Disclaimer: Was out celebrating a new qualification last night. Woke up with a bit of a hang-over and feeling cranky and then saw Far Cry 4 on here. So, a 2400 word rant on games is probably just a hang-over fueled over-reaction to an industry I'm barely interested in anymore. Also excuse the harsh tone of the whole thing. Umm... read ahead at your own peril I suppose.
The same box art, the same game.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.850104-Far-Cry-4-Will-Take-You-to-the-Himalayas-in-2014
Part 1 - Why I didn't like Far Cry 3
Haven't seen my opinion shared yet, maybe I piss you all off, I dunno. I am of the opinion that FarCry 3 was a lazy-arsed cash in. **stroopwafel, pointed out this is ridiculous, I agree. I'd like to amend that to "It could have been a much better game but I believe the team was under heavy pressure to get it released on time." They must have noticed the container problem for example but if there's no time to fix, there's no time to fix it.**
When they said Far Cry 3 I thought, Far Cry 2 with the bugs, annoyances and those really strange and constrained controls that "made for console" games tend to suffer from on the pc(see Skyrim for example,) all fixed. But no, the controls remained, none of the basic game-play was changed except you could Skyrim a bit and murder the wildlife for upgrades or achievements or whatever.
After camp number three I noticed that each camp held very specific similarities (Crysis Corridor syndrome)there's an overlook, an animal cage that you could open, 10 storage containers (only two of which have the prompt to climb up). The whole game through, I could hear the level designers whispering into my ears: "Hey buddy, you want to be smart and tactical and shit? Well you see that ledge up there? What? Yeah that same ledge that every other fucking camp has, yeah, that's tactical and smart. You can like, snipe from there or throw a grenade, it's up to you! Have a fucking cookie." and I would yell at them "Fuck off! I'm the one playing the game, not you!"
Enter the squirrel suit. At first I thought this was awesome... until... I realized that everything was suddenly the closest hilltop away. Standing atop a mountain once I thought: "Ok, I can be anywhere in about a minute. I think I'm close to the end of the game, what's left to do? Murder more animals? OCD the achievements? I wonder what Vaas is doing right now. Oh wait, he died early in the game. Why do I care about the new bad guy again? Oh yeah, the story about adopting this pseudo spiritual island ideology that strengthens the suburban white kid to the point where the White European Male becomes almost god like and saves the witless inhabitants. Hey, I'm a suburban Twittering, selfie-taking white kid too!" That's when I realized I didn't care about those identical camps in the first act or those identical second act camps that were all a squirrel suit away, or the character I represented.
In no way am I saying that Far Cry 1 or 2 were necessarily better (actually I think both were better but that's not the argument here; moving on). For 3 they seemed to try to polish and tighten the mechanics and the narrative but all they ended up doing was emphasizing that this was a game with all the faults of its predecessor plus a plethora of its own problems.
The climbable containers in Far Cry 3 was unforgivable for me. Maybe patches have fixed it but my Far Cry 3 went into the trashcan a minute or so after I'd finished it, I didn't want my PC to become infected with UPlay(whatever it's called)again.
On the highest difficulty you can't really take shots, so you have be... tactical and shit. So, four enemies are patrolling around the container. I'm going to sneak closer and head-shot the first guy standing next to the container. The second guy is close by so I'll wait behind it and pot-shot him as he comes in, then drop a grenade to disorient the last 2 guys while I climb onto the container and bum rush them from an elevated position.
The first two guys go down as planned but then I discover that the container I'd chosen does not have the "Press X to Climb" prompt on it. The last 2 enemies appear and you desperately try to fire back but you die before lead leaves the barrel. Load Last Save, try a different container, same problem. Load Last Save. Ignore climbable containers for rest of game.
And then I think, didn't these guys play their own game? Or didn't they care? They couldn't not have noticed.
Finish easy, repetitive game and go play Battlefield 3 for shooting, Skyrim for mountain and container scaling and animal murdering, Bioshock for a tight, polished narrative etc.
