Far Cry 3: The Definition of Insanity

I'm actually doing a post about a game that came out less than 6 months ago!  Get excite!

Far Cry 3, it's tough to say anything about this game that hasn't already been said.  I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much everything it had to offer.  The combat flowed nicely, the characters were great, pacing was fantastic, scenery was amazing, storyline was amazing and it had the best villain of pretty much any game ever and before I tear Ubisoft a new asshole over the insane instability of the game and the worst experience I've ever had trying to get a game to work in my extensive gaming carreer, I'm going to talk about what Far Cry did right, once I finally got it working.

Villain characterization is kind of a new trick for AAA games.  They find it's best to say, "Here's the bad guy, this is why you don't like him, go kill him."  And for the most part, that works.  The game will then continue to build upon why you don't like this guy, why he needs to be stopped and they stay pretty much the same throughout the game, this would be your Bioshock (I know, I know things change but the vast majority is the same guy), Final Fantasy for the most part, things like that.  They also like to not define a bad guy at all, and focus instead on an opposing force, games like Skyrim, Gears of War, Call of Duty, that type of thing.  "These are your enemy, go get rid of them."

Neither of these paradigms really worked at, or even needed the villian or opposing force to be characterized at all.  They're bad, you're good, good triumphs over evil game ends.  But none of these games really ends up being remembered for they're greatness in this area.  Call of Duty is famous for it's multiplayer, Gears for it's over the top characters and violence, other games are famous for reasons other than their story.  But any recent game that characterizes the villain, pretty much at all, goes down as one of the greats, it's that important to the game.

Don't believe me?  Here's a couple of famous games that got there based quite a bit on how well the villain was written in.  Portal, Bioshock, Amnesia, Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid (all of them), Silent Hill, Knights of the Old Republic, Resident Evil 4, System Shock 2, Final Fantasy 6, God of War, Heavy Rain, Dishonored, Spec Ops: The Line.

Now in some of these you actually play as the villain, I won't list them out for those of you who haven't played some of the games on the list, but that is characterization.  If you've played any of these games, you should instantly know who the main baddie is if it's not yourself.  And this is just of the games that I, personally, have played too.  There are many other memorable ones that didn't make the list because I'm broke.  Apparently Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is very well written but I lack $50 and/or 3 friends who would play it with me.  It's tough having adult friends sometimes.

But this was just a giant off shoot to get to one of the best written villains in modern memory, Vaas Montenegro.

This guy

 Far Cry 3 takes an interesting approach to introducing the protagonist and the villain, that is in the opening cinematic.  And in the beginning, I kind of hated the main character.  He was some douchey trust fund kid who thinks he owns the world.  Then Vaas shows up, charasmatic, funny and out of his fucking mind.  There's instantly a line drawn between the worlds of Douchey McDoucherson, a member of the jet-set and comfortable American lifestyle and psycho war lord from the hard drug super-highway.  And you kind of feel like if Vaas was a real person, you'd want him to like you for more than it would stop him from chopping you into pieces with a machete.

He's unpredictable, unhinged, and not held back in the ways we normally see villains in games.  Sure other villains do worse things over the course of games, but they lack the sincerity in their actions the way Vaas does.  Everything he does is completely intentional and completely insane, it's fantastic.  It makes the game much more engaging and you never stop to think, "Why am I shooting this guy again?"  And they way his development parallels the protagonist, it starts to make you understand his motives as the twin descents into animalistic madness start to match up more and more.  AAA writers take note, I want more Vaas characters and less Nazis, seriously, we won WWII 68 years ago, move on.

Moving on to the rest of the game, there's not a whole lot to tell that other reviewers haven't already said.  The level system works well and I like seeing the tattoo grow, that was a cool addition.  The guns work fine, although I found that putting a silencer and a giant scope on the bolt action rifle pretty much broke the game.  I do feel like the island is far too large for how hard it is to get around outside of fast travel.  The cars kind of suck but they do in all Crytek games so I wasn't too mad.

I rather liked the story telling mechanics in the flashbacks and dream sequences.  It added some variety to the game so it wasn't all jungle running and gunning and it was nice to see some proper bold colors in a shooter.  

 

And it is very pretty

Very pretty

Pretty...

