The first time I played Far Cry 2, I thought, “What a shame. This could have been a great game. But I just don’t like it very much.” After an hour or two of play — and a real effort to enjoy it — I put the game down, never to play again.
Thanks to a combination of the Far Cry 2 permadeath experiment and the blog of the game’s Creative Director, Clint Hocking, that would change. The better part of a year later, I started the game again, picked a new character, and this time, I played to completion. And I liked it. Visually, it’s amazing. There is no problem there. Mechanically, it’s fantastic. I do think those checkpoints on the roads are a serious mistake, and should have been removed or at least set to respawn only after 24 hours or more, but aside from that, the game was a lot of fun, and I hold tremendous respect for it. So why did I almost miss out on this gem?
One basic reason. Because I was so incredibly alienated from my own avatar. In a game that strived so much for immersion, this was absolutely devastating.
If the plot advances in a video game because my character does something stupid, immoral, or unjustified, I find myself disgusted and divorced from any investment I had in the character. I wrote about this problem with Prototype not long ago. Far Cry 2 has the same problem Prototype does in this regard, but it’s another order more severe. This is partially because Far Cry 2 is far more immersive, but it’s also because the alienating moments are more frequent and severe. I want to explain exactly what about Far Cry 2 was so alienating to me, but it will involve spoilers if you haven’t played the game, so be warned.
When you select a character in Far Cry 2, you’re tasked with choosing from one of various totally immoral characters that I could not identify with at all. Being unable to identify with these people was a strike against my immersion when playing as one of them. Still, I readily accepted the backstory that I was there to assassinate a notorious arms dealer, and I could understand why such a hard-bitten killer like myself would be the one chosen for this task.
The introduction grabbed me, and I was incensed (in character) that The Jackal found me and my orders when I was incapacitated with malaria. This was probably supposed to make me like him, but instead of liking the guy, I just thought “Bad idea, letting me go. He’ll get what’s coming to him.” When fighting broke out in the city, I grabbed a couple guns, jumped through the back window into an alley, and fled town. Unfortunately, I collapsed, still sick with malaria, and was captured by one of the two factions and forced to work. Oddly enough, the guy was mad because he imagined that I’d shot a bunch of his boys back in town during my escape, even though I didn’t fire a shot. Once this tutorial mission string was over, I went into town and did a mission for the underground, for much-needed malaria medicine.
Initially, when I met the journalist in Mike’s Bar, I started to form a plan. “Aha, this guy has interviewed The Jackal. Maybe if I work with him, I’ll be able to get closer to finding my target.” This relatively sane strategy was not within the range of creative thought available to my thuggish avatar, however.
According to my journal, the only way to get to The Jackal was through acting as a hired killer for the bloodthirsty factions. So, I figured, I’d take sides with the UFLL. I would do so reluctantly, of course; I knew nothing about these factions, but at least the UFLL had propaganda superiority and thus were likely to have greater popular support. Plus, the APR boss seemed a bit slimy. My strategy was that I would fight with them until they trusted me enough to give me information I could use in my mission.
Alas, this back-up plan was boxed when my avatar decided that was not within his temperament. Rather than follow my own idea of an at least partially sane strategy, I was degraded to acting as a complete mercenary, forced to play both sides when missions on one side dried up, befriend self-centered psychopaths who kept encouraging me to be even more murderous, and generally kill people left and right for blood diamonds.
By this point, I’d given up on playing Far Cry 2 with my first attempt. I just couldn’t get invested in a game that was about being a stupid psychopath thug. I mean, I’d played GTA III: San Andreas and GTA IV, and those had similar problems, but at least I could follow the reasoning of those characters. CJ and Nico were missing a few brain cells and had a severe deficiency in their respect for human life, but they had personal systems of morality and ethics, that while not my own, could at least be made sense of. In fact, those Grand Theft Auto games told compelling stories about people sinking deep into criminal behavior due to a combination of poor judgment and poor circumstances. These games had take-aways; I’ve written an academic essay defending GTA III: San Andreas to a ethnic studies professor.