If there were no Far Cry 1 or 2 I would have said that 'Far Cry: The Same Camp' was an average game which attempted to have an interesting, though misguided, approach to the plot. But since these games exist beside each other I think of Far Cry 3 as a deeply flawed game which took no risks, going so far as to use the "Heart of Darkness" narrative again and, again, playing it safe by replacing my choice of character with this white kid.
The writers thought that they were taking an innovative risk; instead of giving the player an empty shell to fill with their imaginations, they opted to give us a "living" character who changes as he experiences bloodshed and war. The idea being that we would "relate" to this character and his buddies from the start; they use social media, and skydive and go to college, "OMG dey r jus lik me!".
Personally I was just annoyed by these very very very very very uninteresting white kids, and surprised that the entire intro to the game is about how mentally maladjusted you are to this world of bloodshed, drugs and guns, only to murder an animal the moment that this console game decides its ok for you to control your own fucking character. Weren't you still traumatized by that guy you shot in the quick-time intro sequence? If you want to play me a video, do me the fucking favour of not asking me to un-pause it for you.
And let's not forget the climax; you get fucked and then you get penetrated, I guess if I were fifteen years old, the contrived ending would have appealed to me more, but I'm not fifteen and so the tits didn't give me a boner to distract me from the fact that the ending was nonsensical and heavily contrived.
Lara Croft is almost a rape victim, suddenly Lara Croft is a mass murdering psychopath. Ludonarrative dissonance; here's a definition from Wikipedia:
"Ludonarrative dissonance refers to conflicts between a video game's narrative and its game play. The term was coined by Clint Hocking, a former creative director at LucasArts (then at Ubisoft), on his blog in October, 2007.[2] Hocking coined the term in response to the game Bioshock, which according to him promotes the theme of self-interest through its gameplay while promoting the opposing theme of selflessness through its narrative, creating a violation of aesthetic distance that often pulls the player out of the game."
With Far Cry 3 I wasn't pulled out of the game, I was bodily thrown out the fucking door and kicked in the ribs a couple of times before the bouncers urinated on me, laughing while emptying out my wallet.
So Far Cry 4? Well, I'm guessing that I wont be interested. The third one sold too well for them not to repeat the performance. Speaking about repeat performances, have you seen the box art for 4?
Apart from the 3 being a 4 and Vaas having been resurrected as a gay Russian, I see zero difference. Oh yes! The squirrel suit launch pads were made in the Himalayas this time.
Just like Rome 2, the more make-up you slap onto that 60 year old whore the more you end up looking like a pimping clown from the blowback. Hmm... I think I'll keep my money this time.
Part 2 - The Marketing - The Same Game
I want to relate a personal experience here. I mentioned Rome 2 and had made the decision to get a refund for no other reasons than I wanted to 1.) get my money back, 2.) find out if it was at all possible to get your money back for a piece of shit AAA game that you'd been blatantly lied to about and 3.) find out what the internal policies regarding refunds were.
A friend of the family is a trade lawyer who did me the favour of advising me in this endeavour. In the end he proclaimed SEGA thieves and CA spineless cowards and Steam ignorantly complicit(hey, look at the flood of Indie shit on Steam, they allow that).
1.) I didn't get my money back.
2.) As far as I can tell there is absolutely NO WAY to get your money back unless you sue and demonstrate that you'd been sold an obviously broken and unfinished product. I can't afford to do that simply for the principle of the thing; I was scratching a curiosity itch more than I was actually expecting to get refunded.
3.) Creative Assembly staff move or delete any refund mentions from the populated side of their forums. My very polite and legally researched post was moved from the Support Forums to an obscure part of the "Talk About Anything" part of the forums. After pm'ing the mod, who had moved the post, he replied that he's sorry but he couldn't help me and pointed me towards SEGA. The SEGA representative was abrasive, almost rude and I believe they contacted Creative Assembly as I got two almost identical emails from both sides at the same time; not a single sentence or mention was made about the game's quality from their side.
