I think Farcry 2 is better than 3.

Guy from the 80's

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So I've started playing Farcry 2 again and I have to say its better than 3. Farcry 2 has the single player (you are alone) feel and story that Farcry had, but the story with other characters in Farcry 3 became a bit too annoying for me. Yeah I know its a tropical paradise and in that respect it makes sense to have someone on vacation. Its just that the protagonist calling out for his friends sounding like he ate too much Valium made me care less for each cut scene. In the beginning it was ok though, and Vas that dirty bastard did put a nice twist to it. (such as when he ties a block of concrete around your foot) But after a while the novelty wore off.

Now the things that to me makes Farcry 2 better are the following.

Better and more varied geography. The island in Farcry 3 was very repetitive. If you had seen one quarter of it you had seen it all. Africa had some pretty nice rivers with varying landscape. From narrow corridors to more open spaces.

The buddy system. Having friends you could somewhat interact with gave it a nice twist. Especially when they came to your rescue and/or went missing because you didn't bail them out of trouble.

Settlements/patrolled/guarded areas. Farcry 2 had for example a train yard that was packed with enemies, played a mission there and it was an excellent place to snipe from a distance, while the npc's closed the distance and flanked you. Also private property like a heavily guarded mansion. Never really experience anything like it in Farcry 3.

Better and more varied guard posts. The guard posts in Farcry 2 was better and more varied...and were also located at river banks.

Lack of radio towers. The radio towers in Farcry 3 was a nice feature at first....the first 5-8 of them of them. After a while it became a chore...and in many ways it was necessary to do them.

Farcry 2 had GPS....and a sensor/locator for diamonds. The diamonds was ofcorse optional, just like the packages in Grand Theft Auto. Still a nice feature. A proper map that you could use while driving, with the ability to see both local and larger area.

Weapons. Degrading weapons was fun. It added more difficulty and you had to think and consider tactics when your weapon started jamming. Nothing raised stress more than a weapon jamming in the middle of a fire fight, especially at close range. You could pick up enemy guns later, but only after you had killed the owner naturally.

Prettiness. Sunset in Africa was pretty sweet, not to mention driving across the Savannah with winds blowing in tall grass. You could see the wind make wave like patterns. Rain was also better in Farcry 2.

This is my subjective opinion, anyone else agree? I'm playing 2 on hardcore and its excellent fun!




edit : I also forgot Pala. That was also nice, sevral factions at one location...less travel time. Speaking of travel time, the bus stops in Farcry 2 is better than fast travel. Fasttravel removes some of the large open world feel. Fixed bus stops in Farcry 2 made it better as you couldnt just fasttravel right next to your mission area.
 

Casual Shinji

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I had more fun with Far Cry 3 not having to constantly clear the same guard post just to advance along the road. Those respawning guards fucking broke the game for me.

Far Cry 2 also suffered from a severe lack of... life. The gameworld felt empty and lifeless.
 

Guy from the 80's

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Casual Shinji said:
I had more fun with Far Cry 3 not having to constantly clear the same guard post just to advance along the road. Those respawning guards fucking broke the game for me.

Far Cry 2 also suffered from a severe lack of... life. The gameworld felt empty and lifeless.
That was a bit annoying, though it could be fun depending on the individual guardposts. But it was just one thing of the whole package and you could just drive through them.
 

SlaveNumber23

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I found that both games got tedious rather quickly, as much as I enjoyed them. While halfway through either game I found that I had lost all motivation to do any optional quests etc and just rush the story missions instead for the sake of getting the game over with.

Don't get me wrong, I really liked both games, but there is some sort of loneliness and hollowness about them that really got to me after playing them a certain amount of time.

I do agree with most of your points, though Far Cry 3 had a lot more variation in terms of enemies and I really enjoyed sneaking around with a bow, its a shame the bow lost its effectiveness towards the end of the game. I'm pretty indecisive about which game I like more, but the fact that Far Cry 3 had the bow swings me in its favor. I noticed that the AI in Far Cry 3 was pretty crappy, but I can't remember if the Far Cry 2 AI was better or worse.
 

