Checkpoint Breached: Far Cry 3: How to break a sandbox game

I already made a post about FarCry 3, as you'll recall, I was less than happy with the release build. Things have cleaned up since then, and I started my compltionist run, and I broke the game. Hard. Shit's really broken. So here's how this happens. Here's how to break any sanbox game.

1. Understand how the game works

This is important. No sense running around for hours if you're not doing anything. This is the major breaking point for FarCry. If you understated how the game works, it breaks wide open. I was done with hunting 5 hours in. Just done. I had everything I needed from the animals, no more hunting. Second, the radio towers, if you get all of them early, the guns you get break the game, and all you need to win all of FarCry is one weapon and one weapon only, the W700 rifle. And if you pay close attention to the AI system, supressors will make you life easy. Complete all the side mission early and reap the benefits.

This extends far beyond FarCry, which is what I'm trying to point out. An in-depth understanding of any game will cause almost any sandbox game to fail out right. Oblivion becomes strangely easy once you really understand the leveling system. Fallout turns you into a god amongst men once you understand which skills are actually worth taking.

2. Learn the AI

Programmers are getting better with the AI, but in the end, it's a subroutine in a program. Nothing in a video game is random, it's not possible, explains why I can not rationalize playing video poker or video slot machines. Sure things can seem random, but there's patterns. Once you know there's a 140 frame animation when a guard's buddy dies, you know where his head will be. Once you know that combat stances lock an enemy in a single direction, you can sneak behind them. Once you know the running animation, it's not hard to get that running head shot. Provided you're willing to take a rather fun element out of a game, analyzing AI patterns will break things in your favor.

3. Understand your limitations

Breaking a sandbox is going to be an amalgamation of a lot of things. It breaks down to be a zero-skill run, and I don't mean player skill. FarCry 3 tries really damn hard to stop you from doing what I've done. You can't unlock all the skills in the beginning, they're unlocked later on. You have to be comfortable with your skill and a basic skill set. It means playing the majority of the game as an under-powered character, that's the nature of the game. And it means that you're going to have to try real damn hard to make up for the lack of things the devs expect you to have.

Spent a lot of time staring down the sights of this piece of shit

4. Don't be afraid to fail

Doing a second run, especially a complitionist run means you're going to fuck up, a lot, a whole lot. I died so many god damn times. I'd say 95% of those was attempting to jump to get to the fuck damn relics which are incredibly well placed. Failing teaches you what doesn't work. Understanding this and not taking it as a slight against your skill is damn important. I've gotten to to the point where dying in a game is usually something comedic. "Turns out I can't hit the ground going 100+ mph and survive" "Don't pick a fight with a dude with a flamethrower" Need to have that Dwarf Fortress mentality of losing is fun.

5. Have a mastery of the game

God, how to word this without sounding pretentious as shit. You really have to be good at a game to break it. I've been playing PC games for 20+ years, and to say you haven't gained skill in something you've been doing that long is disingenuous. I'm good at PC games, and I'm especially good at shooters. To say anyone can pick up a sandbox game and wreck it is also disingenuous. People have been saying for a while that games are getting easier and I don't think this is true, I think the players are getting better. I'm not doing any of this on easy, I set games for the hardest difficultly right off the bad these days. I thought it was just me until I saw other people playing on the same difficulty, turns out it's not as easy as I think it is. I think I'm just jaded. This came out in my Dark Souls post. I seriously and genuinely did not have that much trouble with the game. So this is where gaming leaves me, taking out hordes of enemies that are supposed to be tough with a bullshit starting pistol with a suppressor on it. But fuck is it still fun.

According to uPlay, I spent 40 hours on FarCry 3, 40 goddamn hours. That's a work week. and it's 100% done. I've done everything because it was fun. The story is still fantastic, although this time around I found Sam to be my favorite character because he's absurdly funny. If you haven't gotten this game, you're missing out of what is one of my top 2 games of 2012, it's only competition being Dishonored, which is my next review because I just snagged the DLC on sale. It's spectacularly good in every aspect and breaking it's balance to pieces honestly just made it more fun.

And now a press release amount of screenshots.