After badgering them for weeks I finally got some vague legal bullshit, basically stating that neither SEGA, nor CA acknowledge a problem with the game. They left the "Fuck you, we already have your money." part unspoken. According to international transparency laws, they are obliged to provide customers with basic procedural information regarding their products such as "Do you have a refund policy? If so, what is it and how does it apply?" It's supposed to be a part of a customer information docket. A good company loves sharing itself; a bad company gives you the run around.
I cataloged and kept all correspondence. I was planning on posting all of it in chronological order on as many gaming sites as I possibly could just to demonstrate to gamers that we have to actively wake up and openly accept that we're dealing with psychopathic entities here who do not mind lying, and actually who see customers as "whales" or cows from which money must be farmed. Apparently, if I had done that, I could have been sued by said companies for defamation and harassment as I have no legal-leg to stand on unless I'd already sued (and won) the court case against them. Who decides whether or not Rome 2 was a completed product at launch? Fuck knows.
Creative Assembly and SEGA both maintain the stance that Rome 2 was "a big commercial success". Yes, that's one form of success. Except that they've alienated almost every long time fan with that unfinished, broken, piece of shit that they lied about in the marketing materials.
"Release and finish later" is a terrible way of going about it. Let's not talk about the money-grubbing DLCs or installed content that you have to pay for to access. The DLCs were buy-able way before the game was in any kind of reasonably playable state.
My point here, and something I feel is not emphasized enough, is that gaming companies are after your money. "The customer is always right." is a sentiment that humanity left behind in the 90s. Now it's about how much money you can legally make off of "whales".
I believe Jim Sterling mentioned that the one gaming event he did not attend had seminars and shit for game makers explaining how to draw in the "whales"; gamers who are willing to spend money for convenience in a game (see EA's Dungeon Keeper).
WE ARE NOT CUSTOMERS ANYMORE! WE ARE COWS TO BE MILKED! I call it MBA syndrome. A Master of Business Administration is trained to look at any business with a predefined idea of how a business functions, meaning that an MBA holds the view that all business is essentially the same in terms of procedure; there's a product and a customer. The MBA relies on the marketing department to inform him of the "market place" conditions and to propose strategies to exploit the market. It is not a requirement for the MBA to understand his product, it is not a requirement for the MBA to even care about, or use the product which production and distribution he oversees, he's simply an administrator with a team of advisers and they all have one goal: MAXIMUM profit.
Non-gamers are in charge of producing games; is this not the most basic kind of common sense? The fuck are we doing?
What does this have to do with Far Cry 4? Let me tell you a story.
A CEO walks into a meeting. He has his marketing team on one side of the table and on the other, a programmer, a designer, a writer; the guys who actually create the game.
What's the difference between one side of the table and the other?
Well the Marketers have their heads full of text book information on exploiting the human pysche (remember, their job is make you want to buy shit, they are very successful). And when I mention Hitler I'm not just doing it for impact, because Hitler was the first leader in history to actively investigate and pursue large scale brainwashing. Marketing and psychology have the same shared past, marketing, arguably being nothing more than a sub-title under the heading: Pavlovian Psychology: How to Fuck With Peoples' Minds Without Them Knowing. Hypnotized zombies buying shit they don't need. This is not hyperbole friends, please research this shit. Marketing is getting more efficient and more extreme, making humanity crazy in the same way that Nazi Nationalism made the German nation go crazy. Go look at any historical culture which followed this pattern; North Korea today, Stalin's Russia etc. The sickness is the same, the symptoms look different. Don't be fooled just because they've got Hello Kitty emblazoned on the product.
On the other side of the table we have gamers; people who chose to dedicate themselves to making games when video-games weren't even a big thing yet. People who care about the product at least a little bit. Let's call them the "creatives".
Creatives on one side of the table, Marketers and Administrators on the other side of the table. Can you see it?
Now I have a simple question for you. Who is the boss at that table? Why does Far Cry 4 having the exact same box-art, lead me to believe that the creatives didn't make that decision? Remember, Far Cry 3 was a success.
The marketers say "Let's not fuck with the formula! Give them the same product!"
The creatives frown but don't say anything because they know from experience that this is a fight they cannot win.
