With all this blasted schooling and such I haven’t had much in the way of time to explore something that I have relearned to love very much, video games. I realize of course that this is strange to some folks, but considering I’m getting my Masters in “creativity” it has become an important facet to my life, namely because I can play, analyze and enjoy it without it intruding into my own work (my pre-Grad School hobbies namely included movies and books, two things that don’t blend well with reading 1000+ pages and writing 50+ of original works). Personal facts aside, I’m going to dedicate the next six days (January 12th means returning to school) to some of the most interesting titles I played over the last six months, today we get Far Cry 2, followed by Fallout 3, Little Big Planet, Mirror’s Edge, Metal Gear Solid 4, with nods to Dead Space and NHL 09.
Far Cry 2 is a difficult game to describe to people. On the surface it’s a shallow first person shooter filled with random encounters, broken gameplay and guns, lots and lots of guns. But it isn’t what Far Cry 2 is that makes it interesting, it’s what it is trying to become.
Immersion is a word that gets tagged and misused a lot in video game journalism, there seems to be a rift between reviewers, critics and players as to what makes a game immersive — some would argue it’s a well tailored world, others a perfectly sculpted story, perhaps some would even say it’s just an addictive quality. FC2’s take on immersion is straight forward: You are in Africa. You are put between a rock and a hard place (er, two waring factions). You must decide what to do next. Sure, it’s not perfect, you don’t really get to chose sides, which arguably is more realistic than if you did, you also don’t ever really get a complete grasp on what exactly is going on, which is likely just the nature of a game that was forced out the door a few minutes before it was done (or perhaps a statement by the developers that, put into this situation, you likely wouldn’t have a clue what was going on… of course, if it was me, even surviving an afternoon would be a feat). What you do get is your hands, and you’ll be seeing a lot of them. Whether it’s by pulling a bullet out of your thigh with pliers, looking at your map (which handily auto-updates objectives while it’s in your pocket), or holding any of the two-gazillion guns in the game. Of course, all this wouldn’t mean much if the game didn’t look good, and rest assured it looks miraculous — it’s the little things that count they say, and maybe I’m the only one who cares, but I was jumping up and down when I noticed that when I walked into a plant… well, just that I walked into a plant, it folded underneath my foot. I didn’t just pass through it magically.
Of course, with all the attempts at realism, a game, as many developers seem hell-bent on reminding us, is just a game. We need save points, an abundance of health packs (does everyone in Africa use a syringe of morphine, like, all the time?), we need mission objectives and friends, we need fetch quests and unlockable guns, weapons dealers on every corner and random attacks (okay, maybe we could have done without the random attacks). FC2 is, noticeably, a game. It isn’t a life simulator, you can’t change your clothes or even your personality, but it does put you in a terrible situation and trusts you to figure out how to best take care of it.
And that’s what makes Far Cry 2 a step above nearly every single game that was released in 2008. It assumes that the player is smart. No tutorials, no buttering up of an evil world, no lies (okay, some people in the game lie, but you have to figure out who is lying, or what their agenda really is). From the second you launch the game you are screwed, running around a nameless African country with a machete and a crap pistol, picking up broken weapons that explode in your hands while you have to figure how to get rid of your malaria and find the arms dealer that you are supposed to kill. If you chose to find background information about the characters, or meet other people like you, you can, and you’ll gradually begin to understand the war economy, the different factions and the repercussions of what you’re doing, or, you can just run around blasting things to bits, your choice (and the important thing here is that the game itself never really informs you of this choice, you just have to figure it out on your own). Oddly, as the game progresses and you continually accept missions with a growing number of karmic grievances (for instance: Please go and destroy the water supply of our enemy because it will piss them off. What? Oh, yeah, well sure a whole village will likely die, what’s your point?) you begin to wonder how killing the arms dealer, which was your original mission and only intent, could possibly fix all the trouble that you’ve caused.
As far as story and writing is concerned it’s about average for a video game world, which puts it at a sub-par “high-literary (we’ll use the term loosely here, like a joke, or perhaps in a mocking tone)” level. It’s unfortunate because there is a lot that could have been done with this, the immersive qualities of the gameplay and graphics hook the players and trap them in the world, so it wouldn’t have taken much more to push us over the edge. The idea of a dynamic, reactive story, which is what the developer’s set out to accomplish (and again, perhaps a rush to a pre-holiday release date might have broken this promise…. honestly, who gives an M rated game as a gift?), was and still is very interesting. It’s been a promise of video games for the last ten years since it was technologically feasible, but has still yet to be completely accomplished (and yes, Fallout 3 is another release from this year with the same promises). Is it too much to ask that if I kill someone in their sleep and return the next morning I’ll find their wife grieving or a funeral service? Or if a NPC dies while traveling at my side others may be less likely to join me on my journey for fear of the same thing happening to them?
In the end Far Cry 2 is an interesting and complex game. More importantly it sets a new standard for ambition in a first person shooter. Sure, it didn’t nail everything, but it did start a lot of fires.