“a fine idea, but in practice it can mean spending a very disproportionate swathe of game-time doing nothing but trudge, trudge”

I”ve rarely spent much time on foot, and indeed sometimes when I’m attacking while driving, I’m happy enough to blow up said car to take out enemies. Once you captured enough safe houses, between those and sentry posts, you’re rarely far from a vehicle. I think the longest I’ve spent walking in game is 2 minutes. It’s possible to simply drive at full speed through – or around – many sentry posts – and get away relatively unscathed. Don’t forget that you can also repair vehicles – I didn’t realise this at first – so even if badly damaged, you can bring them back to new condition.

P.

The woefully undercooked story with annoying scripted events, the empty and restrictive maps, the formulaic weapon store and assasination missions (the latter ALWAYS with the same mission briefing and voice-acting), the silly behaviour of men in small cars attacking my jeep with a mounted machine-gun, the fact that noone ever fights with each other out there, the lack of any impressive set-pieces whatsoever, the uninspired diamond hunt, the useless malaria idea which is just an excuse to send you on yet another identikit mission.

Clearly not a labour of love of the devs.

And why am I even doing these missions? Noone is talking about the jackal AT ALL? What could have been an exciting hunt in an (almost) warzone, where you trade clues for misisons, is just a subpar shooter with pseudo-linearity, lots of immersion-breaking idiocy, lots of dubious design decisions and an almost low-budget feel to it all (with things like your target still standing on a bus, shouting a speech in his megaphone, while you kill everyone around him).

Gave up somehwere at 60%, and I only ever got this far because I wasn’t ready to believe the much-touted about, non-linear story wouldn’t be quite such a shallow, bolted-on element, and was waiting for something, anything, to happen.

All in all, pretty terrible, and just because of the odd reasonably fun shootout I’d give it a 5.

That’s tilting at strawmen.

I’m sorry, what was that, Mr “if only you tried”? : P

I have no problem with ‘wounding’ per se (except as an extension of someone surviving absurd quantities of bullet, but that’s another story). As for the cars and ‘all of these design decisions’, well yes they’re (largely) intentional, of course they have ‘appreciable effects’ (how else would I notice them?), it’s not like the devs could’ve put them in by accident — but so what? It doesn’t matter whether something’s a bug or a big solemn design decision — if it makes a game less satisfying, it’s a fault [insert 'opinions are subjective' boilerplate here].

Theoretically losing your ride ‘adds to the sense of remoteness’, a fine idea, but in practice it can mean spending a very disproportionate swathe of game-time doing nothing but trudge, trudge, trudging off to whichever seems like the most bearable option (patrols are hardly ubiquitous, and if you’re stuck far offroad, good luck catching up with the dot roaming that track on the horizon! Oh, and if you understandably misinterpret a mountain range as a clear area on the map, you could be in for a gigantic runaround…) ‘Bearable’ is, y’know, better than ‘unbearable’, but still isn’t an adjective game designers should like to hear… Am I saying there should be a guarantee against losing your car? No*, just that it’s a major disincentive to stealthing past checkpoints, so complaints about the respawning aren’t invalidated by the ‘just sneak by’ option — you’re either fighting and fighting and fighting (so that you can get to the ‘real’ fight in the big arena with the significant challenges) with the combat approach, or you’re walking and walking and walking there with the stealth. Actually, it’s funny that you should mention the length of game sessions, because I was just thinking, those long hikes start to feel slightly absurd (a bit ‘walking simulator’) when you only have time to do your gaming in short bursts, like I did upon first getting the game — if you play the game for hours, trekking is likely to be a much smaller percentage of your game time, so you can better enjoy the bits of the game where you’re interacting with more than just the level geometry.
Weapon-wise, I never miss an opportunity to replace the owned guns, but the higher-tech ones are still particularly prone to jams after I’ve had to ‘fight my way to a fight’. Not a huge deal, but again, another disincentive to fight at all the checkpoints and, by extension, to drive. I should point out again that I do like this game, and my criticisms aren’t of things I consider game-breaking, just the things that downgrade the experience from ’satisfying’ to ‘Christ I hope I get to another good bit soon’ (and occasionally ‘enraging’).