But in Far Cry 2, I was playing a brute chosen from a lineup of nasties, and I appeared to have no moral fiber whatsoever. My character wasn’t acting out of personal indigence or a sense of vengeance, I wasn’t defending my cousin or sister or family or gang, I didn’t even need to do these things to eat — in Far Cry 2, I was playing a soulless butcher whose only motivation appeared to be his next blood diamond. Rockstar makes their leads human and sympathetic, even in the most controversial games; but Far Cry 2 seemingly didn’t even try.
I play games for escapism, for entertainment. Being made to feel like such a monster doesn’t fall under this category; it isn’t my idea of a good time; this moral tone for the game is so thoroughly alienating that I actually stopped playing. And I missed how much Far Cry 2 did right, because I was slammed to the floor under the extent to which it did this one thing so incredibly wrong.
Eventually, I did come back. I came back to the game because I read about all the things Far Cry 2 did right. I wanted to experience these things, to analyze them, to enjoy them, to embrace the fun in the game. I managed all these things, but unfortunately, the problems didn’t stop there.
So. Moving on in the game, I came to a point where the only mission left was a task from the APR to assassinate the leader of the UFLL in this part of the country. I normally wouldn’t touch this mission with a ten-foot pole, especially as I didn’t like the APR boss nearly as much as I liked the UFLL boss, but my thick-skulled avatar thought it was a good idea, so who am I to override such a plot-advancing decision? I figured I wouldn’t kill him quickly; I’d walk in and wait for him to give me a counter-offer. I did this exactly. The UFLL boss figured out I was there to kill him, had his hands in the air, cursed the APR boss, and did nothing to try to save his life except stand there and then, some five or ten awkward seconds later, decide to pull a submachine gun on me and shoot me. Which got him killed. And at that, I was betrayed by the APR and left for dead while doing a mission I wouldn’t have accepted in the first place. At least the game let me try to defend a church of innocents instead of trying to save those psychos at Mike’s Bar; as I imagined my silent protagonist telling the Catholic priest, I’m not a good person, I’m just a very bad person who fears for his soul.
Life continued in this vein. I was promptly forced to take a mission trying to aggravate and prolong the conflict by starting a battle in the middle of the capital city; not that I actually wanted to do such a horrible thing. The one doctor left in the entire country praised me as a good person for warning him about what I had just did, even though my warning came about two seconds before he was about to find out for himself. I was certain he was missing a few brain cogs when he made that judgment, especially since he knew full well this was my fault in the first place. Not that I was complaining; I needed to be in his good graces to get my malaria medicine, which remained one of the only motivations about my character that I actually understood.
Eventually, I had the opportunity to make peace between the factions, and my best buddy among the psychopaths that I called my friends here in this country advised me to betray the mission, steal a mess of diamonds from the factions, and use them to bribe a pilot and escape the country with the others. I was a bit confused here; if all we needed was a mess of diamonds to get out, then what about that hundred diamonds I had kicking about not so long ago? Why couldn’t we get out then? I am one hundred percent certain that was enough rough diamonds to get us all out on that plane. But whatever; the diamonds were a macguffin, and I had to concede that. Though characters in the game lectured me that the peace would only bring more rape and pillage of the civilian population, I decided that they were doing plenty enough rape and pillage already, and shutting down the bloodbath aspect of the situation could only be an improvement.
I didn’t even have the opportunity to walk into this betrayal willingly though; the choice was taken away from me by a cut scene when I picked up the diamonds, and I ended up in prison, where my buddy lectured my silent protagonist about not keeping to what he promised to do. Silent being the key word here. Well, since my character apparently promised his buddy to get the diamonds to them, and my journal says quite surely that I intended to go with his plan, I concede that this was what my character wanted. But, because my character is silent, he was summarily unable to profess innocence and explain that he was ambushed in a cut scene, even after demonstrating good faith by busting this guy out of prison.
