Tom Penny said:Any mods that make this game not suck?
AkuMifune said:The funny thing to me is how divisive this game is, even on GAF, where I thought more "hardcore" gamers could appreciate the how unique an experience this really is. Whatever.
NEOPARADIGM said:Two things really soured me on this game:
1) No sound options. Specifically, at least while playing with headphones, the enemy dialog was SOOO loud, guys who were 30 feet away from me sounded like they were standing right next to me. Killed immersion.
2) I just couldn't get past how everyone wanted to kill me from the moment they saw me. I'm just a guy tooling around in a jeep. What's the fucking problem, assholes? I would have liked the game ten times more if there was a simple "enemies don't attack until fired upon" mechanic like in Hitman, or some kind of notoriety aspect like in Assassin's Creed.
TheFightingFish said:Just getting into this now on PC. Has anyone else had issues with janky mouse aiming? I know that folks would point to my wireless mouse as the culprit, but it's a sidewinder and has seemed butter smooth in everything I've used it for so far (Crysis, TF2). In FC2 the mouse just seems to skip and jump all over the place, making aiming next to impossible and playing with sensitivity and mouse smoothing didn't seem to help. I can tell it's the mouse since strafing around really fast with the look keys doesn't seem plagued with the same issues. Is PC gamepad support solid? If so maybe I should just do that, though I prefer a mouse.
Huggy said:Switch to direct x 9 for correct mouse accuracy.
I'm not sure which graphics effects you'll be trading for it. Didn't see anything special.
Huggy said:Switch to direct x 9 for correct mouse accuracy.
I'm not sure which graphics effects you'll be trading for it. Didn't see anything special.
Blast Processing said:Steam has me at 32 hours in, and I just got access to the second map.
I choose to go help my buddy Quarbani at Mike's, but he and everyone aside from me was killed anyway. What happens if you go to the church?
Strider2K99 said:So I started playing this on PC recently and two things I noticed:
1. I have it installed under Vista, but for some reason, the option to enable DX9/DX10 isn't in the options menu and I've seen the option in pictures I found online. Any idea why this is the case?
Strider2K99 said:So I started playing this on PC recently and two things I noticed:
1. I have it installed under Vista, but for some reason, the option to enable DX9/DX10 isn't in the options menu and I've seen the option in pictures I found online. Any idea why this is the case?
2. For some odd reason, from within the game pause menu, the game won't let me put the mouse cursor over "Quit" (as in quit to windows), but I can use the arrow keys to highlight and pick the option. Weird.
Aon said:It's unlikely but you might not have a DX10 compatible card. I'm sure you'd know if you do, but sometimes people forget. Sounds odd though.
Major Slack said:Heard about it, heard about the whole open-world, go anywhere, anytime thing. Thought you'd give it a try. And you did. And let me guess... You got about halfway through and you found it extremely repetitive. The game seems to consist of one endless litany of encounters with guard posts that respawn too fast manned with guards equipped with telescopic vision and backed up by enemy patrols that always manage to take you by surprise and shoot your vehicle into a smoldering chug-a-lug. The game is just drive, stop, shoot, repair, drive, stop, shoot, repair, occasionally complete an objective and then more drive, stop, shoot, repair, et cetera, ad nauseam, ad what-the-hell-how-is-this-fun?!?
Well let me tell you friend... Been there, done that. But now things are different. Now, believe it or not, I happen think that Far Cry 2 is, far and away, the best video game EVER.
How did I make this miraculous transformation? I'm not sure exactly what sparked this revelation but about halfway through Far Cry 2, after experiencing gameplay very similar to that outlined in the first paragraph above, I suddenly had an epiphany of sorts and realized, hey wait a minute... I'm going at this all wrong.
The first and most important change I made to my approach was I just simply slowed down. The epiphany I had was that Far Cry 2 is a game that doesn't lead you about by the nose but rather responds to you and the way you play. It waits for you to act and then it reacts. So if you go at the game hard and fast, it will come at you hard and fast. ALL the time. If, on the other hand, you slow down, and I mean really slow down, you will take the game by the balls, you will own the landscape, you will own the guard posts and you will own the enemy patrols.
NEOPARADIGM said:in my opinion, the best stoner game this gen
Clint Hocking left Ubisoft, so it's already too late.NEOPARADIGM said:Game was an acquired taste to be sure (officially took me nearly a year and probably a good 20 hours before I fell in love), but the last thing I want to see is a FC3 that ditches everything I love about this game in favor of some "we-need-to-attract-COD-fans" bullshit.
So .... just saying.
My thoughts exactly specifically the respawning checkpoints...XPE said:I think FC2 is the perfect example of how easy it is to ruin a game, its not that its a bad game, but few things just really let it down
Agency: Past, Present and Future
In her seminal 1998 work Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray first formalized the concept of agency, defining it as the feeling we get when we take meaningful action in an interactive system and experience the results of our decisions and choices. Agency is, in effect, the aggregate of computer, program and designer telling you that your expression in the game world matters. While this concept may seem straightforward and obvious, its implications are profound.