In conclusion, fuck Far Cry 4, probably. I'll see what they release before I even start to contemplate giving them money.
DON'T PRE-ORDER! Pre-Orders very easily become "We already have your money, fuck you!"
The same box art, the same game.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.850104-Far-Cry-4-Will-Take-You-to-the-Himalayas-in-2014
Part 1 - Why I didn't like Far Cry 3
Haven't seen my opinion shared yet, maybe I piss you all off, I dunno. I am of the opinion that FarCry 3 was a lazy-arsed cash in. **stroopwafel, pointed out this is ridiculous, I agree. I'd like to amend that to "It could have been a much better game but I believe the team was under heavy pressure to get it released on time." They must have noticed the container problem for example but if there's no time to fix, there's no time to fix it.**
When they said Far Cry 3 I thought, Far Cry 2 with the bugs, annoyances and those really strange and constrained controls that "made for console" games tend to suffer from on the pc(see Skyrim for example,) all fixed. But no, the controls remained, none of the basic game-play was changed except you could Skyrim a bit and murder the wildlife for upgrades or achievements or whatever.
After camp number three I noticed that each camp held very specific similarities (Crysis Corridor syndrome)there's an overlook, an animal cage that you could open, 10 storage containers (only two of which have the prompt to climb up). The whole game through, I could hear the level designers whispering into my ears: "Hey buddy, you want to be smart and tactical and shit? Well you see that ledge up there? What? Yeah that same ledge that every other fucking camp has, yeah, that's tactical and smart. You can like, snipe from there or throw a grenade, it's up to you! Have a fucking cookie." and I would yell at them "Fuck off! I'm the one playing the game, not you!"
Enter the squirrel suit. At first I thought this was awesome... until... I realized that everything was suddenly the closest hilltop away. Standing atop a mountain once I thought: "Ok, I can be anywhere in about a minute. I think I'm close to the end of the game, what's left to do? Murder more animals? OCD the achievements? I wonder what Vaas is doing right now. Oh wait, he died early in the game. Why do I care about the new bad guy again? Oh yeah, the story about adopting this pseudo spiritual island ideology that strengthens the suburban white kid to the point where the White European Male becomes almost god like and saves the witless inhabitants. Hey, I'm a suburban Twittering, selfie-taking white kid too!" That's when I realized I didn't care about those identical camps in the first act or those identical second act camps that were all a squirrel suit away, or the character I represented.
In no way am I saying that Far Cry 1 or 2 were necessarily better (actually I think both were better but that's not the argument here; moving on). For 3 they seemed to try to polish and tighten the mechanics and the narrative but all they ended up doing was emphasizing that this was a game with all the faults of its predecessor plus a plethora of its own problems.
The climbable containers in Far Cry 3 was unforgivable for me. Maybe patches have fixed it but my Far Cry 3 went into the trashcan a minute or so after I'd finished it, I didn't want my PC to become infected with UPlay(whatever it's called)again.
On the highest difficulty you can't really take shots, so you have be... tactical and shit. So, four enemies are patrolling around the container. I'm going to sneak closer and head-shot the first guy standing next to the container. The second guy is close by so I'll wait behind it and pot-shot him as he comes in, then drop a grenade to disorient the last 2 guys while I climb onto the container and bum rush them from an elevated position.
The first two guys go down as planned but then I discover that the container I'd chosen does not have the "Press X to Climb" prompt on it. The last 2 enemies appear and you desperately try to fire back but you die before lead leaves the barrel. Load Last Save, try a different container, same problem. Load Last Save. Ignore climbable containers for rest of game.
And then I think, didn't these guys play their own game? Or didn't they care? They couldn't not have noticed.
Finish easy, repetitive game and go play Battlefield 3 for shooting, Skyrim for mountain and container scaling and animal murdering, Bioshock for a tight, polished narrative etc.
If there were no Far Cry 1 or 2 I would have said that 'Far Cry: The Same Camp' was an average game which attempted to have an interesting, though misguided, approach to the plot. But since these games exist beside each other I think of Far Cry 3 as a deeply flawed game which took no risks, going so far as to use the "Heart of Darkness" narrative again and, again, playing it safe by replacing my choice of character with this white kid.
