto? Like, remember how in Grand Theft Auto 3, you’d do some missions for one gang, then you’d unlock the next island and do them for another gang? Like that?

    All I could think was… why am I not just repeatedly dealing with the same small cast of characters? Getting to know them as time goes by? I mean, if you want a perfect, perfect example of this, it’s that the game sets up Vaas, the crazy pirate guy with the big scar, as your antagonist. They even heavily hint that he’s some sort of “other side of the coin” for Jason Brody. He keeps trying to kill you in (embarrassingly laughable) stupid ways (like seriously, he captures you like four times, and only on the last is he like “oh wait, put a bullet in him.”) And he’s a real dick. However, you murder him in a dream sequence halfway through the game because (of course) you’re going to a new island and so they need another baddie for the next island.

    Why?

    Why are you suddenly battling Hoyt, a flavourless South African baddie? With the help of yet another new mission giver (Sam, who I quite liked, to be honest, in his pleasing Germaninity.)

    It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t make any sense, unless everyone has collectively agreed that in video games, you have to get a new mission giver in each new area, and if you unlock a big new bit of the game, well, you should have a different baddie.

    This is stupid and it should stop.

    Anyway! As a result, Far Cry 3 doesn’t take you anywhere. Your friends remain distant annoying wanks that you only save at the end because the sexy native princess is fucking mental and acts like an even bigger wank so you’re like “fuck you lady.” Jason Brody keeps sort of implying he’s going pure Colonel Kurtz (there’s some laughable end credits “I’m a monster now!” patter) but considering from the very beginning you’re literally shoving machetes in people’s guts and it’s not like you do much worse than that, it doesn’t ring true. And all the dream sequence stuff actually does the opposite of what it’s supposed to—it takes away the feeling of control over the key murders Jason commits, makes them unreal, so you don’t really feel them. In fact, I at points I was like “wait, is this going to turn out to be ‘it was all a dream…’???”

    It doesn’t, and in the end you’re only not a classic white saviour out of happenstance, but you do get to be a guy who did lots of awesome murders and then escaped scot free apart from the mental trauma, which as a player you don’t feel at all so it’s fine.

    Great shooting, though.

    Will I ever play it again? No, and if you want an interesting fact I could have played it longer, finishing off all the outposts and stuff, but with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and 4 out there, I was like “If I want to do more of that, I’ll do it in one of those.” I’ll probably play Blood Dragon to mix it up, so that should make it clear just how joyfully playable this was despite the awful, awful writing.

    Final Thought: Feel free to compare and contrast to my thoughts on Far Cry 2, a game which I think is utterly flawed (and definitely, totally, not fun) but which I think needed design changes to salvage the story. Here the game works so well that it slightly ruins the premise that this type of thing needs a narrative. To make it work at all you’d have to totally re-write it to make it a triangle between Vaas, Citra and the friends, making them all compelling, rather than confusing (Vaas), idiotic (Citra) and annoying (the friends).

    Oh, did you know it turns out Vaas and Citra are brother and sister? There’s fuck all point to it, but it comes up. it’s so stupid.

    Anyway, you can use fire arrows in Far Cry 3 while still rolling stealth and the fire is just as great as it was in Far Cry 2. 10/10 (for the fire.)

  • Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Ubisoft Montreal / Ubisoft
    Released: October 21st, 2008
    Completed: 15th December, 2014
    Completion: Finished the main story missions, saw the ending. I did some of the other missions, but not to any particular end.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    So! I’ve already written an entire article about Far Cry 2 in this space here, just before Christmas, actually, but I’ve deleted it now because I didn’t like it. The article that is. Far Cry 2?

    I also did not like it.

    As you can probably tell, what with this being the second article I’ve tried to write about Far Cry 2, it’s a difficult game to write about. There’s several angles, you know? And when I try and tie them all up together, well, they end up a half-formed mess. Like Far Cry 2!

    Let’s look at it this way. You know when you watch a movie, right, and then some character does something obviously, stupidly illogical, or there’s some gigantic idiotic plot hole? You know, when you’re watching, like, Prometheus (for some god forsaken reason) and you’re like “how is the guy with mapping robots lost” or “why is that guy touching and annoying a creature that’s so obviously dangerous?” You know, those things?

    Whenever I think of these things, I always sort of imagine my dream job, which is to be the person who, once everyone has decided to make a film, reads the script and says things like “how is she running around after just having abdominal surgery?” or stands on set and stops things to ask “why don’t they just run in a different direction from the giant spinning wheel of death?”

    If they doesn’t get a satisfactory answer, well, they stop production until they get one/changes are made.

    I was sort of thinking about this job while playing Far Cry 2, to be honest. Now, I’m well aware that game development is different from movie development. In game development, I feel like it’s harder to spot errors that are going to come up at the earliest stages, and frankly, when you have big ideas (and it’s clear Far Cry 2 is a big idea) you’re obviously going to fall short in some ways and have to patch things over as best you can and hope it doesn’t fall apart. (This obviously happens with big studio pictures too, but I’m already way off topic here.)

    Far Cry 2 is a game where you are driven into town by a civilian, past checkpoints, and then afterwards, you never see another civilian and every checkpoint is psychotic. Why?

    In Far Cry 2 you have malaria, but you can’t buy malaria pills or get them off the factions you have to help the underground resistance. Why?

    Your target, the Jackal, doesn’t only spare your life but save it repeatedly. Why?

    You never actually do anything that leads you to the Jackal, and no one ever promises you information on him outside of a loading screen tool-tip, despite that supposedly being your aim. Why?

    Both sides try to kill you at all times, even when you’re doing missions for them. Why?

    And so on (and I could go on.) Look, I can hear the arguments people would make against what I’m saying—in fact, I’ve heard them before, because people have long had arguments about this game over things like the checkpoints respawning, going on about how the game is systemically interesting anyway, etc.—but my point is here that these kind of things are never explained in a way that makes them make sense to the audience, and that kind of thing is important to me as a player, ok?

    Playing it, I got the sense—or maybe I wanted to believe—that Far Cry 2 started as a game with a dynamic war happening across the game’s map, where when you sided with one faction they’d treat you as an ally (i.e. you can pass through their checkpoints, etc.) and conquer map zones back and forth (likely pointlessly, as is in line with the game’s ‘point’ as far as I saw it.) A game where every battle was chaos, with crowds of civilians trying to avoid getting shot. A game where malaria was something more than an annoying timer until you had to do another short, pointless mission. Something a lot more open ended, actually. But they had to cut it all down because that’s hard to actually do. I want to believe—I genuinely want to believe—that the answer to every “why?” is just “because it’s what we ended up with, ok?”

    Or, maybe, as is often the case, it’s the fact that game development, like movie development, doesn’t have “why-men” but producers and CEOs and the like who say things like “no, we can’t have civilians being shot” or really any number of things that make this game less than what it feels like it could be.

    Far Cry 2 is one of those games where you feel like “the only way to win is to not play” but not in a clever way where you’re like “ahhh” but in the actual way where you’re better if you don’t bother.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: The fire looks amazing, though. Is there another game/series where fire looks this good? I should have played the entire thing as a pyromaniac instead of my usual decision to roll stealth. It’s so good!