Far Cry 3 reactions (spoilers)

[LostCrusader]

So I just finished up Far Cry 3, and I am wondering about others experience with the game. I was about ready to call it quits on the game 30 minutes in because I didn't like any of the characters, but I ended up getting pretty sucked into the story later on.

Spoiler

I really did like some of the developers take on how being put into that situation could affect a normal person, with my favorite moment in the game being a discussion with one of the friends in the cave where Jason discusses how he feels when he kills has changed from "Oh god that was wrong" to victory.

On to a more direct question, how did your opinions of Jason change/not change when you went to the second island. I would have been pretty happy with the story if Jason left with his friends after killing Vas, and pretty much lost all sympathy for the character when he tells them all "no I'm not leaving, I can't stop killing". I talked to two friends that also played the game, and both said they stopped the game after that part.

 

[Zhukov]

I was left entirely underwhelmed by the whole thing.

It was just so bare-bones. A shooter where you shoot things, with nothing to separate it from the crowd apart from some filler side content and a regular commute between missions. I quit after I got to a point where I was just walking slowly straight forward with a machine gun while holding the trigger down and pointing in the general direction of the next enemy. Couldn't even be bothered aiming.

Story was just... meh. You're on an island. There's pirates. Kill them. Also rescue some twats that you totally care about no really you do shut up. Also there's a hot tattooed chick who gets her tits out from time to time. Never gave a crap about Jason. He never acts anything like a real person, just jumps back and forth from "Fuck yeah, killing a croc bare handed," to "Ohh noo, I can't do that, the pirates might hurt me" to "Whoo, burning people alive is aaaawesome!"

Vaas was good fun and owned every scene he was in, but he only appeared in occasional cutscenes. Then you kill him in a silly QTE fight, then the game introduces some other boring prick you've never seen before and keeps bloody going.

That was the point I gave up on it.

 

[Festus Moonbear]

I was excited about it as a Far Cry 2 fan. After the initial horror at the overcrowded HUD and general hand-holding, I got into it a bit, especially the free-roaming parts as I found 90% of the story missions to be awfully restrictive. Had some good random moments with predatory animals and pirates just like everyone else did, and enjoyed hunting the animals for my wallets, etc - apart from the ones where you had to use specific weapons, which is bullshit to me in what is meant to be a game about freedom. The thing I enjoyed most was taking out guard posts, which is where the game was most like FC2, being able to approach the task however you wanted. Some of the weapons were nice as well, especially the signature ones, but it's a lot of work to get them.

The characters were the biggest let-down to me: I didn't like any of them, including Jason. Everyone was raving about Vaas, and he was right there on the cover like he was the centrepiece of the game, but I found him awful from the start - terrible overacting and gruesomely bad dialogue, dressed up to look clever when it was actually witless. And then he disappeared in a QTE sequence (which I hate), and this other guy became the new boss, Mr Memorable for sure. Going to a new island and doing it all over again was fun for a bit once I got the disguise - lots of walking up to 'friendlies' and stabbing them, and seeing how much chaos I could cause before fleeing. But the story missions just got worse, like a parade of cookie-cutter FPS missions: protect the NPC, defend the area, use the mounted machine gun, yaddy yadda.

As for Jason, he wasn't a believable character to me. I really wanted to just stay with my friends in the cave once they were all rescued, and I actually did for a bit, just chilling out like, 'Okay, that's the end of the game.' But no, you have to fight on to get revenge against Mr Memorable and win the affections of Miss Beardy-Tattoo, neither of which I had any interest in. I pressed on to see how it would end - and what a ridiculous ending it was. It's not possible that a real person could be in a place where those are his only options: no more killing at all, or slit your girlfriend's throat in cold blood! It's clear the writer was trying to make some kind of message statement, but didn't know how to do it.

Also, it's a nitpick I know, but why did the ancient Chinese ruin no one's seen for hundreds of years have boxes containing Cuban cigars, dollar bills and broken cell phones in it? Couldn't the developers have created a couple of unique loot items for there, or just not put any loot there if they couldn't be bothered? Suspension of disbelief compromised...

Overall: some nice gameplay in free roam, a few nice set pieces, frustratingly linear and developer-guided missions, lots of annoying and nonsensical bullshit, terrible story and characters. 9.7 out of 10!!!!

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Vaas was good fun and owned every scene he was in, but he only appeared in occasional cutscenes. Then you kill him in a silly QTE fight, then the game introduces some other boring prick you've never seen before and keeps bloody going.

That was the point I gave up on it.