And when, in time, the opportunity finally came up to put a bullet in the head of The Jackal, the one that I took my entire motivation in the game to be to kill, the game inexplicably took away my weapons, similar to when I’ve been searched at the door of a faction office. My only option was to have a chat with the guy and make a deal, betraying my allies and killing them as they tried to escape the country when I would just as soon have shot the guy I was dealing with and taken off with them. I mean, what was my character even thinking, trying to work with this madman on some grand exodus? Has he gone as far off the deep end as the guy he’s trying to assassinate? Maybe the guy’s had a change of heart, but screw that, and besides, my malaria was so bad at this point that I was afraid I could die if I didn’t leave this hell-hole and get some real medical treatment! What a grand absurdity that the very end of the game is the moment when my character decides to start acting with moral conviction, only for that to be the one moment when I finally want him to just solve his problems with a bullet and leave, because I want him to do what he came to do.
What kills me most about this ending to the game is that they could have easily implemented my chosen ending without compromising gameplay. This is literally the bleeding end of the game. Shooting The Jackal and using the diamonds to leave with the other mercenaries wouldn’t cheat the player out of any but maybe ten or twenty minutes of gameplay. So why couldn’t I do that?
While the term “role-playing game” normally refers to a specific genre, almost all modern games with any kind of preset narrative have some form of role-playing implicit in the play of the game. The fact that this happens is important to consider when making games, especially when making games with an imposed narrative, because what the player character does in the story can either reinforce the player’s sense of identity with their avatar, or jar them out of the game. If the player doesn’t like their own character, they will have trouble liking the game. Rockstar gets it: they may make a game like Bully or GTA, but they are careful to make the protagonist sympathetic and likable, with clear and understandable motivations. You can’t just be someone inexplicably messed up and murderous, not if you want a broad audience anyway. Games with black and white morality scales regularly see the majority of players going for the heroic side. And even movies require likable protagonists. Ignore this at your peril.
Of Far Cry 2, in the end, I liked it. There was a lot to like in that game, once I managed to tolerate my dislike of my own character. But I have to wonder; did the developers think about this kind of thing when they came up with the story? Was it something they even considered? Am I simply not the target audience for the game? Or were they going for a deeper, more cinematic and moving effect, that merely misfired or went over my head?
I own Far Cry 2, but I haven’t gotten around to playing it. Going by what you said, it sounds like to story’s going to be an ordeal to get through. It’s a shame, I was really looking forward to eventually finding the time to play it. Great post, though. Really enjoyed reading it.
I’m glad it was enjoyable — I was worried it would be a bit too “ranty”.
I think Far Cry 2 can be a lot of fun, in moments, but I had to get over two sticking points before I could really appreciate it. The first is discussed in this post, the second is just briefly mentioned, and that is the checkpoints distributed throughout the world. They made an open world that feels claustrophobic and burdensome, because there are enemies everywhere, and it’s a real pain in the neck just to travel to your mission locations.
When I was able to adjust my mindset to take the journey in stride and enjoy the challenges along my travels, that mitigated this point, and allowed me to appreciate an immersive shooter that gives you a lot of tactical flexibility. It’s an unusual game in that it lets you decide what weapons you want to unlock, when to get them in the story, what missions to use them for, and in what combinations. This weapon system does amazing things for the game, making it far more tactical and cerebral, without detracting from the action. I’m very impressed with the more successful elements of Far Cry 2.
I typed up a long comment, but it got deleted, so I hope to make this quick.
I haven’t plaed Far Cry 2, but I had the same feelings as you when playing certain games, sometimes being disgusted by my avatar’s action. Yet, at the end of the day, it’s a game. And at the end of the day, you are not conducting the action, it’s the avatar. If you have fun, that’s all that matters.
However, most player avatars ARE “inexplicably messed up and murderous”, whether they are killing humans, orcs, elves, demons, and aliens. This is especially true in FPSes, where you are given a gun and told to kill everyone who stands in your way, with some marlkey about saving the free world and what not. Even in DOOM, you are a marine who went on a rampage through Mars because your bunny got killed. Despite (or because of) the fact that the characters in FPSes are bland killers, FPSes are quite popular.
I also seem to have different standards than you. For one, you seem to be okay with killing as long as you got a good enough “excuse”. Even if you got a “excuse”, it’s still murder. Maybe not a “evil” murder, but a murder nevertheless. And when you are dealing with most FPS enemies, who are unintelligent fools who wander blindly into the firing range…you know that you are not witnessing a war. You are witnessing a massacre.
