I've finally hit the wall with this game, bit like Corky. I've already written my opinions on the game but I kept pushing on trying to find that ray of hope that would keep me going. However that never comes, this game is probably the biggest case of "When you've seen the first few hours, you've seen it all" pretty much. This game is just Ubisoft Padding galore and it has been done lazy style.
Everything outside of the main mission is just so
boring. You feel required to hunt down animals and skin them at the very beginning just to get those extra weapon slots, inventory slots etc. by then there's nothing else in the entire hunting aspect that changes. With that said, the primary quest line isn't even that interesting.
Billboards when you've liberated camps are either "Go here and pick up the designated weapon and kill X number of Y animal" and "Go here and kill generic commander with a knife". Also, camp liberation is fine for 2-3 camps and then it's just pure copy & paste, worst case of it actually.
Bunch of "Find X crap to ... well, something".
Go here and drive this quad through a few checkpoints, it won't actually be challenging as you always have like 10 seconds to go when you finish.
I haven't actually seen a game in years where it's so padded with boring crap. It feels like they made a huge map and when they had to populate it with stuff they realized the map was way too big to do something substantial and just added a few small mini-games so to speak and copy pasta'd them all over the place.
And as people are so keen to point out, it's optional. Very true but that doesn't make the opinion on this optional fluff any less valid. I like doing side objectives and stuff outside of the main storyline in open world game but I'd also like this content not to suck. They made content that suck and I'm forced to only do the main story which ... Is rubbish.
I mean, most open world games are quite fun outside of missions, just going around, exploring or causing some mayhem. However As this game is just a jungle x 1000, there's not much mayhem to cause. The entire island is as exciting to explore as a glass of water and the entire visual style gets mundane quickly and the game's atmosphere is extremely underwhelming. Honestly, most open world games are fun to explore because there's areas with so much variety - Either a new city style, snowy landscape or a new desert setting ... Something! Here it's just the same everywhere ... Everywhere.
This game needed what almost every Ubisoft game needs, a big ass knife to cut out all their padding and someone to tell the development studio to focus a bit. Imagine if they did the island 1/3 the size, focused more on the camp variety and make it more challenging to take over. Create some more variety, made hunting a lot more tension filled etc.
As I've said before, I respect that people disagree and love the game but this game just doesn't stimulate me at all. It gets boring at record speed which is surprising due to its apparent size and concept ... On paper it sounds good.
I reached that golden point where I just get bored thinking about it. I almost can't be bothered picking up where I left off in AC3 as that is apparently the exact same padding hell.
Corky, we should do some co-op, see if that liven up the game a bit
