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.
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| This guy |
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.
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| And it is very pretty |
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| Very pretty |
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| 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.
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| Kinda boring |
- 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.
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