The writers thought that they were taking an innovative risk; instead of giving the player an empty shell to fill with their imaginations, they opted to give us a "living" character who changes as he experiences bloodshed and war. The idea being that we would "relate" to this character and his buddies from the start; they use social media, and skydive and go to college, "OMG dey r jus lik me!".
Personally I was just annoyed by these very very very very very uninteresting white kids, and surprised that the entire intro to the game is about how mentally maladjusted you are to this world of bloodshed, drugs and guns, only to murder an animal the moment that this console game decides its ok for you to control your own fucking character. Weren't you still traumatized by that guy you shot in the quick-time intro sequence? If you want to play me a video, do me the fucking favour of not asking me to un-pause it for you.
And let's not forget the climax; you get fucked and then you get penetrated, I guess if I were fifteen years old, the contrived ending would have appealed to me more, but I'm not fifteen and so the tits didn't give me a boner to distract me from the fact that the ending was nonsensical and heavily contrived.
Lara Croft is almost a rape victim, suddenly Lara Croft is a mass murdering psychopath. Ludonarrative dissonance; here's a definition from Wikipedia:
"Ludonarrative dissonance refers to conflicts between a video game's narrative and its game play. The term was coined by Clint Hocking, a former creative director at LucasArts (then at Ubisoft), on his blog in October, 2007.[2] Hocking coined the term in response to the game Bioshock, which according to him promotes the theme of self-interest through its gameplay while promoting the opposing theme of selflessness through its narrative, creating a violation of aesthetic distance that often pulls the player out of the game."
With Far Cry 3 I wasn't pulled out of the game, I was bodily thrown out the fucking door and kicked in the ribs a couple of times before the bouncers urinated on me, laughing while emptying out my wallet.
So Far Cry 4? Well, I'm guessing that I wont be interested. The third one sold too well for them not to repeat the performance. Speaking about repeat performances, have you seen the box art for 4?
Apart from the 3 being a 4 and Vaas having been resurrected as a gay Russian, I see zero difference. Oh yes! The squirrel suit launch pads were made in the Himalayas this time.
Just like Rome 2, the more make-up you slap onto that 60 year old whore the more you end up looking like a pimping clown from the blowback. Hmm... I think I'll keep my money this time.
Part 2 - The Marketing - The Same Game
I want to relate a personal experience here. I mentioned Rome 2 and had made the decision to get a refund for no other reasons than I wanted to 1.) get my money back, 2.) find out if it was at all possible to get your money back for a piece of shit AAA game that you'd been blatantly lied to about and 3.) find out what the internal policies regarding refunds were.
A friend of the family is a trade lawyer who did me the favour of advising me in this endeavour. In the end he proclaimed SEGA thieves and CA spineless cowards and Steam ignorantly complicit(hey, look at the flood of Indie shit on Steam, they allow that).
1.) I didn't get my money back.
2.) As far as I can tell there is absolutely NO WAY to get your money back unless you sue and demonstrate that you'd been sold an obviously broken and unfinished product. I can't afford to do that simply for the principle of the thing; I was scratching a curiosity itch more than I was actually expecting to get refunded.
3.) Creative Assembly staff move or delete any refund mentions from the populated side of their forums. My very polite and legally researched post was moved from the Support Forums to an obscure part of the "Talk About Anything" part of the forums. After pm'ing the mod, who had moved the post, he replied that he's sorry but he couldn't help me and pointed me towards SEGA. The SEGA representative was abrasive, almost rude and I believe they contacted Creative Assembly as I got two almost identical emails from both sides at the same time; not a single sentence or mention was made about the game's quality from their side.
After badgering them for weeks I finally got some vague legal bullshit, basically stating that neither SEGA, nor CA acknowledge a problem with the game. They left the "Fuck you, we already have your money." part unspoken. According to international transparency laws, they are obliged to provide customers with basic procedural information regarding their products such as "Do you have a refund policy? If so, what is it and how does it apply?" It's supposed to be a part of a customer information docket. A good company loves sharing itself; a bad company gives you the run around.
