Zero Punctuation: Far Cry Primal

[FPLOON]

Yeah... Who fucking cares that I'm watching an episode featuring a turtle, the next featuring some random kid, and the next featuring a stuff bear, I'm breaking bad through all this canon shit!

Other than that, I guess this game really hammers on about "the journey is more important than the destination"...

 

[Mad World]

I hate that kind of thing. One man single-handedly killed the sabre-toothed cat. Unless it's a role-playing game, that doesn't make sense; video game or not, it just ruins immersion.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Funny thing, my brother actually did watch the second season of Breaking Bad first. I'd watched the first season on Netflix and stopped before the second, when he started watching it he didn't realize it was already on the second season until he'd completely finished it

 

[felbot]

Dont know if its been said already but Bows were very fucking long during the stone age, you could have a bow that was taller than yourself in that era and like most bows it would snap your spine if you used it too much.

 

[Oldcodger]

Nice Flintsones reference at the end! lol

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Sooo, basically skip this and go back to playing The Long Dark? K.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I think the idea with Far Cry Primal might have been that usually people try to scrap around in the sandbox and even forget about the story missions.

The issue I have with this argument is that Ubisoft is actually rather poor at making sandboxes to "scrap around in". Which means the main quest line is pretty much the primary focus of the game; remove that and you're left with a weak sandbox that you don't have an awful lot of flexibility in to do fun stuff.

I used to be a huge fan of the AC games and I loved FC3. But over time its become very evident that Ubisoft suffers heavily from collectables syndrome rather than adding any actual depth to the game. Assassinate ten officers, collect fifty flags, castrate a hundred bears. There's a very distinct lack of content with any actual weight and characters with any individuality and instead there's just tons of "stuff to do" and a scant handful of chracters. I've said this before but its very notable that rarely does an Ubisoft game have actually memorable locations outside of one or two set pieces. I must have played hundreds of hours of Assassins Creed games, I couldn't tell you a single location in any of them. I finished playing Far Cry 4 the other day and the only real places that stand out in my memory as being really notable are the Royal Palace (and the fortress preceding it), King's Bridge and Noore's Fortress. Pretty much everywhere else is just a mush.

In short...there's somehow lots to do but very little variety in any of it. Far Cry 4 is a great example of this. One 32-mission long main quest chain. Two main side-quest chains with other characters. One 'dream sequence'-like quest chain that was apparently a proof of concept for Primal. It amounts to a grand total of five identifiable allied characters (and I'd argue that only three of whom had any real personality and presence in the game) and four identifiable enemy characters (admittedly these were quite good, though Yuma at least definitely could have done with a little more to her), plus Willis who I'd forgotten was even IN the game first time I typed this bit up. Outside of that? Well you've got the usual radio towers and camps, big pile of them; then five different types of collectable amounting to 285 different items to pick up. And a bunch of extremely similar activities where you do the same thing in slightly different areas over and over. The only real variety I found in any of those was the animal hunt quests which were quite fun mainly because of the weapon restrictions it put you under. The hostage rescue and assassination things were okay but given that the entire context was 'they took people, go save them' and 'bad person, go kill them and don't get seen' and the relatively limited variety of environments it became just repetitive as hell.

Compare and contrast with something like Skyrim. Skyrim gets a lot of flak for being shallow, but its the Marianas Trench if you put it alongside a recent Far Cry or Assassin's Creed. With a huge variety of environments and some real attempt to put a variety of different characters in there and a wide range of different approaches, attitudes and quest types to go for.

Going by what I heard, the game's concept seems to be FC4's equivalent to FC3's Blood Dragon if you took out everything that made Blood Dragon so much fun and novel.

And charged three times the price.

 

[gphjr14]

Once this is in the $20 I'd highly recommend it. I had some store credit so I picked this up and platinumed it in a week and just traded it back in. It's fun for what it is but once you've beaten the game and tamed all the animals it gets pretty boring fast. It's already been shown that they used the map from FC4 so you'd be correct in assuming this is just a re-textured FC4 with some new melee mechanics and animal mechanics. Fun game but not worth $60 since Ubisoft clearly didn't start from the ground up with this.

Story wise it's pretty straight forward so don't expect the depth of FC3.

 

[Jburton9]

Thank you for the review Yahtzee - Good pun at the end for meander : ) I will have to use it for the next driver I see down here. Why are they drifting back and forth in two lanes? Oh right it is not the cell phone that is distracting them, it is their state of being - Meanderthals!

