Far Cry 2 is one of the most immersive games I’ve ever played, yet there has never been a game story I have felt more disconnected from.
In Far Cry 2, you are dropped into an african nation erupting into civil war. Your overall mission, as is repeated to you on the loading screen every time you load your game, is to kill the “bastard that armed both sides”. You are free to explore the world, have lots of explosive fiery fights with the agressive militias, and mess about, but to advance the story you have to do missions for the leaders of the warring factions. Every one of these missions is to commit an immoral act that will make the state of the country worse. Stop the production of medicine. Assassinate the chief of police. Destroy a water pipeline. Prevent a peace agreement.
The opening of Far Cry 2 shows you the deteriorating state of the country. Your mission, as you are reminded every time you load your game, is one motivated by the cruelty of the developing war. I wanted to help the country. I wanted to save the civilians. I wanted to stop the war. It’s a credit to the excellent job of the Far Cry 2 team, of all the work they put into immersion, of the work they put into that opening sequence, of the impression of an open world of choices, that I felt so strongly about it. But as Bioshock proved, when you’re a playing a game you’re not in complete control of your own actions. You can only do what the game allows you to do. And Far Cry 2, despite its open sandbox world, will only allow you to do bad things.
It made me angry, at first. There has never been a character in a game I have hated as much as Hector Voorhees, who offered me a mission to disrupt the peace talks between the warring factions just so that he could continue to get work as a mercenary. A mission that the game would not let me refuse. But then over the course of the game, I lost all personal connection to the story and gameworld. I couldn’t stay emotionally involved when despite all appearances, it was made abundantly clear that when it came to the missions, my character was not me, he was some faceless person I would never meet and had no control over.
If you press escape to go into the menu, then go into a journal sub-page, you get to read your character’s thoughts about recent events. From reading this, and from Patrick Redding’s narrative design presentation, I get the sense that there is a predefined character for the player, with defined motives. Namely, that like the rest of the foreigners in the game, you’re a mercenary here to profit from the troubles of the country. Being a villain in a game is perfectly valid kind of story to tell, although I can’t think of an example I’m familiar with that’s been quite so shameless about it as this. Even Hitman included some subtle details to suggest your targets were bad men, in case you needed some kind of moral justification for your killing. Even ignoring that element, I enjoyed being the villain in Hitman. But I hated it in Far Cry 2.
I believe the problem of my reaction to the game comes from a collision between different styles of game storytelling. The Far Cry 2 team have given the protagonist of their story definite motives and character. But in presentation, this is not communicated at all. The protagonist is presented as a blank slate character, in the style of the Half-Life games. We never leave first person perspective, the character never speaks, and even never takes an action that the player did not initiate (it just sometimes doesn’t implement any other actions than the one you’re intended to take). These kind of devices are commonly used in order for the player to put themselves into the protagonist’s shoes, to empathise with him/her, or to prevent the in-game character from ever saying or doing anything that would contradict the player. It helps immersion a lot, which is why I imagine it was chosen to be used in Far Cry 2.
But I’m not sure the story is one that will fit this. In both Far Cry 2 and in Half-Life, the player’s character does whatever he’s told to do. The difference is in what those tasks are, and how they are presented to you. In Half-Life, your goals are generally clearly the only option in the circumstances, the instruction from other characters is merely an explanation of those circumstances. “You’re being hunted, you should get out of the city”, “We’re under attack, defend yourself”. In Far Cry 2, things are not so clear and obvious and urgent. It gives you choice, and only then reveals that its a choice of one, and your option is not one most people would want to pick.
It’s possible that I’m wrong about this, and it isn’t impossible to merge these two styles of storytelling. Maybe it is just a matter of the difficulty of execution, as Clint Hocking claims on Pentadact’s blog. He admits that there were some weaknesses in the early story, and maybe if the changes he describes had made it in, I wouldn’t have had a problem. I nevertheless applaud the Far Cry 2 team for their efforts. It’s an ambitious game, and I think very successful in almost everything it has tried to do, even if I think the story was a poor choice.
Heh. I am afraid to play the game, as I grew up in a war-torn African country, and I fear it would hit a little too close to home.
This is exactly what I thought when playing, you get to be a good friend to your fellow mercs, turning up when they need you, and you bring tapes of the Jackal to the journo, but at the end of the day, you’re playing a mercenary who makes money from conflict.
