HaraDaya said:
Dogstile said:
I'm going to sum this up with "you realise you've just excused it for every bad design decision they made because you liked it, right?". The majority of the people who played the game didn't like it because it was boring. It was fun for a couple of hours, the travelling, the grinding, everything. Then I realised that I actually wanted to be playing the game and sneaking across the game map wasn't playing the game, especially seeing as if you wanted to get anything done within a sensible time (sensible being within an hour for a mission) you had to drive fast and then get the heat off you when you got there.
After the novelty of exploration wears off, the game really has nothing to keep you going. It stops being "lets sneak past this checkpoint" and becomes "for fucks sake, I have to go past that again!".
The point is, Far Cry 2 is not a bad game. But most people didn't like it. And that's fine, I hate Call of Duty and it's scripted campaign, I think it's the enemy of good games. Millions of others buy it every year regardless of my opinion.
So what if a mission takes over an hour? If you find travelling and encountering dynamic scenarios is boring, then Far Cry 2 is indeed not for you. But that doesn't make it a bad game. You're trying to play a different game than Far Cry 2 is.
Having not played Far Cry 2 (played the PC version of Far Cry 1), it sounds like it's stuck in that awkward phase of sandbox games, where you have these huge commutes between missions (Far Cry and Crysis had this problem IMO), but without doing what it needed to do to make that interesting to most players.
To use Fallout 3 and Skyrim as examples, the game knows that exploration is key, so you're required to find locations first, but because they know you'll often want to travel there quickly, they have a robust Quick Travel system so you're not constantly dragged into random skirmishes you're not interested in dealing with. Half the time I'll just walk wherever I need to go, because getting distracted from your objective is half the fun... but sometimes you just want to get the job done and those distractions are a giant pain in the ass.
And I agree with your observations about stealth based on my experience with Far Cry 1. Stealth was possible, but the game didn't program in a lot of artificial stupidity to make it easy. You couldn't just crouch walk your way through brush and expect them not to notice you, because you're a six foot man in a loud Hawaiian t-shirt. But half the fun of Far Cry was utilizing stealth to plan an assault.
Of course, in that game, everyone complained about snipers taking them out from a mile down the road. Which probably says a lot about who does and doesn't like these kind of games. If you think walking down a road to an enemy base is how a game should be played, you'll hate Far Cry, because the game will absolutely punish you for doing something like that. It's a game for the guy who wants to circle round the back and hop a fence.