Casual Shinji

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Guy from the 80 said:
Casual Shinji said:
I had more fun with Far Cry 3 not having to constantly clear the same guard post just to advance along the road. Those respawning guards fucking broke the game for me.

Far Cry 2 also suffered from a severe lack of... life. The gameworld felt empty and lifeless.
That was a bit annoying, though it could be fun depending on the individual guardposts. But it was just one thing of the whole package and you could just drive through them.
It got in the way of a sense of progression. Clearing enemy areas in cool and meticulous fashion becomes totally meaningless, as well as fucking tedious, when they just spawn right back the next minute.
 

Guy from the 80's

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SlaveNumber23 said:
Don't get me wrong, I really liked both games, but there is some sort of loneliness and hollowness about them that really got to me after playing them a certain amount of time.
In a flight sim kind of way. I've started to love this game, but it happened during my second playthrough and the first being years ago.

Casual Shinji said:
It got in the way of a sense of progression. Clearing enemy areas in cool and meticulous fashion becomes totally meaningless, as well as fucking tedious, when they just spawn right back the next minute.
When you clear guard a guard post the npc's do not respawn, perhaps it has been patched? I remember(that they respawned) this from the pc version I played years a go (now playing the 360 version). I've also found that if you engage lets say a patrol and detroy them it takes hours (in game time) for them to reappear. But that makes sense as the different factions have their own turfs.
 

Zhukov

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I found them both equally tedious.

Preferred the health system in FC2.

However, FC3 at least had Vaas who was always fun to watch.
 

Festus Moonbear

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I found FC2 the superior game without a doubt; actually I consider it to be one of the greatest games of all time and my personal favourite FPS, so maybe I'm biased. I was actually really late to FC2, discovering it just a few weeks before FC3 came out, so I pretty much played them each for the first time back-to-back. FC3 annoyed me immediately with all its gamey bullshit: What's that big yellow dot on my brother's back? an objective marker? NOOOOOO! Surely it will disappear after the intro, like it's just part of the training, right? NOOOOOO! The HUD is so crowded it's unbearable, and even though you can turn some of it off (on a console I mean), enough remains to stay annoying. There is not the same sense of freedom in FC3 - you can tell the devs want you to play it in a certain way and are going to punish you for not doing so. Sometimes literally with 'you are leaving the mission area' insta-fails. In FC2 they just gave you an objective and let you do it however you wanted. The only thing you could do wrong was die. FC3 is constantly holding your hand as well, reminding you to do things you should already know - I don't need to be told to shoot the cage and let the animal out for the 20th time, or that crouching makes less noise after 30+ hours of gameplay. Leave me alone! This stuff gets to me and takes me out of the game.

As for FC2, I didn't really get what people were complaining about. Respawning checkpoints? Well yes, you can't kill everyone in the country and have it to yourself. It's easy enough to avoid with proper planning. Get your map out (your real map that you hold in your hand in real time - God I love FC2), and work out a route that won't take you past guard posts: one way in, another way out, cross-country. In FC3 you just empty the geography of content - notice that Ubisoft actually added a 'respawn guard posts' option because people were complaining about it! You can't please anyone, it seems. Anyway, I actually appreciated the guard posts respawning because sometimes I'd come out of a mission feeling fired up and ready to go, and just drive madly towards the nearest guard post for some explodey fun. (Come on, dickwads, I've got a grenade launcher and I'm not afraid to use it.) It also made for some great random encounters which are the best part of the game, as intended by the devs.

Malaria? Just added to the tension for me and the sense of desperation and foreboding: this is not going to end well for you, because violence rarely does.

Degrading weapons? Same thing, except that again this could easily be avoided with proper planning. My weapons didn't jam for me (after the first hour or so when I didn't know what I was doing) until right at the end of the game when there were no more weapon shops available. Again, this adds to the sense of autonomy: plan properly before setting out, and do the mission however you want.

