Far Cry 2’s slow burn
Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and offers little guidance.
Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.
On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.
Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.
But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.
For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.
Far Cry 2 has been an exception. What at first seemed like unfortunate sparseness now feels to me like a canvas for emergent gameplay (those well-worn buzzwords). There’s your recurring sickness; the unreliability of found weaponry; the combination of almost uniformly dry environments, video game-y inflammable objects, and fire that propagates convincingly.
The game’s persistent component parts feel designed to convey a convincingly (but not flashily) coherent world, but even more importantly to increase the chances of memorable things happening.
In addition to progressing the game’s main quest line, you can help out your buddies with their own tangential objectives, sabotage arms dealers’ competition to open up new weapon options, or perform hit jobs for that old game chestnut, the deep mysterious unnamed voice.
I find myself constantly telling people stories about my own Far Cry 2 experience. Sometimes they involve the game’s rather basic plot, and sometimes they don’t. This is not something I usually find myself doing.
There was the time, very early in my playthrough, when I got out of my 80s-era hatchback to track down a diamond in the jungle using the game’s No Country For Old Men-esque homing beacon, forgot where I parked the car, passed out from malaria trying to find it, and was safely awoken by the buddy character I had recently rescued.
Or the time I was patiently scouting out an enemy encampment with my sniper rifle scope and startled by nearby sudden movement, reflexively snapping my crosshairs over to the source — and finding my sights trained on a young gazelle that had wandered out from some overgrowth.
Or the time I had just blown up an entire base in a domino-like chain reaction, with a single well-placed rocket; turning to leave, I found myself blinded by the reflection of the high noon sun on bright white sand dunes — and out of the shimmering brilliance trotted a pair of zebras.
These events, just a few examples of the many Far Cry 2 moments I take pleasure in relating, are not even particularly remarkable in and of themselves. Part of the game’s success is its sense of restraint — another area that works against it in the short term, but for it if you decide to take advantage of what it has to offer.
Unlike its predecessor (with which it shares only the most tangential thematic bonds of environmental openness and…shooting), there are no supernatural or science fiction elements to Far Cry 2.
Certainly, the player can soak up more bullets than the enemies, and the AI is not going to win any strategic matchups, but when it comes to the setting and the feel, few exaggerated liberties are taken — a surprisingly (and, to me, unfortunately) uncommon approach in video games.
Africa is not rendered in a particularly stylized way, and the events that take place are often only as over the top as the player makes them (and that potential is there, if you want it).
This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go. One doesn’t really appreciate Far Cry 2’s attention to detail in that regard until the time has been invested to generate enough of the unique moments that result.
Far Cry 2, headed up by creative director Clint Hocking (a vocal proponent of exploration and player-driven experiences in games), is not for everybody. It has its flaws — the frequency at which enemies respawn, for example, is frequently and justifiably called out.
Some of its impressive features, like its partially self-constructing narrative, are handled quietly enough that most players may not even notice them at work. And, in the end, some may find its fundamental gameplay building blocks too repetitive to hold interest to completion.
But Far Cry 2 does succeed where many games do not, despite frequent claims by marketers — and very few shooters even attempt to go there at all. On the opposite side of the design spectrum as the Half-Lifes and Call of Dutys (impressive games in their own right), Far Cry 2 doesn’t so much attempt to define a memorable experience and effectively communicate it to the player as it does to define a set of rules and an environment in which memorable experiences are likely to happen, letting the player loose in that world.
Tags: clint hocking, console gaming, far cry 2, fire, patrick redding, pc gaming, ubisoft montreal
October 30th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
You might be interested in this really neat essay by film prof. David Bordwell on narratives (and specifically how they’re constructed in the two different presidential candidates’ memoirs). I don’t have a direct HAY THIS IS FAR CRY 2 linkage or anything, but some part of it might catch your eye.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=2962
I especially love the part where he asks the Big Questions of narratives:
*What is a story? How does it differ from other things, such as a description or an abstract image? Are jokes narratives? Are dreams? Are riddles? Is the concept so broad that anything can be treated as a story?
*Why do stories engage us? What do we need to know, or do, to understand a story? What powers enable us to create stories? Are story-making and story comprehension distinctively human activities?
*Do stories rendered in language differ from those rendered in other media? Is the ability to make or follow stories dependent on our knowing language, even if the story is presented without words (as, say, a silent film)?
*How do narratives imply or suggest or symbolize broader meanings than the bare events they recount? What enables a narrative to stand for more than it seems to say?
*What patterns of narrative construction do we find in different traditions, periods, times, and places? How might they bear the traces of social and political views? How might they express varying conceptions of the world?
