Gaming Far Cry 2 is Underappreciated

I enjoyed this game a fair bit, because I persevered, but I certainly didn't finish it. It had merits and so much potential. But those constant and immediately respawning checkpoints and idiotic vehicle combat absolutely killed it. I could not understand all the reviews. The sheer stupidity of the respawns destroyed any immersion.

 

Well i bought it. Played it for an hour, drove to some hut where i was supposed to meet someone and nothing happened. Waited around till daylight still nothing happened so stopped playing it and put it on the shelf where it has stayed ever since.

Waste of 25 quid that was. Crap bug ridden game imo.

 

Then I have an inch deep understanding of PC tech, even though it has been my job for some time.
A Game coded to work on hardware a couple of years down the road is badly coded.
A game that still has trouble playing on top end systems a few years down the road is badly coded.
What machines did they Dev/Test on ? Machines from Mars ?
I spent hours going through the options for Crysis, and got it playing on a 8800GTS-640 with most of the Ultra options, there were a couple that brought the GPU to its knees, so i deactivated them.

Sorry if '....' is annoying, its a habit, and yes, i'm English. Grammar and Punctuation are not my Forté.

 

I actually enjoyed the Mutants. (Feeling lonely now ;-))
To me it was more of a single player game than FC2.

Whats pap ?

 

I don't really recall the final stages, but I do remember some sort of letdown.
And I didn't mean FarCry was like HL, just it was how i felt when I played HL and FC for the first time

I'm not a fan of multiplayer (kept on getting wasted in Quake Arena in the Voodoo1 days put me off for ever.)

 

Wow, a troll article on bit-tech. Looks like the redesign brought some non-visual changes aswell.

 

Interesting developer article about Far Cry 2. Problem is its developer related rather than user related...and spot the heading error (WHAT WENT RIGHT x2)
http://gamedeveloper.texterity.com/gamedevelopersample/200903?pg=33#pg32

 

Well, I enjoyed myself, so screw all you haters
(in the nicest possible way of course)

Certainly, if nothing else FC2 is probably the most divisive game EVAR. That said, even those of us that love it, can still spend several hours picking holes, and pointing out the annoying bits, and yet, somehow, I still really love it, I wonder why?

Here's a few things I liked about it that I think everyone can agree with:

Firstly, it's pretty. Hard to disagree with that, but of course pretty graphics do not a game make, so let's ignore that.

The Fire, ooohhh, but the fire was good, in fact, I can't think of another game with better fire (answers on postcards please).

The buddies: as Craig pointed out in the article, the buddy system worked really well (assuming you got more than half an hour into the game and were enjoying yourself already, at least).

The weapons: well, loads of games have fun weapons, and FC2 is not exceptionally great, although obviously anything involving fire was fun to play with.


Ok, so there's some things that everyone can admit that they liked, but there's loads of stuff that we can all agree was crap, but the chief among these was Ubi's, quite frankly idiotic, decision not to allow mods (the map editor was great, but come on!), otherwise by now I think FC2 would be, well, not as universally hated perhaps, but lets take a second to think of how much better this game could have been with a few changes...

24 respawn timers on check points - oh such an easy fix!

more scripted missions - the free form nature was fun, but I think we'd all have enjoyed a few more nicely written missions, see gta for examples.

A microlight - come on, I can see why an actual plane might have moved to fast for the graphics engine, but if it can cope with hang gliders, then a powered microlight moving at the same speed should have been ok.

More NPCs: or you know, any outside of the few tiny areas where they show up, this would have made the world just that bit more believable.


tl/dr
ok, most of you hate FC2, we get the message already.
some of us love it though, but it's hard to say why

 

it didnt look so great when you had to run it on minimum settings to reduce the horrific mouse lag to playable levels

that the fire that would travel about 10ft then suddenly vanish for no particular reason?
really not that great :\

most of the weapons were **** primarily because of the ridiculous amount of damage random semi-naked africans could sustain

it was seriously just an awful awful game in almost every way
i think the best bit of the entire thing was running over animals in a jeep and seeing as there are apparently only 4 types of animal in africa according to ubisoft that got boring pretty fast

 

I don't see it as a troll article, just someone who has a different opinion. Amazingly enough it does happen.

 

Maybe if they didn't ALL want you dead. One of the most annoying things about FC2 was that no matter where you were going you had to stop at every single intersection and kill all the black people.

 

I have a nasty feeling that this was more to do with the difficulty of coding friendly AI than anything else. Even the addition of a GTA-style area-conquering system would've been an improvement.

 

did the guy above say most diverse game ever? LMAo, its the most repetitive game ever, many games do diverse ten times better.

 

LMAo, sorry for the double post, not sure what happened. The guy who said the best part of the game was running over animals in the jeep, funny cause it's true.

 

What mods would you reccomend for Stalker then?
(as I'm getting pretty bored running the same distances over and over again)

 

Moan Moan Moan lol

Oops - shall I say it - oh go on then - Great Article and I Like the new look of the Website.

And err yes the game has some issues - but I really enjoyed it and got wrapped up in the narrative so much that by the end I was emotionally drained.

And I played it on the 360 too.

My major grip is the lack of civilians but the game was just gorgeous to look at and play and in places was fun and quite interesting - I also did a lot of driving to edges of areas to avoid those patrols which in a war torn country of million would be many.

Its a long game and I really enjoyed the 2nd half also bombing about in a boat etc. In many ways the is a better experience and feel objectively more realistic and fun the dying a trillion times in games - which I also enjoy at times - like halo and modern warfare 2.

I for one hope they iron out the problems and give us a FarCry 3!
its definitely my cuppa chae.

 

It looks like there'll be more than 100 replies to this article, and most of it seems to stem from people who feel the game was a let-down. It had been acclaimed to the skies by critics, and many players want to know how the experts could have got it so wrong. *looks at the publisher's advertising budget*

It's another reason for me to miss the late Total PC Gaming mag. It picked up on the game's flaws, whilst PC Gamer, PC Zone and PC Format lionised it. Metacritics's FC2 page shows a huge gap between the critics score (average 85) and user score (a paltry 5.5).

 

Buddy system worked well? Might as well have put up a prompt "Sorry, you're crap at this game so we're gonna give you a hand" Honestly, I hated it and pressed the reload key straight away. I think it was the animation that ruined the flow (or something).

Still one of the few sand-box games I finished, the main bug-bear being the check points and respawns which were easy to avoid with a bit of thought...

 

I honestly believe that reviewers liked this game because they only put a few hours into it. It was fun for the first few hours.

 

"A Game coded to work on hardware a couple of years down the road is badly coded." - No

"A game that still has trouble playing on top end systems a few years down the road is badly coded" - No

I offer one simple piece of proof. Anything that comes close to its looks, comes close to its performance. An equally interacative environment is also a requirement.

A badly coded game would be stalker clear sky, or supreme commander.

Running under the DX9 executable its well optimized.

On topic, FC2 just didnt do it for me. I appreciate the article and am tempted to give it one more shot. FC1 was fun all the way through. I actually liked fighting the mutants. The jungle river level was amazingly good looking too.