After I struggled thrugh the entire 2nd half of the game I retroactively decided that when you kill Vaas you've won the game and everyone goes home and back to being the useless, spolit twats they are.

 

[Strazdas]

You know, the more i hear FC2 fans hating it, the more i want to play it, i despise FC2 (and i loved the first one), so this may just go back onto my lists to get when i have time for them.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Surprised at all the hate it's getting here, I liked it quite a bit. Bit padded, certainly, but the minute to minute game play was smooth and fun, and I found the story line surprisingly entertaining. Superlative voice acting from a few of the principles, and a slightly offbeat (for gaming) Heart of Darkness story in which the "heroes" turn out to be arguably worse than the villains.

Fantastic use of music too.

 

[Festus Moonbear]

You know, the more i hear FC2 fans hating it, the more i want to play it, i despise FC2 (and i loved the first one), so this may just go back onto my lists to get when i have time for them.

If you hated FC2 for the same reasons most FC2 haters do, you might well like FC3 as they obviously tried their best to listen to criticisms and fix those things. Possibly the reason FC2 fans hate it is that they didn't think it was broken to begin with, but that's another story. It's not like FC2 was faithful to FC1 either, so we can't really complain.

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

I thought it was a good game overall.

The gun play and sneak mechanics were good. Hunting was pretty fun. I liked being able to slowly take back the islands. The PC'c friends were fairly believable as real people, or at least they all had some personality.

On the other hand, the PC's dialog and reasoning were totally dumb. It seemed like Vaas was meant to be deep and philosophical, but he just came off as an asshole that was trying too hard. I hated the sharks and crocodiles. The whole 'white kid from America is these island people's savior' plot was completely stupid. The PC's rallying speech after boning/grinding that island chick was just fucking awful.

But yea, overall I liked it.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

The whole 'white kid from America is these island people's savior' plot was completely stupid.

That was not the plot.

Brody is portrayed as a pawn, not a savior.

 

[Tom_green_day]

Look at the sales. That tells you all you need to know. People loved this game. Or you could look at one of the millions of other threads there are about this exact topic with someone else saying 'I finished a game so imma make a thread about it'.
But I thought it was a great game, my #5 of 2012 after Mass Effect 3, XCOM, Borderlands 2 and Black Ops 2.

 

[LetalisK]

Even though it got a bit repetitive and strained near the end, at least the story was interesting and tried something different. Though considering it's following what was FC2 just pulling up its top, flashing its boobs, and expecting everyone to be mesmerized, I may give it a little bit more credit then it's due. In the end, I had fun, so that's enough for me.

 

[Brian Tams]

The "choose your ending" bit at the end was wildly out of place and felt like it had been added to fill a check list. Player interaction up to that point had been non existent, so suddenly asking me to decide Jason's fate reeked of bullshit. So, I went ahead and chose the ending that fit the narrative leading up to that point (and it was shit anyways).

I also felt like the game couldn't mske up its mind about fall damage. There were times when I would slide thirty meters down the side of a mountain whilst bouncing of boulders all along the way and would not lose a single speck of health, and others where I'd lose half my health from tripping on a pebble.

 

[boradam]

I enjoyed FarCry 3, a lot actually. When I started the story the only thing I was expecting was a "Save your buddies from the pirates!" story, and I thought it would be over in less than ten hours. After I got to the Dr. though, the story started to pick up for me and I really began to enjoy it and get immersed in it.

The entire game I could see that Jason was becoming the person he was fighting (Vaas), which is to say a monster, and I really appreciated that play on the story. The entire game just builds up to what someone can lose and how easy it happens when you lose focus of what your goal really is.

I really liked it. I can't bring myself to playing it again though, I mean once I finished the story I can't see myself going back into it, it felt really dark to look back on.

 

[Milanezi]

I began enjoying Jason after he recognized that he was way into the whole "killing business" and that in murdering he had found his path. Reminded me of the speech given in the book "Devils in Exile" (by Chuck Hogan)... If I didn't know beforehand, due to spoilers, that jason would turn in a somewhat ruthless killer, I would have quit on the game for sure. It has the classic "open world Ubisoft formula": a lot of more-or-less rewarding sidequests that are 100% unnecessary to the picture as a whole, only for the sake of justifying a huge open world, just like Assassin's Creed...

Anyway, knowing that the story itself had a curve to turn Jason into a killer, made me go to the end. I stopped short from killing my own friends though, I figured "Jason's a killer, he enjoys the brutal life he met in the island, but by no means does that make him EVIL." He never killed anyone without a reason, so there'd be no sense in killing his friends, which actually made me a little disappointed, I just can't help but see a very superfluous choice at that point exactly because, well why can't he stay in the island with the tribe while his friends leave? There's just no real connection there, I felt like my hand as a gamer was being forced against my will, and to the obvious choice nonetheless (I chose to save my buddies), which led to the tribe's hottie getting killed (???)...