*(although, hey, calling up a buddy so they could give you a lift to the nearest [whatever] might be neat without being game-breaking… that’s arguably a bit feature-creepish of me, I admit, but hey, if it helps your game!…)

Anyway, enough of the checkpoint stuff. On the theoretical level, at first I actually kind of liked how interchangeable the factions were — it seemed a clever comment on the real conflicts it’s based on, ancient gang warfare with a patina of ideology to give the indistinguishable thugs some PR spin; ‘old grudge, break to new mutiny’. But, like I was saying with the ‘remoteness’ thing, good theory can make for bad practice — as you say, it reduces the story to a vague mist of ‘get to the target and do this — our boys don’t know you, so they’ll kill ya just like normal’, with only the briefest periods of intrigue (I was so relieved to see the Jackal again whenSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER). I liked the very jaundiced view of mercenaries as the story went on though, that was pleasingly honest — you were playing the kind of prick that makes Tommy Vercetti look like a teddybear, and even your buddies were always part of that same nasty war machine. I guess it’s just one of those cases where reality bumps against game incentives (the narrative ones, in this case) and the latter kind of cops it.

The wounding of guys adds to the brutality of the situations and the ‘never safe’ atmosphere.

The losing your vehicle in remote areas adds to the sense of remoteness plus the designers always put in random patrols so you can, if you are good, get another car that way.

So all these design decisions have appreciable effects of atmosphere and gameflow. They are not simply faults.

Also, I’ve never had a shop bought gun jam on me. Swap them more often.

However, and this is where i agree with you, they can get a bit attritional on your patience because the game is so spread out. The pace is slow, and the plot is handed out peicemeal. The changeover to the second map felt like an adrenaline shot simply because some things actually happened and changed. If they moved the plot faster, these design decisions wouldn’t have time to drag you down.

These annoyances could also be a result of play style. Perhaps we shouldn’t be playing it in hours-long sessions. Perhaps this idea of super intensely playing it over a weekend or week before the next game comes out is not something we should expect most games to be able to survive.

Arguably that’s the entire point of guard posts…

Haha, quite…

As you say, the wearing-down of one’s weapons is another downside to the checkpoint slog (it kinda depends with ammo — the sheer tonnage of bullets you have to pour into someone to kill them does expend ammo supplies quickly (and renders the scattershot heavy machineguns nigh-useless), but you’ll stay well-stocked if you abandon all bullet-based weaponry like I did — it can take the better part of an entire clip to kill a guy if your headshots are unlucky (and then it’s 50/50 you’ll just wound him and have to finish him off with the leftovers), but a pair of shotgun shells will usually do it. Love that USAS 12…) — in several major fights I’ve had my beloved dart rifle explode in my hands due to its high degradation rate plus all the little assassinations I had to do to get to the ‘real’ fight. (I’m pretty damn leery of gun-jamming in games generally, but gun-jams are actually a significant element of FC2’s economy, so that’s a whole other can of worms.)

I agree that the many vectors of approach/evasion are a big part of what give this game legs. I pretty much hated the original Far Cry, but flexibility is something it definitely got right (in places), and Far Cry 2 goes one better (appropriately enough). The stealth potential at least allows you to put a dent in the enemy force before they find you out, and obviously the ability to just plain sneak past checkpoints can be a blessing (although in that case you can kiss your transport goodbye, which is a massive disincentive if you’re in a remote region… another plus for my ideology!). A mere scene or two of FC-esque flexibility would add a lot of longevity to the Half-Life games at relatively little cost (and for all the protestations about how Half-Life games aren’t supposed to HAVE longevity, ‘popcorn movie’, blah blah blah, the final fight of Episode 2 and AI-director ideas in Left for Dead make me wonder if Valve are coming to see the virtues of more ‘flexible’ game orchestration… it might just be a blip though, we’ll see). There is room between the Warren Spector school and the Gabe Newell school!