October 31st, 2008 at 8:25 am
Far Cry 2 is a DRM infested piece of shit. I don’t care how well the game actually plays, if it’s got the best story ever told and graphics that are more real than reality itself. The DRM makes it garbage and you should be ashamed for supporting a system that makes the customers suffer more than the pirates.
November 1st, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Except that this post wasn’t supporting the DRM, it was supporting the game itself.
November 1st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
You’ve discussed this before but the slow burn effect at least to me seems to have a lot to do with immersion. The game initially has this very standard shooter feel. Most people just seem incapable or unwilling to immediately identify with the stories protagonist. That only odd because in a real sense it is you the player. Very much like suspending your disbelief in a film you need to be able to clear that hurdle to recognize the feeling not of remote controlling some poor merc sap in Africa but of being the bastard. Everything is done as though it’s you you never go to the third person and nowhere in the game is the fourth wall ever really broken. Personally it feeds my gaming style well mainly because I know I’m the kind of jackass who winces when my character is hit in a game it is particularly weird when I play fighters but whatever. My point is it takes most of us a little while to get our minds in the right place. The game seems to just drop us into the middle of it but the feel i got was one of just waking up to discover this is me and I have a job to do. On the game play side there are a lot of unnecessary things. In particular i found the bit with malaria to be a huge annoyance more than anything. The fact that
November 1st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
gah hit submit early but yea thats about it
November 10th, 2008 at 10:19 am
If you have the time, and have not done so already, check out STALKER. I think it is more of a predecessor for Far Cry 2 than its own namesake was. Of course it is a less polished game, but it has those elements of personal story in a thoroughyly hostile world.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:16 am
All of the things you mentioned are what makes Far Cry 2 such an excellent title. It’s when you wipe out a camp, go just over the hill to an objective and wander back over and down that same hill towards that same camp that the game becomes a chore. The enemies respawn way too soon and it makes the incessant driving around very tedious. You find yourself destroying the same camp over and over and over again, even if you never really leave the immediate area. As soon as that camp goes out of sight, the bad guys come back.
I like that there is respawning of the baddies, it would seem odd and boring if you cleared a camp and it stayed empty. But respawning the same amount of bad guys, with the same weapons, in the same general spots just become far too tedious.
That and the odd meth-head dialog. I really don’t understand why they thought it would be okay if they cut out the spacing between sentences. It sounds weird, annoying, and breaks the immersion that the game’s wonderful environment gives you.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:18 am
The world just feels unfinished, to me. It’s as if they spent 2 years making a map, models and textures, then said “oh shit, you’re supposed to be able to *interact* with all of this?” So they proceeded to throw in some mission templates and call it a day.
The world isn’t ALIVE. Nothing you do really affects anything else. If I blast my way through the cease-fire area, why doesn’t anyone recognize me next time around? Why is the SAME guy guarding the APR or UFLL door? Completing missions for one faction or another doesn’t affect your environment in any way; The checkpoints still all shoot at you, and everyone on the map tries to kill you. To me, the whole “deniable asset” thing is just a way around having to code anything meaningful as a result of your actions. It’s easier to just have every NPC out for your blood than to have an organic-feeling group of people inhabiting the game.
Frankly, the game just doesn’t feel finished. There’s a whole lot of interaction that could(should!) be present, but it just isn’t. In a game like half-life 2 you don’t need to worry about having a living world because the story is the life of the game. The story of half-life(or other games) drives the player and the experience forward, introduces new elements etc. What is there to accomplish that in far-cry, exactly? Sure, I can complete missions, but to what end? The world is static, and you just can’t have a static world *and* a free-roaming nature unless you want to make a MMORPG.
What’s more, to suggest that the game isn’t incredibly repetitive is to have not played it. The first time my buddy rescued me from a firefight in which I had gone down, it was pretty neat. What about the 15th time? It’s useful, but I don’t find it particularly memorable. The missions are all identical copies of one-another, ocurring at different geographical locations on the maps. Heck, the missions for the weapons dealers don’t even require you to complete them in a certain amount of time. Seems odd that the truck-driver gets lost and drives in circles forever and ever, no?
There’s two approaches to a game like this; Make a story, or make a world in which a story might take place. If you opt for the latter you’d better be sure that your world *works*. It can’t just be there, it has to be functional in some way.