I cataloged and kept all correspondence. I was planning on posting all of it in chronological order on as many gaming sites as I possibly could just to demonstrate to gamers that we have to actively wake up and openly accept that we're dealing with psychopathic entities here who do not mind lying, and actually who see customers as "whales" or cows from which money must be farmed. Apparently, if I had done that, I could have been sued by said companies for defamation and harassment as I have no legal-leg to stand on unless I'd already sued (and won) the court case against them. Who decides whether or not Rome 2 was a completed product at launch? Fuck knows.
Creative Assembly and SEGA both maintain the stance that Rome 2 was "a big commercial success". Yes, that's one form of success. Except that they've alienated almost every long time fan with that unfinished, broken, piece of shit that they lied about in the marketing materials.
"Release and finish later" is a terrible way of going about it. Let's not talk about the money-grubbing DLCs or installed content that you have to pay for to access. The DLCs were buy-able way before the game was in any kind of reasonably playable state.
My point here, and something I feel is not emphasized enough, is that gaming companies are after your money. "The customer is always right." is a sentiment that humanity left behind in the 90s. Now it's about how much money you can legally make off of "whales".
I believe Jim Sterling mentioned that the one gaming event he did not attend had seminars and shit for game makers explaining how to draw in the "whales"; gamers who are willing to spend money for convenience in a game (see EA's Dungeon Keeper).
WE ARE NOT CUSTOMERS ANYMORE! WE ARE COWS TO BE MILKED! I call it MBA syndrome. A Master of Business Administration is trained to look at any business with a predefined idea of how a business functions, meaning that an MBA holds the view that all business is essentially the same in terms of procedure; there's a product and a customer. The MBA relies on the marketing department to inform him of the "market place" conditions and to propose strategies to exploit the market. It is not a requirement for the MBA to understand his product, it is not a requirement for the MBA to even care about, or use the product which production and distribution he oversees, he's simply an administrator with a team of advisers and they all have one goal: MAXIMUM profit.
Non-gamers are in charge of producing games; is this not the most basic kind of common sense? The fuck are we doing?
What does this have to do with Far Cry 4? Let me tell you a story.
A CEO walks into a meeting. He has his marketing team on one side of the table and on the other, a programmer, a designer, a writer; the guys who actually create the game.
What's the difference between one side of the table and the other?
Well the Marketers have their heads full of text book information on exploiting the human pysche (remember, their job is make you want to buy shit, they are very successful). And when I mention Hitler I'm not just doing it for impact, because Hitler was the first leader in history to actively investigate and pursue large scale brainwashing. Marketing and psychology have the same shared past, marketing, arguably being nothing more than a sub-title under the heading: Pavlovian Psychology: How to Fuck With Peoples' Minds Without Them Knowing. Hypnotized zombies buying shit they don't need. This is not hyperbole friends, please research this shit. Marketing is getting more efficient and more extreme, making humanity crazy in the same way that Nazi Nationalism made the German nation go crazy. Go look at any historical culture which followed this pattern; North Korea today, Stalin's Russia etc. The sickness is the same, the symptoms look different. Don't be fooled just because they've got Hello Kitty emblazoned on the product.
On the other side of the table we have gamers; people who chose to dedicate themselves to making games when video-games weren't even a big thing yet. People who care about the product at least a little bit. Let's call them the "creatives".
Creatives on one side of the table, Marketers and Administrators on the other side of the table. Can you see it?
Now I have a simple question for you. Who is the boss at that table? Why does Far Cry 4 having the exact same box-art, lead me to believe that the creatives didn't make that decision? Remember, Far Cry 3 was a success.
The marketers say "Let's not fuck with the formula! Give them the same product!"
The creatives frown but don't say anything because they know from experience that this is a fight they cannot win.
In conclusion, fuck Far Cry 4, probably. I'll see what they release before I even start to contemplate giving them money.
DON'T PRE-ORDER! Pre-Orders very easily become "We already have your money, fuck you!"
