Copy Paste Syndrome.

[Matthew]

I like the farcry games. Farcry 2 had virtually no colour. Anyone else notice that? It's either grey or red depending on the monitor you play it on. It's meant to be africa, but look at a picture of africa, it's got saturation.

Anyway, that aside - the first farcry was about gunplay and involved a lot of long range gameplay and passing through difficult somewhat open levels. Then farcry 2 decided to make it a huge playpen. Farcry 2 was huge. Yet every area seemed similar or identical, because the same assets and prefabs where placed everywhere and everything was a murkey/red/brown. It felt like someone was using the provided multiplayer map editor and just throwing things together on a bigger scale. Yet, farcry 2 did have plenty going for it beyond the fact that it's copy paste world. It had a great core story. I thought far cry 3 got the visuals right. And then injected some more trippy themes into far cry 3. Despite farcry 2 having some more knockout moments, three seemed to have a vitality to it. An insanity. Something a bit chaotic. It was copy and paste as well, however the vibrancy of everything combined with the chaos somehow made that copy and paste more of something you could look the other way with. Plus some things like watchtowers clearly had their own personality. And the fact that they where newly introduced helped making exploring feel like exploring rather than running past different combinations of a very limited set of assets. (Copy paste syndrome)

Then farycry 4 came out, and it just broke everyone's computers.Literally, it's streaming was broken. It took months to fix it with patches. Sli support was a long time coming. The whole thing was a mess. I think farcry 4 is one of the most incredible looking games on pc. Though.

The color grading just makes me want to play the game. Just to be part of that pretty world. Plus it's overly intensive visuals, that still tax any computer that runs them - really gave the game a richness and a sense of depth. Unfortunately, beyond some tweaks it was a copy paste world as well. And the newness factor was spent on farcry 3. So the fact that the same core assets where "painted" all over a moderately sized map made discovery of a new area feel often flat. What farcry 4 needed to do was introduce far more meaningful hand crafted open world segments.

In bethesda rpg's, you see a story painted with the ingame assets, at no point do you see the same combination of assets, despite the game using a similar level of assets. Why? Because fallout tells a story with it's placement of things, as does skyrim. It can show a skeleton reaching up out of murky water as if it drowned in a room. Whereas a farcry game will simply get the same lootable ammo box, or the same "thing you need to press e on to collect" and that's it.

What the next farcry games in the franchise need - Including primal - is a world that speaks for itself. Not a story injected into a copy paste world. I don't want it to become a elder scrolls game. I want it to give meaning to it's surroundings. Not because it's what other games do. But rather because it's what ANY game should do.

[goodpoints]

Originally posted by Matthew:

I like the farcry games. Farcry 2 had virtually no colour. Anyone else notice that? It's either grey or red depending on the monitor you play it on. It's meant to be africa, but look at a picture of africa, it's got saturation.

Anyway, that aside - the first farcry was about gunplay and involved a lot of long range gameplay and passing through difficult somewhat open levels. Then farcry 2 decided to make it a huge playpen. Farcry 2 was huge. Yet every area seemed similar or identical, because the same assets and prefabs where placed everywhere and everything was a murkey/red/brown. It felt like someone was using the provided multiplayer map editor and just throwing things together on a bigger scale. Yet, farcry 2 did have plenty going for it beyond the fact that it's copy paste world. It had a great core story. I thought far cry 3 got the visuals right. And then injected some more trippy themes into far cry 3. Despite farcry 2 having some more knockout moments, three seemed to have a vitality to it. An insanity. Something a bit chaotic. It was copy and paste as well, however the vibrancy of everything combined with the chaos somehow made that copy and paste more of something you could look the other way with. Plus some things like watchtowers clearly had their own personality. And the fact that they where newly introduced helped making exploring feel like exploring rather than running past different combinations of a very limited set of assets. (Copy paste syndrome)

Then farycry 4 came out, and it just broke everyone's computers.Literally, it's streaming was broken. It took months to fix it with patches. Sli support was a long time coming. The whole thing was a mess. I think farcry 4 is one of the most incredible looking games on pc. Though.

The color grading just makes me want to play the game. Just to be part of that pretty world. Plus it's overly intensive visuals, that still tax any computer that runs them - really gave the game a richness and a sense of depth. Unfortunately, beyond some tweaks it was a copy paste world as well. And the newness factor was spent on farcry 3. So the fact that the same core assets where "painted" all over a moderately sized map made discovery of a new area feel often flat. What farcry 4 needed to do was introduce far more meaningful hand crafted open world segments.

In bethesda rpg's, you see a story painted with the ingame assets, at no point do you see the same combination of assets, despite the game using a similar level of assets. Why? Because fallout tells a story with it's placement of things, as does skyrim. It can show a skeleton reaching up out of murky water as if it drowned in a room. Whereas a farcry game will simply get the same lootable ammo box, or the same "thing you need to press e on to collect" and that's it.

What the next farcry games in the franchise need - Including primal - is a world that speaks for itself. Not a story injected into a copy paste world. I don't want it to become a elder scrolls game. I want it to give meaning to it's surroundings. Not because it's what other games do. But rather because it's what ANY game should do.

I thought FC2 had the most diverse and realistic looking environments. (with the exception of the repetitive building assets, but FC 3/4 were not much of an improvement there) There was savannah, scrubland, desert, and forests vs. the monotonous jungles of FC 3/4. (ok 4 had some mountains) Even the trees were much more diverse in FC2, how could you not love those acacia trees? I recall the savannah being more gold/yellow than red, but I loved the pervasive dustiness of it. FC 3 and 4 are actually way undersaturated to me, the greens are just way too light/bright. Which region of Africa are you comparing it to? (It's a pretty biome diverse continent...) It's pretty similar to the transitional climate regions in southern Chad or the North/South Sudan border. If anything, the forests were a little too dense and green in the southern part of FC2, like there were so many damn ferns on the floor. But the way the savannah gradually transitioned into the forest in the game was amazing.

FC2 was deeply flawed but some of the core ideas were (and still are) pretty revolutionary for an FPS. Instead of fixing things, FC 3/4 just scrapped most of the meaningful interactivity with the environment and AI life and made huge sandboxes devoid of any sense of life. Yes they added a bunch of animals and bad guys for you to hunt, but if you don't choose to interact with them, they have no impact on the game world. While the respawnable guard posts of FC2 were obnoxious and a terrible design decision, at least you had to plan your way around them, something in the environment actually affected the way you play and made you feel vulnerable.

All I ever wanted was Far Cry 2 with a real dynamic faction war. (something that no FPS has yet managed) Or it could just keep getting refined down to a tech demo/hunting sim with a ton of collectible items, until you inevitably arrive at the idea to just make the player an actual hunter-gatherer.