Somewhere in an Ubisoft board room a person or several people won a bet. "Hey I bet we can make a game about cave men with the same bullet point feature list and people would pay full price for it!" "No way! But if they do, does that mean we found a new core audience or is it that they will buy anything we shovel at them? We need more metrics! Let's keep selling them games until they stop buying!"

Honestly, it looks pretty but all the live video of the game that I have seen so far, not really my cup of tea sadly.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Let's keep selling them games until they stop buying!"

It's clear this has been the development direction of Assassin's Creed for years now.

 

[el_emmens]

you don't fuck around in my hundred acre wood

I need this on a t-shirt

 

[Jonathan Lorizio]

Is anyone else having trouble viewing the Far Cry Primal review? I get the ad and then a 42 second montage of escapist content. It then ends.... yet i come here and see that it is working for others. Browser issue?

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Yahtzee seems to be running into a lot of these "it's perfectly serviceable but it didn't blow my mind" games as of late.

 

[ToastyMozart]

The player character indeed does have the same voice actor as Adam Jensen.
I have to say, a pair of arm blades and an invisibility cloak would certainly make this game more interesting, albeit even more broken.

 

[happyninja42]

Yahtzee seems to be running into a lot of these "it's perfectly serviceable but it didn't blow my mind" games as of late.

Is that a bad thing though? I mean, it's an ok game. I'm playing it now, and yeah, it's nothing new, it's more Farcry, but if it's competently done, is there really a complaint? Can every game "blow your mind" after the last game "blew your mind"? Must we always have the next thing blow the last thing out of the water? The game isn't bad, it does what it does fairly well. I enjoy playing it, and I've genuinely had fun with some of the content. I love the one armed guy, and how gleefully happy he is to call you Smie Gahn!! every time he sees you. I'm a little disappointed by the animal companion system, as I found them more of a liability in combat than help. But that could be because I gravitate towards stealth runs. The couple of times I've gone balls out, I dump a crazy bomb on a tough mob, and send in my great scar bear, and just watch the chaos. It's amusing to watch, but not as fun to play, so I don't do it much.

Overall, I'm not sure it's worth full price, but is it a decent game? I think so. Worth picking up on sale for sure.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Yahtzee seems to be running into a lot of these "it's perfectly serviceable but it didn't blow my mind" games as of late.

Is that a bad thing though? I mean, it's an ok game. I'm playing it now, and yeah, it's nothing new, it's more Farcry, but if it's competently done, is there really a complaint? Can every game "blow your mind" after the last game "blew your mind"? Must we always have the next thing blow the last thing out of the water? The game isn't bad, it does what it does fairly well. I enjoy playing it, and I've genuinely had fun with some of the content. I love the one armed guy, and how gleefully happy he is to call you Smie Gahn!! every time he sees you. I'm a little disappointed by the animal companion system, as I found them more of a liability in combat than help. But that could be because I gravitate towards stealth runs. The couple of times I've gone balls out, I dump a crazy bomb on a tough mob, and send in my great scar bear, and just watch the chaos. It's amusing to watch, but not as fun to play, so I don't do it much.

Overall, I'm not sure it's worth full price, but is it a decent game? I think so. Worth picking up on sale for sure.

I'm with you, I think Yahtz suffers that famed malaise critics get of "good isn't good enough".

 

[4Aces]

I want that fully loaded jaguar scene on a T-shirt. Then I can drive 3 hours to UbiHQ and make them wear them. Of course I will be packing bees in case they get snooty with their outrageous accents.

This game is not perfectly serviceable. As was said, there is no story. It is just a meandering mess of side quests, populated by some of the worst spear sponges (like a bullet sponge, but old-school) ever created. Bethesda is perfecting this style themselves, trying to make games by hitting a "randomize shit" icon in their toolset, and letting maths do the rest of the work for them. I guess Ubi realized that is the way to go if you want to have a modern sandbox game. Faster, cheaper, and with 500% less papercuts. They just do not realize that we are not going to pay an ever increasing amount of money for an ever decreasing amount of development effort. Remember, they had the bones of all the other games to build this out of, so mechanics and modeling was not that large an effort. Let us not even begin on the voice acting.

I guess the next stage for this is DLC that lets you wear a T-Rex like a mech? Or perhaps you wake up and realize you were just in a drug-induced coma brought on by poorly constructed VR, and you are still in FarCreed: Shoggoth.

Meanderthals had aerially deployed explosive devices? My Anthropology professor has a lot of explaining to do...