I’ve been thinking lately about high agency level design and I remembered hearing that Far Cry 3’s outposts were really well done, so it’s been on my list for a while. Since I’ve been working on a game that might use a similar style of levels, I decided it was a good time to give it a go. There are spoilers in here because the story isn’t really the important part of this game. I also assume some familiarity with the genre, so I apologize if you’ve never played any of the sort.
For some reason, I never quite picked up that Far Cry 3 was such an Ubisoft Formula game. It became clear rather quickly though that the game was basically Assassin’s Creed (which I haven’t played, but have watched) with higher powered guns. I do not mind this. Despite the objective flow feeling exactly how you’d expect from what it is, they use the formula because it feels good to play.
Part of that formula involves a lot of side objectives. There are animal hunting ones which I did because they unlock some handy upgrades and are fun little side excursions. There were these racing ones that I didn’t care for (The game very much wants you to drive around in cars, but I always just drove into a river so I mostly ended up sprinting everywhere). There were also some story ones that I probably missed because you had to talk to random people to get them. In the end, I probably only did ¼ of the possible side missions.
Other than those, you are clearing outposts, climbing towers, or doing the main story quests. I honestly loved the tower climbing parts. They’re very simple climbing puzzles, trivially so, but they do an excellent job of breaking up the action with some some more relaxing “stop and remember how pretty this game is” gameplay. Same for hang-gliding around, which was awesome but I wished I could’ve done more of. Gliding is one of my favorite modes of transport in games; controlling a glider has its own satisfying minigame and gives players agency over how they travel while still having enough interesting limitations to be balancable.
The outposts are the main highlight, and are just dynamic enough to keep things interesting for the game’s dozen hour runtime. I do wish the ‘reinforcements’ timer were a bit longer so that I could feasibly rambo the camp before they arrived, but it still acts as a good incentive to disable the alarm stealthily first if you can. Each one is its own fun puzzle where the player gets to choose their approach. I especially liked the binocular mechanic, which lets you scout and mark players ahead of time in what is maybe my favorite implementation of that mechanic. I talked about this a while back in my post on detective mode and love to see the evolution there.
There’s also a skill tree system, which I felt had enough compelling options to stay interesting, but all the best ones are all gated behind story quests. I know this is common and it’s a fine way to ensure players don’t get caught up grinding sidequests forever, but I wished the gated abilities felt more impactful. It took me most of the game to unlock the faster sprint, but did it really need to? Is that too powerful for me to have early on? It took me enough of the game to unlock my fun tools that I didn’t get as much time with them as I would have liked. It’s a nice touch how your unlocked skills add to your tattoo though; it’s an awesome little immersion bit.
Far Cry 3 was interesting from that perspective. You play as Jason, a seemingly doucheyboy who is out partying with his friends when you’re all captured by a psycho gang of criminals. I appreciated what they were doing with the characters initially–it was compelling to see a character put into a crazy situation and freaking out about it appropriately.
Before long though, Jason gets oh so very much into killing and stimming and causing mayhem (which he–that is to say, you–are also unreasonably good at). I did find this a bit unsettling at first, but once you accept that the game is just an action movie power fantasy, it’s…fine.
Vaas is also a great villain, and you immediately believe that he’s both crazy enough to kill you, and to give you that small chance to escape which the story hinges on. For some reason though, you kill him ⅔ of the way through the game and then have to deal with his boss for the rest of the game, and he’s just an all around less interesting character.
On the whole, the story missions were engaging enough that I found myself invested in them. They make frequent use of these dream sequences where you mostly just walk slowly through and I thought they worked well, both as a gameplay pacing tool and a storytelling tool. While the missions do tend to involve outpost clearing in addition to their main objective (or at least, you probably want to clear the outpost near your mission first), there are some fun ones that mix up gameplay. One issue I ran into there is that, while much of the game encourages stealthy gameplay, some of the story missions are definitely designed for you to go in guns blazing. The thing is, you don’t know this until you are doing them and I sometimes found myself unsure of whether the game wanted me to be stealthy or start chucking molotovs. Games like Dishonored are able to make both options viable, but here it seemed like you were supposed to do one or the other and I had to guess which.
On my playthrough I decided to be Oliver Queen (it fits the game really well!), so I used my bow and knife was much as possible.
For some missions though, especially ones where you have to protect allies from enemies, you really need to be using guns, mines, and so on. I appreciated how these missions mixed up the gameplay, but they also took me the most attempts and caused me the most frustration. The combination of “I can’t control this npc at all so it’s obnoxious when they die” and the missions being very difficult on a first attempt felt at odds with the free-flowing “choose your power fantasy” nature of the rest of the game.
Until you know where the enemies are going to come from and which waves have heavies and so forth, you’re probably going to die a few times. That’s not always bad, but FC3 is generally very good about offering the player the information they need to make interesting decisions (for instance, you can always scout outposts ahead of time), so I found myself feeling suddenly much more helpless in these missions. Maybe that was the intent, but again, I’m not sure it fits the fantasy.
On the whole, I truly enjoyed Far Cry 3. It’s not anything groundbreaking, but it executes well on what it’s trying to do and is definitely good fun if you’re into the fantasy it’s selling. I’m not sure when I’ll next pick up the series, but I expect it’ll be a decent time when I do.