Anyway, I could go on forever about this, but I won't. I'm not going to say that people are wrong for not liking FC2 or whatever, but just that personally I thought it was the superior game for both gameplay and thematic reasons. FC2 feels like it's actually about something, and something pretty deep. When I finished it for the first time, I was literally shaking and dumbfounded for the next 48 hours. Then I started FC3. Yeah yeah, it's good, but not in the same way. It has no effect on me other than to give me a bit of fun as I play it. And the times when FC3 really shines are the times when it's closest to FC2: random encounters, assassination missions, taking down guard posts however I feel like doing it. But it always feels like FC2-lite to me. A fluffy Big Mac compared to a manly Cornish pasty.
 

Tom_green_day

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I prefer Far Cry 3, but like you said they took out some really important elements-
-Weapon degrading. It was tense in a firefight to break your gun, pick up and enemy gun that was inferior or have it jam etc. In 3 all the guns are more perfect, and this rarely happens.
-Buddy system, as you said. Made the character have more depth as he had allies, instead of being all alone.
-Diamonds. In 3, money and therefore guns was way too common, and there was no progression as you could get guns for free almost straight away. 2 had a longer haul of improvement.
-Vehicle repair. In 3, why do you need to carry a separate equipment to repair vehicles? Enough said.
-Respawning enemies. It did get annoying at points, but upon completing the game 3 felt empty as there were no more enemies, and the achievements that required certain kills were locked off until future playthroughs.
-Health system. It was more tense if you could only heal when you had meds, instead of all the time.
-The gameplay in 2 felt more refined and fluid. In 3 it felt as if it had taken a step back and was more jarring and 'realistic' like Battlefield, instead of fun and easy to use such as in CoD.
 

piinyouri

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I totally get this.
As much as I do prefer FC3 overall, FC2 just has certain things that 3 doesnt.

The feeling of survival is much more prevalent in 2, I just dig the atmosphere so much more, flaws and all.
 

80sboy

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Yeah...never have I played a game that bored me more to tears as FC2.

The game just went on and on with the missions, and nothing seemed to be happening even though - storywise - there technically was.

Metaphorically speaking to give an example:

The game for me was a like a picture of a delicious chocolate cake...as good as it looked. It's still a picture. Flat and tasteless.

The game looked like there was a lot going on in it, but I just couldn't taste it...I didn't feel it.

On the other hand...FC3 was almost a 180 in that respect.
 

Elementary - Dear Watson

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I think a mash up of the 2 would be amazing! Some of the gameplay elements made Farcry 3 superior, and they ironed out a lot of the issues from 2. For instance the Jamming weapons didn't help gameplay in 2, the repetitive guard post clearing - just so you could go to the next waypoint, I don't think the map worked like that - it was too awkward, and I didn't like the way you couldn't go everywhere in the game world, and you were just essentially funnelled into certain paths and areas, with hills and mountains you could only dream of climbing!

I agree though, the characters were a lot better, and I liked the way you helped them and they helped you, but always felt like they were seperate to your story... not a team, just friends with a mercs code.
The set places were cool, but they often felt a bit strange and out of place... like why was there a random train yard? And why were there THAT many boats on that lake? And why did every village look SO different?
The graphics were beautiful though... and I liked the feeling of isolation you had for a lot of the game... you wern't adopted as a savior by literally the first character you meet in the game! Saying that they could have done the factions a little better... it didn't matter who you worked for, all guards on the island would try and kill you anyway!

I really didn't like all the pointless long distance walking in 2 either. You would try and drive somewhere, and inevitably you would lose your car somehow, and have to walk miles to a save point or somewhere safe... and then you would take a wrong turn (because the bulky map was just annoying to get out all the time) and you would receive a shed loads RPGs to the face... dead... Gah!
 

Arcade Hero X

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@Paperboy I completely agree I got soooo bored playing FC2 because no matter how many missions I did I didn't feel as though I was making any progress. I mean both factions could have been the exact same really an it would have been hard to tell the difference. The missions themselves were bland usually go here and kill or blow a certain thing up.

But in saying this some of the stuff in FC2 was amazing. The weapon degradation and the fire physics I mean how many other games can you fire and RPG and the tall grass behind you lights on fire or the actual rocket bounce off it's intended target because it was too close. Can't forget ripping nails out of your hand to heal yourself too and my personal favorite RANDOM COW OUT OF FUCKING NOWHERE charges across your car bonnet.