But here's the interesting part of the post, the part that made me want to punch small children, the part that damn near ruined the entire game forcing me to send it to the worst of the worst games I've ever "played", the save system.

The more obvervant reader may have noticed that all the screenshots I posted, and that was all I took, save this one.

Kinda boring

Are all from the first two-ish hours of the game.  Well there's a reason for that, Far Cry 3 is about as stable as a a toddler with a third of a leg missing learning to walk on an ice rink after being spun around a merry-go-round powered by a jet engine for 40 minutes.  Here's the short list of things that crashed Far Cry 3 when I first installed it.

• Using the uPlay overlay
• Using the Steam overlay
• Switching graphics settings
• Changing mouse sensitivities
• Random autosave points
• NPC dialouge
• Bringing up the weapon buying menu
• Looting an enemy

Most of these were fixed by switching from the dx11 exe to the dx9, a minor annoyance but if it lets me play the game, whatever.  But there was another problem, the game didn't seem to be saving.  At first I just figured that the crashes were corrupting the save files, it seemed plausible at the time since I checked the save folder and saw that there were saves, I just figured they were corrupt.  They weren't

What happened next made me question if I was insane, which is a nice parallel to draw because this is Far Cry 3.

I tried for 8 hours of the course of two days to get saves to work.  I would try a fix, play the game to the first save point, which I thought was after you escaped the camp in the beginning, so I played that section over and over and over and over and over and over and over expecting the game to save, it didn't.  Expecting something to change.

I was furious, I bought this fucking game at full price because I wanted to, you know, play the fucking game and it's bricked.  Day 1 bricked.  I've been fairly upset about shotty release builds before, but this is on a whole other level.  This breaks the game, I can't save, I can't play it because it's all for nothing.  But I found a fix and it made me realize why pirates exist.

The fix, for the game I legally own, was to crack the game, that I owned and payed for.  I had to get a file from people who could get sued for what they've done to make a product I purchased work.  The pirated, ripped open, modified, recompiled .exe from a random person on the internet was far better than the one released by the game devs.  But there was a problem, because of the crack, online features were disabled and I couldn't run anything with it or it would not save.  That means I couldn't run it in steam, couldn't run EVGA precision and it's on-screen overlay and even Fraps would make it not save.  So that's why I have 5 screenshots, they're from a 3 hour long play session that didn't save, I had to start completely over.

Ubisoft will have to release the most spectacular game ever made for me to consider purchasing from them ever again.  Instead, if I want to play an Ubisoft game and have it work I will pirate it.  This is why piracy is prevalent and this is why I'm glad it's prevalent.  Ubisoft support offered me, "This is a known issue, it is in the process of being fixed." The Pirate Bay offered me, "Here, just download this file, replace these files in this folder and boom, game works."  Go fuck yourself Ubisoft.

Skyrim: Breaking games and breaking down

Christ it's been a long time since my last post.  I got a little caught up with work and games I bought over the lovely Winter Steam Sale but I'm revisiting a new classic, Skyrim.

It's been a while since I touched Skyrim, admittedly, the first play through was on a pirated copy.  I have since changed my ways and supported my all time favorite game dev, that's Bethesda by the by.  Please don't crucify me internet, we've all been broke when an amazing game launched, being a student puts you in a desperate situation.  However, playing the pirated version of Skyrim does allow me to make some interesting observations, but more on that later.

Skyrim, where the hell do you start with a game this big?  Well this time around, I started at the back.  During my Oblivion days, I had a massive issue of not following the main quest line.  I just could not be bothered to do any of the boring normal stuff because the rest of the game was way more fun.  It got to the point to where I knew exactly who to kill and when to get an invite from the Dark Brotherhood and the game started there.  I had the same problem with Skyrim.

Sandbox games are great, provided they're well designed.  If the world is boring, I'm going to get bored.  Skyrim is no exception, but it does do almost everything right.

Pretty much the last of the main quest line I saw

Now for those of you who were not around, or like me overwhelmed, when Morrowind came out, it's tough to describe the level of depth of that game.  But this is where Skyrim almost got it's start.

Here's the run down of how the last three Elder Scrolls games played out.