Killing as a mercenary is tolerable, it’s your job. You kill people to put food on the table. Somebody’s gotta help the military out in its war, it might as well be you. Altough this may be due to the fact that both mercenary games I play (Mercenaries 1 and Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath) do not require you to kill, you could just arrest the target in question and send him off to prison…and in fact, you get paid more if you bring in the criminals alive rather than dead. The Stranger in “Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath” also have at least some likable aspects in his character.
However, killing people to avenge your family…not so good. It seems to be a waste of time, time better spent just cursing the enemy for all eternity and then rebuilding your society. And, all those soldiers and gang members you kill in pursuit of blood revenge…Do they not have a family too? I’d happily play as a merc, but if you hand me some guy saying, “I want revenge!”, you’ll just make me want to strangle this guy for his idiocy.
But the people that disgust me the most are the player avatars who are doing this for GLORY AND FAME! Really? You’re going to kill millions of people just to sastify your own ego? No.
I think Servant Corps has hit the nail on the head right here – Far Cry 2 really only makes sense when you stop suspending your sense disbelief and gut reactions of horror at the actions that you just have to do in the course of playing an FPS game.
I mean, think about it, it would take a seriously f***ed up human being to be a real FPS protagonist! Once I switched the part of my brain back on that treated every kill as just another point on the scoreboard, and started thinking about my all of my actions, not just the decisions I had to make as part of the narrative, the game finally took off for me and I fell in love with it for what it was trying to do. In essence, every kill is as important a decisions as whether I save my mercenary buddies in Mike’s bar or the Priest in the Church. Every kill is part of the story (maybe that’s what I was trying to get at with the perma-death experience? The next logical step would be to apply the same rule to my own life, I suppose, and then that too becomes just as important a part of the narrative).
When I stopped playing it as “just a game” and thought about all of the things it made me do, and the things I did willingly, it became a much more cohesive narrative and a much more ambitious game. By the end of it, I understood WHY I couldn’t live with myself anymore – I’d become exactly that which I was trying to destroy. The ending kind of made sense in light of what the rest of the game was trying to do.
And that, all up, is why I can’t stop writing and playing about it! =P
Thanks for the comment, and my apologies for the delay in moderation, I’ve been on vacation at the beach without internet for the past week, and only just returned.
I can hear what you’re saying about the need to disable your usual distancing from the violence to appreciate what the game tries to do. This morning I saw a few fragments from the movie “The Mosquito Coast”. As entertainment, it was painful, with a protagonist making poor decision after poor decision that brings ruin on his family, a theme I’m not fond of (though I can see how others might like such a story of a flawed protagonist). But reading the back, I saw one of the things the movie tried to do was show the “dark side of heroism.” Like that movie, it sounds to me like what you’re saying is that the story of Far Cry 2 should be appreciated as an exploration of the dark side — and potential realities — inherent in what happens when a FPS “hero” goes rampaging through a real world setting. It’s not pretty, and that person isn’t going to be a good person.
I can see the appeal there, with telling that story, with playing that game, I just can’t identify with it. I do like intelligent entertainment, but I like to be able to interact with that intelligence, to explore it, to play with it on a very direct and mechanical level. If the game presents the theme of the brutality of a true FPS hero’s actions, I want the freedom — mechanically and narratively — to be able to explore refusing that power and destruction. If the only way to save your character’s soul is not to play, then it’s a false choice; the game essentially ties my hands and doesn’t let me explore the issue. It becomes listening to a sermon rather than choosing how to live your life.
It reminds me, in a way, of what Clint Hocking talked about with his criticism of Bioshock. You don’t choose to be a monster in Far Cry 2 any more than you choose to help Atlas in Bioshock. You have to if you want to play the game. Perhaps the game would strike a more sound chord with me if the brutality of my character was something I embraced, but it was something I rejected; to have the game attempt to show me how horrible of a character I was playing, when it was the one forcing me to play such a character against my will, that doesn’t affect me very deeply.