FC3 was better simply because of the story, I mean every mission felt as though you were working towards something and even if you decided to do the side missions they were always interesting enough. I personally didn't like that they gave you every gun in the game for free I mean what was the point of money in that game, Those arguing that the world felt empty in FC3 I mean there was loads to see. You can usually see some friendly jeeps driving by and some citizens doing there thing on the roadsides. There was also all the different animals to hunt or use to your advantage especially when attacking an outpost i mean who needs a buddy when you have a bear who actually attacks the enemy or at least distracts them rather then getting glitch stuck behind a poxy tree or other obstacle that they could just walk around.
 

Nihilm

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I liked Far cry 1 more than either 2 or 3.

It had a better story then either of those and the gameplay was tough as nails for a singleplayer game. I had loads of fun.
Far cry 2 got so boring after 4 hours and had a CoD-like story without the cutscenes and it was stretched out to last the entire game.

Far cry 3 was a lot more fun, but I still prefered 1.

Personally didn't like the change to open world, seemingly random missions, etc. Also preferred the old health/armor system the original had.

I think both FC 2 and 3 are kind of mediocre, 2 being a lot more mediocre than 3. On the argument between 2 and 3, 3 wins hands down :/ .

Atleast i could stand playing 3 more than 4 hours before stoping and never playing it again.
 

L4Y Duke

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I finished Far Cry 2, and yesterday picked up 3.

I will say that both games have their merits, but in terms of enjoyment, I'm liking 3 more than I did 2. In Far Cry 2, the endlessly respawning checkpoints got old after a while, and the diamond and tape fetch quests wore out their welcome quickly.

On the other hand, the totems and letters in 3 are much better, as not only do you have the option of just buying a map to cut out all the desperate searching crap (and it is an option, not a mandatory helping hand of contempt for one's inadequacies), but getting to is quite often more of a challenge than finding where they are.

Plus, it's particularly entertaining to see a guard outpost of pirates freak out over the fact that their pet tiger somehow got out of its cage and is now a little pissed.
 

AT God

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I haven't played Far Cry 3 yet but I am going out on a limb to say Far Cry 2 was one of the most poorly reviewed games I have ever played. Usually I like games that critics hate and love games critics like, I hated this game.

The setup for the game, the universe, the story, all great, but THERE IS NO GAME. I want feedback on this rant because I finally forced myself to see Far Cry 2 to the bitter end last week and having seen that people hated the ending (the best part of the game in my opinion) I don't understand what others saw in this game.

Again, I will reiterate that all the mechanics are awesome, I loved the buddy system, I liked the weapons, although flipping the viewmodels on weapons to show the ejection ports should be a punishable offense, the great Counter-Strike did it and it was WRONG. I liked the way the driving handled mechanically, the dynamic health system was awesome and stomach turning (the animation where he ejects the bullet from his elbow by snapping it back really fast gives me chills), I even liked the degrading weapons, kinda.

But what I fail to understand is what people saw in the game. They made a huge map, added a couple of important locations, (most of the map being open roads where the only encounters are randomly spawning cars and accidentally running over zebras while looking at the map), and the missions were literally go to this specific area of the map, kill/pickup target, return for another mission. The way the buddy system modified the missions was interesting, but the modification was always "Go to this place and kill/pickup target, then proceed with original objective of kill/pickup target." I just hated how all the missions were take an boring and flow breakingly long drive to a random location to fight enemies that have respawned since the last time you visited there and kill something was considered a mission. Every single mission was a stupid fetch quest. There were only like 4 real missions that had unique objectives, and those missions were GREAT, (the final mission where you have to fight past groups of enemies using only the weapons you brought with you and scavenge was actually fun)

If Far Cry 3 is this same crap of being a well built universe with the same damn mission over and over I am going to be very upset and is why I am waiting for it to go on sale first.

