Far Cry 2 takes an entirely different approach to allowing a player to carve out their own path through Africa, and one that doesn't compromise the previous game's reputation as an uncomplicated but thrilling shooter. The narrative designer says it’s a shooter, it s a game about killing people. So the biggest input, or the biggest monkey wrench the player can throw into any kind narrative flow, is by systematically murdering the cast of characters. What they needed was to be sure they could provide a story that wouldn't be fragile – He says, ‘We weren't trying to resist the player's efforts to change it, but we weren't left with chaos and carnage if the player's being a sociopath either’. Improvisation
In short, it's less about shooting first and asking questions later, and more about answering the questions yourself - with bullets. It's a relatively fresh approach that could well be successful, in that rather than being conscious of which conversation option will be the best way to steer the storyline, the plot is a larger picture painted from smaller interactions and decisions are made in a way that's not self-conscious. It should also mean that those occasions where you reload because you made the 'wrong' decision in a crucial exchange, are few and far between.
By presenting the player with lots of little choices, a few medium sized choices and the occasional big choice, the player has a stronger sense that it's built on his choices rather than something some angry, vengeful or indifferent deity has imposed on him. It means the player gets to hear a lot more of the content if they want to, and if they don't they're not waiting around for the inevitable cutscene to interrupt the flow of the game.
Having spent some quality time shooting, driving and incinerating in Far Cry 2's lavish representation of Africa, we can see why that flow is so treasured. Action sequences; easily overcome through a little careful planning, but as enemies outflank and surprise you, each battle becomes a frantic series of improvisations. Legislating for a jammed rifle, or simply the meager ammunition supplies available, means you'll often be thrown into a situation where your wits are your most dangerous asset. Much has been made of fire propagation and while it'd be easy to dismiss it as a gimmick, it's often the most effective way to seal off the aggressive Al and ensure that at least one angle of attack can be considered eliminated. The conflicts we engaged in were frantic and, once the enemies were aware of our presence, we were hunted down mercilessly.
Total control
Scouting an area with the monocular, which automatically marks your map with items of interest, is one way to tip the odds slightly more in your favor, though, as Clint Hocking Creative Director, explains. ‘You can mark sniper and gunner positions because that defines where dangerous fire will be coming from. You can also mark health and ammunition supplies and mark vehicles. Instead of saying I have to mark snipers, I have to mark rocketeers, I have to mark mounted weapons, marking any one of those things reveals them all. Same with the ammo piles, I mark any kind of ammo pile as it reveals all of the ammo stores in that location’. It seems one of the few concessions to unreality, and even then this magical map is a tangible item, meaning you won't be pulling it up when the ordnance starts flying. This is in keeping with a theme of grounding the player in the world - there are no third-person cutscenes and items are collected with embodied arms and hands.
Hand in hand with that grounding is the sense that the player is the protagonist. Although a character is chosen from a cast of 12, the rest of whom become the cast of Al buddies, the player will never find themselves playing second fiddle to the scriptwriters. ‘The games I like to play don't force me to be someone that I'm not,’ Clint says. ‘There's nothing I find more frustrating in a game than having a character that I'm playing say something that I fundamentally disagree with or didn't want to say. What I want is to give the player an empty vessel to put himself in, so we've taken these 12 buddy characters, and you choose one of those to be your avatar. You're then subtracting that character from the script, and he's no longer able to be called by the dynamic elements of the story to fill a role because he's you, and he doesn't have any personality except that which you give him’.
From what we've seen, Far Cry 2 looks like it will be able to achieve an impressive reconciliation between the meathead gunplay of the original and the opportunity to really brand this rich, open world with your own decisions and personality. And as Redding explains, even those who would ordinarily actively ignore those decisions will see the world changing through their actions. ‘The meatheads don't even realize that they're participating in the story. They're like, ‘do I want to burn this guy, do I want to shoot him once he's burning, do I want to wound him and wait for his buddy to come out and save him and then shoot that guy?’ But what they don't know is that it all adds up - we're keeping track of it. We get the question a lot, 'why is it a Far Cry game?', but to me there is no better franchise to try to introduce hardcore gamers into these crazy ideas we have about procedural narrative’.
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