Really, it’s not that I need an “excuse” to embrace the violence committed by my character, per se, but that I need a motivation. GTA is still disturbing, don’t get me wrong; I’ve often stopped playing for awhile because I understood how horrible the things on screen were. But at least I can grasp the motivation. Far Cry 2 asks more of me than that. I’m expected to embody a killer without any shred of nobility or human passion in that killer’s mind — and rather than exploring the dark side of heroism, of revenge, of some other interesting theme, I feel like I’m exploring the dark side of some madman who merely kills people for diamonds. Maybe that’s supposed to be the dark side of the FPS gamer… but if so, it was lost on me.
I can get the logic behind the ending, it just didn’t apply to me. The character was a monster — but in my mind, the only reason I was even doing those things was because the game made me, not because there was any rational reason to do them. To me, I hadn’t become that which I wanted to destroy in the process of trying to destroy it; I had become that which I wanted to destroy because the game made me act that way, and the only solution was to cap the Jackal and get out dodge so people would stop shooting at me and telling me to blow up food and medicine.
Another thought — if you aren’t tired of reading my words yet! — is that I did appreciate the way that the buddy missions allowed you to refuse to do what you’re asked to do if you think they’re wrong. It breaks with the way FPSes, and most games, handle that kind of thing. If a game character tells you to do X, you do it, unless another game character tells you that you don’t have to unless you want to. We’re so accustomed to accepting the convention of surrendering free will in these matters in games (because to do otherwise would be to rail against the simulation boundary of the game, as I did here) that I didn’t even consider refusing my buddies my first play.
Later, I could appreciate it. But I had to read about the game more before I could grasp that I even really was being given a choice. As a designer trying to give the player choices, this conditioning may be very limiting. It’s probably part of why inFAMOUS and so many other games that try to implement moral choices offer such blatant binary options as to how to handle situations. The irony, of course, is that Far Cry 2 makes it very clear these missions are optional, but I still felt like I was cheating myself if I didn’t do them.
Because I’d read more about the game the second time, and because I approached with a new, reflective and more critical eye, I felt more control and identification with my character every time I stood there in front of a buddy and said “No, I’m not going to help you rain carcinogenic defoliant from the sky just so the enemies won’t have cover for one mission.” On rare occasions I agreed to do their missions, but usually I refused, because I knew it was my choice — I could actually say no.
I agree with your post on this topic. In the latter stages of the game I felt so disconnected from the actions of my avatar that I literally spend through the core missions just to “finish” it and get the game over with. I found the core gameplay and design fun to play but I was sick of being such a butcher with no option to moderate my actions at all. Seemed like I was an on the rails character playing out the story in an open world.
Hi Gerard, thanks for your comment. I checked out your blog and found the pacifist gamer approach pretty interesting; when I went to comment on the PvZ pacifist post, I was challenged by a WordPress login screen which rejected my WordPress login. I don’t know if I’m missing something, or there’s odd with your blog, but it’s preventing me from commenting…
I was going to admire the approach, and mention that it would have never occurred to me to try to play pacifist in a tower defense game like that, as the genre seems highly incompatible. I must question the lawnmower strategy, however! While accepting that lawnmowers are inevitable, it seems to me that if you wish to minimize damage to zombies, you should funnel all zombies after that first lawnmower triggers into the now empty lane! Funneling them into lanes with lawnmowers that have yet to trigger seems to be working to maximize violence against the zombies, not minimize it…
Speaking of pacifist play, have you tried playing Far Cry 2 and only killing the people that the game tells you to kill, and NO MORE? Or does that still have you rack up a huge body count?
Because Far Cry 2 is a FPS and is designed for a high body count, it would be very difficult to play the game as a pacifist. I have heard of people attempting it, but it’s a pretty far stretch for me. I personally usually only aim for pacifist play when the game and genre can support it. Thus my surprise at Gerard’s playing that way on a tower defense game!
I have been playing far cry for awhile now and i still think that what most annoys me about the game is the choice of missions. I wish that it would be possible to stick with one side or not to stick with any side at all. Besides my concerns i still think it’s a great game and that the tactics involved when playunh the game are the funnest.
[…] because they’re your enemy, is a freedom I crave in many games. I wanted it in Far Cry 2, and railed against the simulation boundary when it deprived me of the opportunity to play a character I …. I want the freedom to play the fantasy of a badass hero who has the sense of mind not to become a […]