Right now I’ve stopped playing at the point where you have to take the barge full of weapons to a village/town purely to destabilize everything. Basically, I can’t be that much of a bastard.
(after christmas when I’m in my customary prost festive depression I may well be in a black enough mood to want to kill everyone, maybe then FC2 will suddenly make sense.)
thats definitely a valid point. but then again… playing a mercenary is it that surprising? i see him more as a neutral character.. his main objective seems noble enough ( killing the jackal – although this too he is getting paid to do!) there are also many small quests which could be seen as ‘good’ e.g finding lost evidence against the factions. there are a lot more games out there which are more restrictive in terms of storyline and its generally rpgs that give a good/evil choice. i totally agree with what you are saying about the differing storytelling.. i think maybe that dosent work because its more uncomfortable being put into the shoes of the bad character with a bit better storytelling also they could provide more motives or reasoning behind becoming/being a less than good character.
I haven’t played Fry Cry 2 and so I had no idea it was so one-sided morally. I’ll definitely pick it up now just to see how this was handled.
Too true. I think there choice of allowing you to play as like 15 people also hurt the game badly. When I started the game, The taxi driver was so charismatic, the soldiers you encounter so foreboding. I truly thought it would have a fantastic story. I was very disappointed as I continued on and found such a moment would not happen again, at least until the halfway mark and the transition into the southern area. The few entirely scripted events were very powerful and cinematic, but everything else, not so much. I didn’t even notice if what I was doing was bad, as the story was so terribly dull I just skipped all the mission explanations. They tried to offer you some kind of choice between helping your buddies out and just going along with it, but obviously one would want to help out the buddies every time, seeing as how it gives you so many benefits. Not to mention you get trophies if you always choose your buddies. The game is just so aimless throughout, just the vague idea of killing the jackal/getting out of the country, there’s very little direction. Its obvious that they attempted to give each of your buddies a robust backstory, but it rarely shined through for me. It’s a shame that they wasted such an interesting premise, that could have been truly powerful. It would have been fantastic if you had a choice to help the country or destroy it, but although there are to agencies to relieve your missions from, they’re both inherently evil. They clearly spent far to much time making the story work from each characters perspective then it actually being emotionally engaging.
Wow. Everyone’s so offended by this game. Far Cry 2 is, without a doubt, one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s funny that nobody questions this point. The offense seems to come from where and how the game challenges you. To my mind, that means the game was very successful in doing so. That’s what games do, folks. We play them in order to be challenged.
The reason I’m posting here is to respond to Akrid. If you “just skipped all the mission explanations”, you aren’t really qualified to comment on the story at all, now are you? I’m guessing you haven’t finished the game either, so you have very little idea what character development takes place. Perhaps, reference the above paragraph, and give it another try, this time expecting to be challenged.
This is exactly how I felt (with a dose of “why does everything have to be on the opposite end of the map from other things?”). I wonder if the decision to exclude civilians from the game was supposed to help ease you into the role.
I feel you with the Voorhees hate. I love his accent, I love his attitude, but the things he asked me to do in the second chapter were appalling. The same goes for Nick Greaves – the British APR lieutenant who fills in for Voorhees if you are rescued by an APR lieutenant in the opening chapter rather than a UFLL one. “Here is the only supply of Nitrous Oxide [painkiller] left in the entire country, blow it up”, “Here is an entire barge of high-grade weaponry that I want you to escort here so that we both [read: I] have a job”.
Even your buddy’s motivations are amoral at best, completely immoral at worst. I’m glad that such a game exists, one that forces me to experience something that I wouldn’t normally do [be evil in games] but it is hard to play through.
hi all, I hope resurrecting this thread is not bad form, but I had the exact same troubles with FC 2. it was mainly the comparison with game’s most obvious reference point, joseph conrad’s “heart of darkness”, which I reread recently with an eye on FC 2, which made me sad at the game’s squandered chance at greatness.
“Heart of darkness” – explicitly present in FC 2 in the title of the very last mission – questions if a basically good man must not necessarily begin to commit inhuman acts when faced with absolute power and the absence of moral judgment by others, in the novel’s case the power of the civilized, technical man over the “primitive”, but warlike inhabitants of the inner congo. note that here it is also the quest for profit which leads Kurtz down that path.