Morrowind: This game hates you, pick the wrong class, pick the wrong weapons and leveling up will make you weaker, the game carries on and attempts to murder you at every turn and you can brick your whole game by leveling incorrectly.  The level of customization is insane, everything about the game is unreal, the armor system, the skill system, the world, the lack of fast travel, the game still hates you.

Oblivion: Combat got a huge upgrade (in my opinion), the game is vastly more accessible but you can still get screwed by the leveling system if you're not careful.  Still remains one of my best and often repeated gaming experiences.

Skyrim: Fallout leveling system for the most part, you can kind of get messed up if you try to be a Jack of All Trades but it's more forgiving, the game never becomes impossible as far as I can tell, more focus is spent on making the world interesting.

Skyrim sits nicely in it's niche, the game is playable by non-hyper RPG fans and doesn't require a note sheet to handle the leveling system (looking at you morrowind) but as a result, the experience is slightly dumbed down but it's kind of a good thing, the game is accessible.  And, it's much prettier than the previous incarnations

Didn't realize there was two moons

Skyrim allowed me to be who I wanted to be.  As I mentioned previously (and at nausea) I like hard games.  So I generally like stealth games.  Agent 47 and I have a great relationship.  So I played a sneaky thief assassin as I have played most other Elder Scroll games and the game more than obliged me.  My guilds were still there, the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild welcomed me like an old friend and the subtle off shoots to the previous games drew me in instantly.  I mourned the run down state of my previously glorious Dark Brotherhood and felt for the downtrodden thieves ravaged by a spell of bad luck.  Despite my ignoring the main questline, it still showed up in my guilds.  They were feeling the affects of the massive civil war going on, the collapse of the empire and it made the experience all the more richer.

I spent 30 hours ignoring the main quest line, and I absolutely love that they let me do that.  "Go off an explore, you're still the dragon born, it will be here when you get back."

But you've all played this game, you know how great it is.  So here comes the shit you probably didn't see.

As I mentioned previously, I played first on a pirated version.  Those not familiar with piracy, you have to deal with some issues when you pirate a game, it's not all it's cracked up to be.  Glitches are everywhere, the game can crash for no reason, there's issues.  When I first played through, the main quest was glitched to high fucking hell.  I had to open the console so many times I lost count.  Safe to say it ruined the main story it was so bad.  But I put up with it, it's free right?  But I own it now and now I'm pissed.

Now, credit where credit is due, Skyrim is massive.  There is no way in hell you can test out absolutely everything in the game, it's not feasible.  I understand that.  I've beta tested more games than I can count and that's why they do that, to find these odd corner bugs that exist in certain situations that may have been missed in QA.

I played at version 1.1, when I played the game this time around, it was 1.8.who the hell cares.  The main quest is still glitched to high fucking hell and it pissed me off.

I paid for this game, and all the DLC and the game is still messed up and it's worse this time around.  Steam achievements are kind of my weakness, well achievements in general.  There's something nice about being rewarded in a completely meaningless way for arbitrary things I did in the game.  But here arises my main problem with a glitched game.  Being a PC gamer, we have many more options other than "Reload the save and pray" sort of thing you have from a console version, we have the dev console.  The only problem is using the dev console in Skyrim can brick your achievements.

I had to break out console commands 14 times during the main campaign, I know, I counted.  Here's the process for using the console and maintaining achievements for Skyrim.  Save, use console commands to fix the horribly glitched main quest line, save in a different slot, reload the latter save and hope achievements work, if they don't revert to older save and try to figure it all out.

I paid for this shit to work and it doesn't.  Going through the main quest was like pulling teeth, I just quit playing a couple of times, that's how much it pissed me off.  I would like to note that none of the secondary questlines, and I know, I did all of them, had any glitches at all.  The main quest line should be the main focus for QA so I don't have to deal with this sort of shit.  If it was a beta, or a pirated copy, I would understand, but this is nearly unforgivable.  It's the main quest for fuck's sake.

But I soldiered on and you should too, Skyrim was probably my favorite game of 2011 for many good reasons, but if the retail is no better than the pirated version why should I bother to pay for it?

Here's some more screen shots because I took a bunch and need to use them.

Very pretty

Building houses is actually really fun

I look fucking scary

The portal

Badass horse