Politrukk said:
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.
Transdude1996 said:
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.