I think FC 2 could really have been a turning point in gaming if the player were given even the most minimal choices – influencing the actual outcome or not. eg you should have the option of turning down Voorhees’ offer, ultimately confronting him, to find out that the dirty deed was done by someone else.
as it is, FC 2 offers no choices at all apart from a sort of cynical apathy – “TIA, “this is Africa”, comes to mind — and this despite being an open world game and ironically offering the most sombre and beautiful landscapes in any game ever.
if the player had had the CHANCE to rebel against this sarcastic worldview, his actual defeat in this, the actual surrender to this darkness would have made for an epic experience, and a singular one as well. as it is, the game makes me depressed; the more I win, the more I have to question my acts. or rather, I do; any 14-year-old can blissfully just romp through it and shoot at anything that moves.
whatever. let’s hope the next few games progress in this direction.
This game was so good on so many fronts that it allowed us to concentrate on something most often overlooked or ignored on other games. I really liked the world, and how it changed based on time of day. The weapons and vehicles had little complaint and the AI was enjoyable to play against.
Its just that when the pattern of having to go across the whole map to get to the next mission and that mission having no choice I had to re-evaluate spending any more time in that world. I hope the team takes FC2 as a good stepping stone and adds in some more engaging storylines, as they have the environment pretty nailed.
first of all I would like to say that I am a big fan of your work Robin. Alice and Kev is a great story. I agree with you on the morality issue. I try not to do bad things but when an oppurtunity comes up to cause mayhem for the good of others I’m not upset. I wish I could have just killed the jackal in the end ah well. Thank you again Robin I look forward to your next chapter of Alice and Kev.
I don’t know why everyone thinks this game is so ‘bad’ and ‘appaling’. In this type of situation wouldn’t you do this?
well i mean come on guys….morality? we’re a merc, not a priest, we’re paid to kill people, bad or good, money’s still green (or diamonds still crystal i guess lol)
That’s why I stick to Fallout 3.
Outstanding morality.
Yep David, especially if your character is lvl 30 and “Devil” and actually emptied Little Lamplight (meaning: killed all kids inside it, which is possible with a killable children mod), yet still is the praised hero of the Brotherhood of Steel. I still wish one could actually join the Enclave.
I have two characters in Fallout 3, one good, one evil. Though, evil? Isn’t she just doing anything to survive?
Far Cry 2 put me off eventually because it’s plain repetitive. Rinse and repeat. Over and over and over and over again the same things. It bored me. Morality? It’s a game. It’s for entertainment, not for teaching moral principles (which will, one day, be rendered obsolete anyway.) I can butcher and kill in Fallout 3 without any reprisals. The only thing is that eventually the “law” will come after me. Which isn’t really a difference from the “good” path, because there the Talon mercs will come after you.
If the nature of the game offends you you should finish it. The final encounter with the Jackal is surprising and has a lot to do with the corrupt practices of the mercs in the game
I’m surprised by this entry. Via Rock Paper Shotgun, I found Alice and Kev and greatly enjoyed reading it. Reminds me of the joys Dwarf Fortress can spawn. As I did when the first Sims was first released, I still.. hesitate, and maintain a distance. I can see immense potential but also such a gulf between the current state, then and now, and what it could, what it should be.
But I digress, my point is simply that I found a kinship there with the way you enjoy allowing a game to play itself, and open your eyes to the stories that unfold when you let them.
And here I’m conflicted, as I found FarCry 2 to be one of the least immersive or enjoyable experiences in mainstream gaming for some years.
I’m afraid I never managed to grasp much of the storyline – my six-ten hour play afforded me no gains but an increasing irritation with poor gameplay mechanics and inhuman, ghostly AI.. And then a sense of utter sickness and mounting emotional discomfort as I found the missions to be little more than the slow and methodical slaughter of Afrikaaner, Australian and American men hiding in shacks.
After that many hours spent either crushed under a truck watching a repetition of cinematic ‘rescue sequences’, or creeping around a shanty town shooting mercenaries like myself in the legs for some diamonds that grant me no tangible reward I consider valuable, I never touched the game again.
It was emotionally effective in all the worst ways, while not allowing me the freedom to act as I wished, without a good reason for not being able to.
So sate my curiosity, roBurky – What did you find in this game, that I missed?