I think i’ll fire up TF2 now, to brush off all the realism :D
Also, i’ve killed a few guys with the machete, but how do you do those finishing moves which you’ve done above?

The only thing they have in common is an emphasis on being able to choose how to approach fights in a large open area, which my changes don’t alter. But yes, Sam, I do want a different game.

Doc, the first Far Cry didn’t involve talking to anyone, but the second does. I’m not proposing any more talking, just giving it a purpose and spreading it out.

I’m not saying your suggestions wouldn’t make a good game, but it wouldn’t be Far Cry.

But I should go on to say that your suggestions are exactly the sort of thing I’m praying to see in Deus Ex 3. (Note that I’m praying, not expecting.) An open-ended objective system like that, coupled with a storyline that responds to your style of play, rather than your dialogue choices (think Fable II or, more obscurely, Iji), would bring back the sense of immersion and consequence that made the original Deus Ex such a great experience.

The second more detailed set of suggestions/points you raise are interesting, they would certainly make for a great game, but they wouldn’t transfer easily over into what we currently have as FC2. If FC2 had been built up differently with some of the latter point you raised, then it would be magnificent.

It would also let players learn the guards schedules. After some observation, they could learn that certain posts are never guarded at certain times, or discover when guards leave one post to staff another. Gives a lot more motivation to slowing down and scouting ahead, and learning about the world you’re playing in.

And in the game.

I’m not interested in trying to coax a modicum of affection or concern out of the player the way Valve have with Alyx, because it’s really hard and even when you do it phenomenally well, a chunk of gamers will always refer to her as “the annoying bitch”. I’d rather make the victims the only goal, so you’re automatically caring about them for gameplay reasons, then any emotional response from the more human demographic towards the notion of preserving human life is a bonus.

Ladders and AI are irrelevant – you’d never have to escort them anywhere, because that’s not hero’s work. You just have to eliminate the threat before they’re killed.

The problem I always had with the hostage idea was that I’m not sure I’d actually care if they died. Most hostages in games are insufferable, and even if they were to possess functioning AI and the ability to climb ladders, I don’t know that this is enough.

The buddies in FarCry 2 are horrible people, but you spend enough time with them to get to know them a little. It’s doesn’t feel like a failure because, as you rightly point out, they’re free agents for whom you’re not responsible. But when they die, it feels like a person has died.

A nameless hostage wouldn’t feel like a generic representative of human life to me. It would feel like a generic NPC, of which I’ve encountered thousands.

Still hating FarCry 2 for all the reasons you specify. But also loving it for lots of others.

Just because a game is labelled as “shooter” does that mean it has to be non-stop action all the time with continually respawning enemies, or can it drift off into subjects requiring more thought?

You’re using Assassins Creed as your basis for the ideas being good? Oh lord. Bad idea. I’ve played Assassins Creed and it was horribly repetitive and not that entertaining to play. Once you’d done one intelligence gathering mission you’d done them all, literally. The game never challenged you after the start.

@Pentadact

Even if it’s what you would like rather than expect, it just seems wrong to me to put down a game because of what it doesn’t have when you know what to expect.

I wouldn’t go to see a serious horror movie then afterwards go “hmm, that was a bit shit, it wasn’t funny, plus I wanted them to break out in song in the last act, that would have been cool.”

When you go to play Far Cry 2 you know what to expect beforehand. A shooter. It’s marketed as a shooter, the first was a shooter. Yet you seem to be wanting something that isn’t a shooter and blaming the game for this.

Your ideas, of course, would be great if they were implemented well into a game. But if they were implemented into Far Cry 2 then a load of people would be thinking “what the hell, I paid money for a shooter and I got THIS?!”

So in essence, the game you want…isn’t Far Cry 2. Far Cry 2 is Far Cry 2. :-P Of course your ideas would have much improved Assassins Creed.

I like it for this game, but it’s doesn’t have the properties I was interested in when talking about that superhero game.

Buddy death doesn’t feel like failure to me. They’re obviously free agents, with large guns, and their own agenda and their own problems. It never feels like my fault when they die, and that was the point of the hostages: they would absolutely live or die by your skill or choices. Their namelessness is intentional – when you know a character, as you do the Far Cry buddies, there’s a ninety percent chance any given player will dislike them enough to be indifferent to their deaths. I wanted ‘pure’ hostages, people you could never know anything about ahead of time, so their life is just a human life in general terms, you never get any details by which to judge them.

They two key ideas in The Invincibles were that a) you couldn’t die, and b) the game would continue in spite of failure.

In FC2, you’re usually rescued by a buddy when your health hits zero. You’re dragged to safety before the fight continues.

Failure in The Invincibles was to take the shape of hostages dying, but in FarCry 2 it’s the buddies. They can die in the midst of a mission and the game goes on without them. It’s actually better than The Invincibles idea, because the hostages were many and meaningless, while the buddies have at least some influence over the story and the flow of the game.

I think it would be really cool if you perhaps actually bumped into the Jackal at some point and you and he had no idea who each other was. Then you could be like “Damn! if only I had killed everyone I saw in the beginning of the game, I wouldn’t be stuck now!”

Or you end up chasing him down some alleys in a tense gunfight, only to lose him and have to carry on the search.

For replayability the Jackal could look different and be in different places each new game.

You’re right, though, I just gave three examples that all incentivise killing the contact rather than helping him. I don’t think that’s automatically a bad thing; the player wouldn’t know it, and it wouldn’t necessarily be easy. These guys would be in towns, and in my game the dozens of armed guards enforcing the cease-fire wouldn’t forget your crimes the second you leave their sight. One unprovoked murder could leave you with an entire town of people out for your blood, and you’re going to need something from that town further down the line.

But the ideal situation would be where you know you can kill the dude who’s got the intel you need, and it won’t break the game, but you’re not sure whether it’s going to make life easier or harder. So let’s say you really do need the journalist’s photo, and it’s in his safe. You can kill him rather than doing whatever spying/retrieval job he’s asking you to do, but then you’ve got to pay the arms dealer through the nose for the equipment to break into a safe. And you can kill the car hire guy, but then all you’ve got to go on are his logs, and that leaves three possible vehicles the Jackal could be driving.

There are obvious gaps in all the ideas I set out on James because explaining them comprehensively would take hundreds of thousands of words and be very dry. So I just give a rough description of what I’d like to see, and if anyone has a specific problem with it I can elaborate in the comments.

The fact of the matter is Far Cry is a shooter. You shoot things. If you expect gameplay based around intel gathering and complicated game mechanics then you’re just kidding yourself.

Plus in your game the easiest way to get through it is to kill everyone to take their intel. It does sound nice on paper though. :-P

On a completely unrelated note, what’s the little arrow by your thumb in the last picture…?

Though i think the best buddies in a game were those in Republic Commando. They were witty intelligent and obeyed your orders.

I dont think ill get FC2, yes you can go anywhere but it seems more like same Sh*t slightly different place.

And the Orignal Far Cry was way to hard and annoying to play.

Im Glad I got that out.

BTW, love the photo themes.

Same with Clear Sky, not playing it until someone patches it, removes grenades from the enemies, reverts the anomalies back to the STALKER ones, remove the humour from the announcements and kill the Jamaican… (carries on listing problems).