Emergent!

but they give a feeling of impeding progress, rather than being a part of progress

Arguably that’s the entire point of guard posts…..

I see the point, though. Problem is that each guard post is a tax on your ammo and your weapons lifespan, especially en-route to a proper mission battle. Albeit the game does usually offer alternate route, and I guess it is refreshing to have an FPS that makes you consider options other than just wiping everyone in your path out of the way.

I’ve actually seen people say that it’s not as good as Boiling Point. That hurts my brain. There’s also a large contingent of people complaining that avoiding combat is too hard, and there are too many fights – this would be an issue in an RPG, perhaps, but this is an FPS.

I think people make these complaints because the checkpoints are usually purgatory-esque ‘filler’ battles that merely slow you down when you’re heading across vast distances to get to ‘real’ battles which have narrative/lucrative consequences, and are set in more complex and challenging arenas (the Fort or the Petro Sahel property or the plantation or blah blah blah). Checkpoints become a bit more enjoyable when you suppress the urge for resource management (ammo is plentiful in FC2) and just blast the living hell out of your enemies with maximum aggression (instantly killing those fuckwits in jeeps with a perfect lob from the pistol-slot grenade launcher just doesn’t get old — “Try running me down NOW!”), but they give a feeling of impeding progress, rather than being a part of progress. Why is this, and how could Ubi Montreal counter it? Well, they could fix the ‘buddies turn hostile in your second playthrough’ bug so I could PLAY THE GAME AGAIN I’m not actually sure how you would fix it in a game with the ‘geo-narrative’ (oh, so that’s why essayists make up words…) hub structure of Far Cry 2. The STALKER games deal with their real-estate very well (except when GSC blunder and create terrible overspawning areas, but the philosophy’s there) by having the story quests lead you linearly, zone by zone, through the… Zone, with ample free time in which you can (apart from one or two area unlocks) explore quite freely. Contrast with Far Cry 2’s structure — practically the whole world is open (there are two area-unlocks, one of them very minor), which is neato, except you’re always returning to the hub like a rubber ball on a string, treading the same paths over and over, fighting the same trolls under the same bridges, because you just got back from a long and bloody siege at Sepoko on an APR mission after ever-so-many game hours, and NOW the UFLL want you to trudge all the way back out to the same region and blow away a guy at the railyard next door (”Christ, couldn’t you have called me?…”); if, instead of a single hub, there were regional villages where you could acquire missions to be carried out in that general area (like Cordon village in STALKER, or Dark Valley in Clear Sky; the Bar from STALKER was an FC2-esque ‘hub’, but it didn’t send you very far away), each area could potentially become much more meaningful to you (”ahh, here’s the western savannah, where I waged war on bandits to steal back medicine for the Underground…”), plus when you went off to complete a task, you’d only be scuffling with three or four checkpoints at a time, not six or seven. You’d still have the freedom to go where you please, you’d still get to know and experience the whole map (heck, it’d exploit the map more effectively than the existing structure, where loads of missions happen in the same places, leaving some good locations practically unused), it’d just cut down on exhaustion, the “Christ, I’m really not up to playing that game tonight” mindset that no company wants to foster in its patrons.

And just to cut off the inevitable twit protests in advance, I’m hardly suggesting some sort unattainable they’d-never-have-time-to-do-that feature creep here, just positing what you should and shouldn’t do with an open-world structure. Actually, considering the unprecedented(?) size of FC2’s maps, I’m surprised they went with a ’single hub’ level design — it turns a virtue into a liability! Still a fun game though, despite a lack of ambition in the non-technological aspects (only one — arguably two — mission type, factions.are meaningless on a gameplay level, every NPC outside of a house is a killbot…) I’d recommend FC2 if they fix the nigh-game-breaking ‘rescue-buddies are hostile in your second game’ bug (it’s Ubisoft, so changes are 70/30 against… but some of their teams have better reps than others…)