January 3rd, 2009 at 5:59 pm
I at least half-agree with everything Matt said, but I still love the game. For me, the general absence of a “motivation system” (to complete the main missions) seemed strange at first, but I learned to appreciate it by the time I entered the southern district and had most of the weapons unlocked. I realized something right around then: for the most part, I could take a mission when I felt like it, abandon a mission whenever I wanted, load up on explodey-things and rush a guard post … whatever … and no matter what, the game world (and the core game play) was still there. Apart from the malaria silliness, the game never nagged me to do anything, and I decided that was awesome.
(tangent)FC2 sort of ruined the single player side of Call of Duty: World at War for me. After having so much freedom, one heavily scripted sequence after another was just stifling. WaW isn’t a great game on its own merits in the first place, but the strengths of FC2 made me less inclined to forgive the weaknesses of WaW.(/tangent)
FC2 could have had a more developed plot, and less of that “everyone will try to kill you once you cross this magic line” mechanic, and it would have been a better game. But there is a lot to like if you’re willing to make your own fun, instead of waiting for the game to force you to have fun.
March 3rd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
“Africa is not rendered in a particularly stylized way, and the events that take place are often only as over the top as the player makes them (and that potential is there, if you want it).
“This is video game Africa to be sure, but closer to real Africa than most video games would bother to go.”
I’ve really been wondering about this; apart from visual fidelity and the wildlife, I’m not sure what people mean. It hardly makes sense to run around asking people where they’ve been in Africa and what about it was correctly reproduced by Far Cry 2, but I do really feel a kind of fatigue and horror that Africa is treated so credulously as every Amercian’s on-demand, playground for plausible violence and for exploring philosophies on violence, as though there were nothing else in an entire continent, no everyday life, just potential victims waiting for their genocide to arrive, one nation or town as good as any other.
April 16th, 2009 at 1:07 am
I feel kind of repetitive saying this but I can almost agree with every reply to this game. I’ve had plenty of memorable moments in this game. What with being able scout locations, snipe, use stealth tactics, running and gunning, or just sitting back and watching all my enemies burn alive. But its attractiveness came at me in waves. At first, I thought the whole thing sucked. I had to drive ungodly long distances and get attacked by at least 3 to 4 random jeeps with gunners, and no explanation as to why or who they were affiliated with, (It seems like everyone outside of Pala is just a bunch of really trigger-happy retards.) only to find myself performing menial tasks with very little explanation as to how it affects the world. I mean if your going to have a sandbox style game and story that you can ’supposedly’ manipulate than stuff should change as a result of how your character progresses. For example, If I work for the UFLL then for gods sake put me in your army! I dont want UFLL soldiers down my throat every 10 seconds. In truth I was expecting to be ‘recruited’ by a faction and then decide whether or not I should leak information to the other side for cash. Or if I destroy a APR camp for the UFLL than the UFLL would occupy it, at least until the APR attacked again. Bottom line is if the character is supposed to be turning the tides of this war, then the war itself should be more lifelike and be affected by the efforts I’ve put into it.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
I have to say this is a really interesting article, and this kind of thing went through my mind many times when playing through the game. There were moments that seemed memorable (buddy waking you up, seeing zebras), but on closer inspection happen far too rarely (in the case of the zebras) or far too often (90% of the time, if you die on a buddy mission the buddy will wake you up) to be memorable after the first time. I persevered with the game, having mild fun, mainly with the promise in mind that this was procedural content and that the story was affected by how you play.
However, after talking to my friend about the plot hook that happens when you find the 2nd map, it seems that it’s exactly the same for every person. The only damn bit of procedural content plot-wise is you getting a bit of text on character profiles saying ‘missing’ or ‘dead’ when something happens to them. And I’m sure something as simple as that has been happening for years.
Truth be told, I got to the second map and did the first mission, which was relatively fun and different (the one where you are defending the boat) - then saw all the symbols depicting exactly the same locations as in the previous map and realised I would effectively be doing exactly the same thing for another 12 hours in slightly different dry, African locations. Since then, I haven’t bothered playing single player.
September 14th, 2009 at 10:30 am
The way they incorporate the map into gameplay is so good, it makes games that don’t have such a feature (or at least a pop-up semi-opaque map) really annoying. I’m playing Wolfenstein right now and pressing tab to wait for the map to load up and interrupt the action feels terrible.
I also love, and people have talked about this for days, the way they use your hands/arms in the game, it adds a hell of a lot of immersion to the game in an elegant and sometimes disturbing way (see: pulling rebar out of your leg)
Unfortunately I have to run the game on low graphics settings, so I’m missing out on the environmental atmosphere that also seems to be one of the game’s strong points. I played about 10 hours like this and then set it aside, waiting for a new graphics card.