Far Cry 3

Swear much!

Same style island setting is a bit boring.

Think it looks good. The setting is way better than the last one.

It actually looks like a sequel to Far Cry this time.

Looks fantastic, character animation & dialogue seems very promising.

I will however fight anyone who bad mouths Far Cry 2. You have been warned.

I will however fight anyone who bad mouths Far Cry 2. You have been warned.

I hated it, come fight me if you like beating on cripples.

I'm liking the look of this though, loved the first game, and the console versions of it, not the Wii one mind, I had the good sense to avoid that. If this is more of the same then I'm up for it.

I'll fight you instead. I'm disabled so it's fair.

I think between this, Battlefield 3 and Bioshock Infinite, its time for a PC upgrade.

And Gaggle, FC2 was promising, but the mission structure and faction war stuff was so janked it sorta hampered the experience.

I'll fight you instead. I'm disabled so it's fair.

Cool., I'll get some blade attachments for my wheels.

And Gaggle, FC2 was promising, but the mission structure and faction war stuff was so janked it sorta hampered the experience.

FC2 was a superb technical achievement which delivered intensely rich and detailed environments environments, creating an experience that still stands among the best today. It delivered everything it promised and then some.

Now take off your shirt because this is between you, me and the mud in the street.

I don't think it was that rich and detailed, rather, it just rode on the fact that its easy to make an undeveloped jungle environment look varied, whereas to me it looked more like a muddle of repeating textures and tree models, with messed up enemy AI that somehow had hawk vision without even facing your direction. I guess thats a Far Cry tradition, but still, in 2008 it can fuck off. It also made the actual gameplay devolve into a binary Snipe from far away, or go in close for all out full automatic warfare.

Not to mention the overwhelming tedium of having to return to the faction bases to turn in your quests, as well as the mind numbing journeys to and from locations, that were only made worse by your jeep's tendancy to start smoking and subsequently explode after so much as a gentle brush with a tree. On top of that, there really was no political choice you could make, since you had to complete missions from both factions in order to progress, essentially making the theme of choice or player agency completely moot. It was over-long, the shooting was unrefined, the most interesting mechanic - that of fire - was made useless by the fucking awful enemy AI and all in all, yeah, it was an interesting place to visit, for a couple of hours, but it was not somewhere you would want to stay.

I couldn't disagree more, particularly on the point of it being "underdeveloped" - it's dozens of miles of naturally evolving jungle, desert and lake terrain dynamically lit with a full day-night cycle and weather. You do not pull that kind of stuff out of a middleware program. The AI was competent and it's application onto a playfield of such scope of variety impressive in it's own application. The fire and other damage effects on the environment were certainly impressive but that wasn't even the joy of it. The shooting isn't the absurd comic book gunplay of CoD and it's a better experience for it, making firefights terse and tense experiences with a genuine sense danger that most other shooters miss entirely. This wasn't a game to hold your hand and and coddle you and I loved it for it. You want fast travel? Grab a rusty pistol and jack your own jeep.

I will take your point of the limited difference the player was able to make on the story but I always read it as a means of exploring the narrative through each faction, catching some fraction of a conversation as you walked in the door embellishing the dirty character of the world. This by itself places FC2 near a rare altitude that many of the upcoming games dare not even dream about - see MW3 still stuck it's claustrophobic corridors as it hand holds you from one carefully timed explosion to the next.

FC2 was and still is a breath of fresh air in a world that was and still is chock full of shooters obsessed with gun metal and brown and suffering from a desperate agoraphobia, stubbornly refusing to leave the confines of their corridors and strictly scripted sequences to which the player is little more then a passenger. FC3 already looks ready to pick up the baton, lush open jungles and what promises to be a strengthened narrative structure and I await it fervently. That so few other games dare be even half as ambitious as the Far Cry series is the only disappointment.

That's cool, your interpretation is completely valid, and I guess thats the thing with videogames even more so than other media; one persons experience can differ wildly from anothers, especially in a game that tries to offer something in the vein of non-linearity and a large open world. I guess some of the things that you really appreciated about it were the same things that I thought could have been more refined.