Aside from 'the interactive system' (or for our purposes, the video game) there is no other medium of human expression that literally validates the expression of the audience. Agency, therefore, is not just a feature of games, it is the very foundation of what games are and how they mean. It is not simply that your expression and its validation matters, it's that your expression and its validation are all that matters. This is a fundamental departure from the author-centric notion of what art is and what it can be, and it is no understatement to say that agency changes everything.
A decade ago, with the critical acclaim of high agency games such as the Thief and System Shock games from now defunct Looking Glass Studios, and the Deus Ex games from Ion Storm Austin, agency was on the rise. When I got my own start in the game industry in 2001, it seemed obvious that the path that would see games delivered into the promised land where they'd be recognized as a legitimate form of creative and artistic expression was by increasing the agency they offered. Unfortunately, despite their critical acclaim and their lasting influence on professional designers, these high agency games were largely commercial failures.
To compound the problem, Microsoft went toe to toe with Sony by launching the Xbox and bringing what was traditionally the highest agency type of game possible the so-called immersive sim fps to a more casual (and explosively growing) audience of console gamers. Halo is still a pretty high agency game, but compared to the complexity and nuance of player expression available in games in the 'Looking Glass School', it was a step backwards. But it was a mega-hit and it helped define the expectations of an entirely new generation of gamers.
The last decade has seen a widespread reduction in agency. Racing games like the Burnout series became 'chutes of awesome' instead of games of skill and strategy and tactics. RPGs like KoTOR constrained agency to the mid and high levels of play, while turning over most low-level agency to probabilistic determination. Even traditionally high agency first-person shooters have increasingly sacrificed the potential for incredible awesomeness to arise from player agency, highly interconnected systems, and emergence, in exchange for pre-masticated 'wow sequences' that are exciting to watch - once - and rarely meaningful to actually play. Even GTA - the king of agency 10 years ago, has seen its system space massively curtailed in its latest iteration in order to make more room for the authored narrative. Action adventure games rely heavily on non-systemic QTEs and unique qameplay one-offs in an attempt to be more filmic while often missing the point of what both film and games are.
For every step backward, there are steps forward to be sure. Oblivion and Fallout 3 more than answered the call for an RPG with incredible agency across all levels. The Bioshock games have proved themselves worthy successors to the System Shock series. Portal offers irrefutable proof that ludonarrative dissonance can be dealt with if the writer realizes that his work must be in service of the player experience and not vice versa. This is to say nothing of multiplayer games from WoW to Modern Warfare to Little Big Planet to Left 4 Dead, where agency will (hopefully) always reign.
I do not generally believe in 'slippery slope' arguments. Mankind (and perhaps game developers especially) are more than the wet clay certain mythologies would have it we are wrought from, we are thinking beings. One of the things we do best is balance and optimize complex situations. I am more fearful of arms race scenarios. Arms races happen when easily predictable gains along a single axis suck intelligent well-meaning people toward inevitable conclusions that they are unable to avoid despite their clear visibility. Incremental sacrifices of agency in exchange for massive leaps forward in development of authored film-like narrative technique is - in my opinion - just such an arms race. Especially if that race is the Zeno's paradox I believe it to be.
While selling games that appeal to a broad audience is our responsibility as professionals, we also have a responsibility of stewardship over the resource of agency. As the newest, and perhaps the final domain of human artistic expression, and as the democratizing force of human creativity, the responsible and sustainable development and exploitation of agency is critical to our collective future. Over the next ten years, the choices we make in terms of delivering agency to players and developing their taste for agency will impact not just the direction of the game industry, but the direction of the development of human culture in general.
It is not, and it never will be, a mistake to make games that offer all different degrees of agency, from the high to the low. But it is a very serious mistake indeed to dismiss its importance, to adopt a laissez-faire attitude, or to neglect our responsibility as pioneers into the last great frontier of our cultural development.
JB1981 said:I need to finish this game, I remember really enjoying it but stopped playing for some reason
JB1981 said:I need to finish this game, I remember really enjoying it but stopped playing for some reason
Shake Appeal said:Speaking of Clint Hocking, this should be printed out and nailed to the desk of everyone working on videogames today:
(from http://www.clicknothing.com/)
For all its flaws, agency is what makes Far Cry 2 one of the best shooters of this generation.
That is a great piece!Shake Appeal said:Speaking of Clint Hocking, this should be printed out and nailed to the desk of everyone working on videogames today:
(from http://www.clicknothing.com/)
For all its flaws, agency is what makes Far Cry 2 one of the best shooters of this generation.
This game is free for ps+ users this week just a heads up