Maybe I am biased because I played Far Cry 1, which seems to be the problem for PC gamers in the Crytek engine games. (Far Cry 1 had the open worlds but had actual unique missions. Crysis was just way better than Crysis 2 since Crysis 1 had a lot going on.)

I actually stopped an entertaining Escapist video to make this rant and I really want to hear other people explain what I missed because I really hated Far Cry 2.
 

aaronobst

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I preferred FC2?s African setting over FC3?s but that?s about it.
FC3 had the better characters, story, missions, design choices, features and traversal.

The only thing that I remember about FC2 was staring at a map while driving.
 

Xdeser2

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[small]I apologize in advance...[/small]





Far Cry 2....I wanted to love it..I really did....but it was just...Bad

REALLY bad. The buddy system was terrible. Yes, unscrupulous mercenary that I just found in the middle of the African brush with all the personality of a cardboard cutout, I'll unquestionably believe your loyalty to me.

The story was almost non-existent, I mean, WHY are these warlords fighting? Who the hell knows, the game tells you fuck all in the first few hours. The characters were non-characters. The villain just, you know, spares your life for no reason in the beginning. Why? Because apparently this ruthless arms dealer who's ready to throw entire nations into war at the drop of some cash, who the CIA's willing to send agents after, just says "Hey, why not, man whose been sent to Kill me? I'll spare you. Because that's how I got this reputation as a ruthless arms dealer, by letting malaria do my killing for me and not tying up any loose ends." -_-

Speaking of Malaria....who in their right mind thought this was a fun system? Just drop everything you want to do because Roman wants to go bowling Your Malaria is flaring up again. And what does this humanitarian faction (whose job it is, by the way, to disseminate the drug to fight the disease) want you to do? Kill some people.

This brings me to the missions. HOLY SHIT, Its hard to find a more repetitive game. Want new weapons from the arms dealer? Blow up a convoy going in a circle at some edge of a map. EVERY TIME. You cleared out a guard outpost? Too bad. as soon as its outside of draw distance, *Poof* Guards magically respawn.

Look, I don't ENTIRELY hate this game. What drew me to it initially was its style. I LIKE the idea of having to survive in a war-torn nation with only your wits, I just wish that the story that went along with it was at least entertaining. The shooting mechanics were really well done, and the idea that you had to do some dirty work for an arms dealer was great, but the mission structure to support it just wasn't there past the 15th time you had to do the same bloody thing.

The environments are BEAUTIFUL and a real joy to look at, but the game feels empty. This is supposed to be a nation state in civil war...where are the civilians and the refugees? The world has very impressive features, but the 30th time you have to drive to the other edge of the map because the way their fast travel works is incredibly annoying, the feeling of wonder fades.

I personally felt that Far Cry 3 was an improvement on all fronts. Sure, the story was ridiculous, but it actually had characters and motivations. It was still somewhat repetitive, but at least it made some efforts to hide this with (admittedly shallow) side quests strewn in among the hunting and elimination quests. The Crafting system also added a clear sense of progression for the first few hours.

But hey, opinions, we all have them.
 

Racecarlock

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Festus Moonbear said:
Malaria? Just added to the tension for me and the sense of desperation and foreboding: this is not going to end well for you, because violence rarely does.

Degrading weapons? Same thing, except that again this could easily be avoided with proper planning. My weapons didn't jam for me (after the first hour or so when I didn't know what I was doing) until right at the end of the game when there were no more weapon shops available. Again, this adds to the sense of autonomy: plan properly before setting out, and do the mission however you want.
Because, you know, tension can't be added by having a huge amount of intelligent enemy soldiers. No, we have to randomly interrupt combat with random mandatory chores that make you incredibly vulnerable.

I'd rather only plan when I want to and not when some mechanic decides so, but I guess that means I'm just crazy.

"this is not going to end well for you, because violence rarely does."

That's how it is in real life, but why are games trying to teach me a moral lesson like I'm 5 years old and watching playhouse disney? I came for violence and roller coasters, not morals and malaria pill popping.

I only liked far cry 2 because it has a map editor that lets me burn a lot of trees. Even then, 3's map editor lets me burn AI enemies, which is way better.