This change is most prolific in the repetition of certain missions.
Coupled with the hostile landscape, Far Cry 2 steadily coerces the player into changing their behavior because of the constant stress it creates.
It is very easy to find yourself in the middle of the desert low on health, using a broken gun, low on ammo, and not being anywhere near a save point. The consequence of all these depleting resources is that once you set off on a mission, there are literally dozens of things threatening your survival at every turn. One of the boldest decisions of the game is the safe house system, in which safe houses are the only places you can save other than the completion of missions. Ammunition and health items are also rare in the higher difficulties. Enemy weapons can be picked up, but they are always in terrible condition. The guns are constantly degrading with use, so that even a brand new rifle will begin to jam after using it for too long. If you aren’t careful about restocking your supply, you can find yourself in the middle of the jungle without any medication right when you’re about to collapse. The player catches malaria and will randomly need to take a pill when symptoms fire up. For every mission there are countless ways to travel to your destination and relatively equal dangers with each route.Īdded to this hostility are a variety of finite resources that are always draining your abilities. Waiting until nighttime means you’ll be harder to see, though depending on where the sun is you can blind the guards. When that doesn’t work, you take a boat and head downriver. The first time you head towards a mission objective, you might take the roads and brave the guard posts. It is constantly pushing the player to become more efficient at killing and traveling. The effect, to many people’s frustration, is that this is a landscape that is incessantly hostile. Clear out a guard post, raid the supplies, and the next time you pass through it will be restocked with both goods and soldiers. What is interesting about this landscape is the decision to make the soldiers, all of whom are hostile, re-spawn. Scattered around the map are guard posts, safe houses, and various locations that come up during missions. Using cars, dune buggies, four wheelers, or boats scattered throughout the map, the player navigates a war-torn African country. The design is hard to summarize, but the best explanation is that it’s an enormous sandbox first-person shooter. For the purposes of this essay, I played Far Cry 2 on the Xbox 360 with the additional downloadable content.
By adding interchangeable characters that enable real death and consequences for combat choices, the game merges the narrative and design to create its own trip into the darkness. The narrative, inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reflects this descent. A nominee for the Game Developer’s Choice Award for Best Game Design, it created a system that coerced the player into adopting steadily more violent and morally conflicted behavior to progress. Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 is a game that is made up of numerous design quirks and concepts. You can see the immediate components of it, the way the design makes you get killed or the way it makes you avoid certain kinds of conduct but the final product of all those details is the experience of the game. Innovative game design is often a concept that people only observe mechanically without appreciating the final product.