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I really quite liked it.

The combat was good, the world felt open and huge, but still populated and the RPG elements were well incorporated. It was pathetically easy even on Hard, but still fun to play.

In terms of plot, I thought it was brilliant for the most part. To me, it's sort of like a Greek tragedy.
I may be giving the devs too much credit, but here's my interpretation: Jason is a shallow materialistic human being. You, the player, know nothing about who his friends are as people because Jason knows nothing about them. Despite calling them friends or even brothers, he has no real feelings toward them and this is reflected in their complete lack of character.
The same goes for Jason himself. Nothing before the island meant a damn thing.

As he kills, he becomes closer to who he truly is. The natives are the only people with character because that's who he truly identifies with.

Taking it from this angle, I loved the plot and characters.

Still, I had 2 issues:
Vaas should have been the final boss with Hoyt being the mid-boss. Hoyt is just a thousand times less interesting.

The "Bad" ending as well as the guy who wrote it need to both take a molten railroad spike so far up the anus, they puke fire like a lava monster until they die horribly.

 

[Evonisia]

I thought it was pretty OK, but it didn't really get me invested. They handled the villains poorly though and the bad ending was crap.

FarCry 2 had pretty bad endings too, why can't we just go back to having a single ending? Sure, FarCry 1's wasn't really good but it was fine for what it was.

 

[MrDumpkins]

I thought the game was pretty fun, the story started out pretty exciting, it was fun to save your friends. I really liked that every character from the island was absolutely crazy. Though I'm not sure why they wanted everyone on the island to be crazy, it was the theme of the story, both sides are crazy, the alice in wonderland quotes confirm that.

Game play wise I really liked the environmental design and once you get to the second island the little gadget you get is freaking awesome. Taking down all the camps was the most fun part of the game, I did all of those missions plus the radio towers, which were also fun. The actual side missions were boring, repetitive, and I never felt like the reward was worth the trudge, the fact that I had to kill people with knives or animals with certain weapons was stupid.

I still beat the game, enjoyed it, and for the 20 bucks I spent on it I feel like I got the content I wanted. The most disappointing thing about overall game was no 3D vision support for DX11, I would have loved that.

 

[pspman45]

at first I was like YEAH! lets do this whole decent into insanity thing with quotes from Alice in Wonderland and the loading screens symbolizing his descent into madness.
but when the whole "going insane" part happened, it felt forced, like it happened too quickly rather than being a thing that occurs over time. He just suddenly decides that he's insane and starts scaring off his friends, which could have been a neat idea, like his friends know that without him, they're screwed, but that he's trading his own sanity to save them, and they're not sure how to respond to that

Another thing that to me didn't make any sense was when you loot an animal at the start, Jason's all like "Ew, Gross" which is like, yea that makes sense. but by the end, where you are injecting yourself with various drugs and wearing sacks made of animals, he's still like "Ew, gross." that really bothers me for some reason, like you KILL PEOPLE but cutting up a dead deer, nope, too much.

Game play was fun if stealthed, it did a good job of making you feel like a hunter or a predator, unlike some stealth games where you hide like a *****, but shooting the guns jut didn't kick it for me. I don't know if it was the sound, or the general lack of recoil, or something else, but they didn't feel good to shoot.

AND THE PART WITH THE MAGIC COMPASS, LIKE SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL? I couldn't tell if it was supposed to be like a drug induced hallucination like some other scenes, but the fact that I was running around a tropical Island killing pirates so I could retrieve a magic compass just seemed stupid

Also the fact that Vaas gets killed in a cut-scene and you go after some other guy you've never met and don't care about.
Hoyt was just a boring character, compared to the rest of the cast, who were great. you could never tell quite what was wrong with all of them, but there was something.. off? about all of them

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Vaas should have been the final boss with Hoyt being the mid-boss. Hoyt is just a thousand times less interesting.

Also the fact that Vaas gets killed in a cut-scene and you go after some other guy you've never met and don't care about. Hoyt was just a boring character.

Vaas was good fun and owned every scene he was in, but he only appeared in occasional cutscenes. Then you kill him in a silly QTE fight, then the game introduces some other boring prick you've never seen before and keeps bloody going.

See, I kind of saw Hoyt as a red herring. He's boring and inconsequential because he's boring and inconsequential. Jason is the real monster by that point, and Citra is the primary antagonist.