Games of the Week

You’re driving a jeep down a rocky dirt road in an arid African savannah. As you watch the mountains pass by you and listen to the whiney creak of the suspension, you hear something new, something unnatural. Looking behind you, you spot a UFLL armored jeep, and their gunner has his sights on you. As bullets begin to fly you panic and desperately look to your map to find refuge somewhere, anywhere. You spot, about two clicks southeast, a safehouse. Perfect! Quickly, you swerve off of the main road and drive on the rough deftly working your way through a deep, lush valley, and yet your followers prove as tactile as you. You’re shaking. You’ve accomplished too much to let it all end now. The road ahead is narrowing, and trees surround you on all sides, and it’s becoming difficult, too difficult, to evade them all, and inevitably you collide, banging your head on the steering wheel and smashing the engine. Dizzy, you emerge from the car completely exposed, and your enemies have you cornered. Just as all seems lost, your good friend Quarbani Singh happens upon the scene, and helps you to finish your pursuers. After shots fired and blood shed, you and Singh are victorious, and you notice that the safe house is half a mile down hill near a lake. The sun is setting. The sweltering heat at last granting you reprieve. A pack of zebras are drinking from the lake as you approach, but the gentle crunch of twigs beneath your boots alerts them to your presence and they gallop off into the sunset. You open the cheap wooden door, put your equipment away and lay down on a cot prepared for rest. You survived another day. The wilderness is harsh and unforgiving. You question how much longer you can carry on as a cacophony as crickets lull you into the sweet embrace of sleep. Just another day in the world of Far Cry 2.




The game I’ve been playing most this week has been Far Cry 2, something I had been meaning to play for months but was pushed into playing after hearing a GDC panel by Jonathan Morin and a tantalizing discount on Steam. I’ve heard a lot about this game, both positive and negative, so I wasn’t quite sure of what to expect. I haven’t played for too long yet, only about 8 hours, but what I have played I am really liking, give or take a few design frustrations that have come up.

To start off, my favorite thing about the game is its premise; a lone mercenary trying to survive in the wilderness of Africa, fighting off malaria, making allies and hunting down a man known as “The Jackal” who left you for dead in a burning hotel. The player is free to roam about 20-odd square kilometers of African wilderness, traversing mountains, deserts and savannah. In order to progress, you are forced to work for two factions of a rebellion in the country, working to improve your reputation, connections and equipment. The reasons I like this game are plenty, but I think for this post I’ll focus on the little design annoyances I’m struggling with and why I don’t like them or why I feel they are justified.

Okay, remember earlier when I said that the player is free to traverse the world of Far Cry 2? Well, that’s true in a technical sense. The only things stopping you at any point in time are countless checkpoints and armored jeeps in the roads filled with enemy NPC’s that have astounding perception and can notice you coming from hundreds of yards away, and have weapons training enough to shoot you on sight. In fact, other than animals, your enemies are the only other people you will really meet during gameplay. Even when you take a mission for one of the factions (UFLL or APR) they will tell you at the end of you briefing that “it is a secret mission and our guys will still target you.”



Wow, I understand that it’s a game of some difficulty but come on! What, were they too busy to develop friendly AI or was it just not that important to them? Normally I suppose this would be a non-issue for me, but in Far Cry 2 there are some gameplay systems in place that make such frequent enemy encounters difficult. One is the malaria, which requires that every few hours the player take a pill to fight it, and once you run out you have to undertake tedious missions to get more. Two, that weapons you obtain from enemies are cheap and will jam frequently, and to get better weapons again requires undertaking tedious missions.

What this does for me is keep me from wanting to explore the awesome world that they painstakingly took time to develop, and oh how I would love to explore every inch of it to find every diamond. But alas, it just isn’t worth it to have to fight enemies at every intersection of the road. Now, instead of driving from place to place, I just take the bus quick-travel system to save me the trouble, and when I have to acknowledge something in a game as being troublesome then something has gone very wrong.




The malaria aspect of the game has come under fire from some as well. A good friend of mine stopped playing because of the malaria. I can understand how he feels, but I am of the camp that likes this particular mechanic. As I mentioned earlier, I listened to a GDC panel by Jonathan Morin, lead designer of Far Cry 2, and he talks about player improvisation in games and how to purposely design ingenuity into gameplay. Things like malaria attacks and weapon jams are things that completely destroy any strategy the player may have had while planning an attack, and they force the player to think quickly and reconstruct a new plan in wake of what’s happened. They shake up the entire planning phase of gameplay, forcing the player to now quickly analyze his/her surroundings and algorithmically predict enemy activity. I like this aspect, at least enough to not be annoyed with it in practice.

There is a lot more to say on Far Cry 2, and it does a lot of very interesting things while attempting things even more interesting. For what it’s worth, Anthony Burch of destructoid.com has been closely following talks from Far Cry 2 designers and they are interesting from a technical aspect of game design. This was a really long post and I hope my following posts are shorter.

And to David and anybody else to notices a new post to my dying blog, this is for a class I’m taking now and not meant explicitly to entertain you!