Some Weekend Writing about Far Cry 4.

I rarely abandon games. Mainly because of the infamous “sunk cost fallacy”: I spent money on this, thus I must play it in its entirety to get my money’s worth. Even for a person like me who doesn’t buy a lot of games these days, there’s that fear of wanting to not let even a game I bought on deep discount go to waste. So with that thought process in mind, I drag myself through a game that I’m not thoroughly invested in, just to see the ending and sit through a 30 minute credits sequence.

This post talks about my most recent case of suffering from that sunk cost fallacy. Amusingly, it’s a sequel to a game that I’ve written about on this very blog in 2014, the year that game’s sequel came out.

Far Cry 4 is a game that basically pulled a bait-and-switch on me and a friend, and in many cases did things backwards compared to the previous game. How can a sequel bungle so many things the previous game got right? Well, let me explain why this game is a disappointment to me.

There are a handful of games I own that I tend to use more as a co-op social experience than as any sort of serious deep investment. Destiny 2 is a common example: While there’s a unique, interesting world with a rather neat amount of lore to it, I honestly couldn’t care less about it, thus I just roam around areas and kill various monsters for loot with friends. Most “looter shooters” fall into this trap, but at least Bungie makes up in it with cool designs and some rather picturesque visuals. I have a fair share of games that fall into this category of “here to play it in co-op with friends” than to be invested in the story or the characters.

Friend of the site Bobinator from Hardcore Gaming 101 suggested that I get Far Cry 4 way back in mid-2018 as it was at a good discount of $13, and would fit that criteria of “playing it in co-op with friends.” He and I have played games like the Saints Row series entirely in co-op and we enjoyed our times with it. Far Cry has a similar free-roaming nature of messing around in a digital world, so I took the plunge. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, for one, the beginning was not available to play in co-op. We had to finish the extended tutorial sections solo. Basically going through the game’s mechanics, doing a few side missions, and a bit more backstory to the game’s events. After the two of us having to play the campaign by ourselves at our own pace for an hour, we decided to try again a few days later.

The second time around, I joined his session and we started messing around with the various activities the game had on offer. From simple hunting missions to assassination missions to liberating outposts, we were shooting things in the world of Kyrat. Though, we were getting frustrated in spots as certain missions weren’t made clear or had very strict rules depending on the side mission.

While we were kinda bored while playing that one time, we tried once more a few days later. At some point both of us were just slogging through the side stuff and capturing outposts, wondering when the next story mission was gonna be available for us to play. We assumed maybe it would be like Just Cause 2 where you had to fulfill a number of missions before the next one could be unlocked.  

After another two hours of us completing stuff, I figured something wasn’t right. Later that day, I hopped into the game solo and suddenly, icons for characters in the world showed up. I did further research and found out Ubisoft tricked the both of us.

The “co-op” in Far Cry 4 only lets you and a buddy finish side missions and capture outposts, there was no campaign co-op to be seen. Needless to say, we were both disappointed and frustrated that Ubisoft touted a feature yet didn’t clarify that it was going to be a watered down version of said feature. Knowing that our hopes of messing around Kyrat together were basically ruined by this news, my friend bailed out of the game, while I decided to stick to it by myself. Turns out the bait and switch co-op was only the tip of the iceberg.

Far Cry 4’s plot is fairly bog standard: You play as Ajay Ghale, who takes his mother’s ashes to the land of Kyrat where he grew up, but gets captured by Pagan Min, the leader of the island. Having to fight for his life, he meets up with the Golden Path, a rebel faction that’s trying to stop Pagan Min’s dominance over Kyrat and to take it back to the people. It’s not as off-putting as Far Cry 3’s story of douchebro college student turned violent psychopath, but it does feel a bit more cliched here.

There are parts of the story that are somewhat ridiculous, such as the moral quandaries of “should we preserve this opium factory or destroy it,” which is rather silly. I eventually met a character named Willis who was written like your typical American CIA hardass who makes such jokes as “you need to be discreet like a Republican living in San Francisco” which isn’t really that funny. This is also ironic, considering Ubisoft likes to play the “our games cover political things but we are not trying to be political” card when it’s clear they have a certain bias. I mean, this is the same company that literally publishes games under the Tom Clancy brand, a famous author known for his conservative military fetish.

The core gameplay loop of Far Cry 4 is mostly the same as the previous game: Capture outposts and radio towers to unlock parts of the world, while occasionally hunting and doing side missions to get XP and level up. There’s still shooting, upgrading skills, crafting items to hold more ammo or to give temporary buffs like damage resistance. It’s a bit more streamlined in spots, but essentially the same as before.

That doesn’t sound too bad, right? I enjoyed Far Cry 3 all those years ago, even when I sounded down on it when I wrote about it back then, more of the same isn’t always bad. That would be true if Ubisoft didn’t make rather bizarre design decisions that make the game more frustrating than fun.

For instance, it feels like Ajay is made of tinfoil and rubber bands as it doesn’t take much for him to die, even on the game’s normal difficulty. There’s body armor to resist some damage and upgrades to give him more health, but it still doesn’t take much for him to die, sometimes even from rather low heights. This is something that was also prevalent in Far Cry 3, and it sucks that they didn’t really address it except making it easier to make healing syringes.

While Far Cry as a franchise is basically considered a shooter, it’s always had some light stealth elements tacked on. Enemies have a meter that fills up if they immediately spot you, that kind of stuff. For Far Cry 4, somebody had the genius idea of having the Assassination side mission alongside several of the story missions require Ajay to sneak through without getting spotted, otherwise the mission fails.

Quick question for those reading: Can you think of a single video game that had a “mission failure if you get spotted” stealth mechanic that was well-implemented and good? Trick question, there are none. In my memory of playing Far Cry 3, there was only a few small sections that had these, so for Ubisoft to stick with these and make them more prevalent seems rather baffling.

As I kept playing, Far Cry 4 just started being an absolute chore to play as I kept doing stuff to get to the next story mission. While doing certain missions, I was often stopped dead in my tracks with various side junk that gives me karma for the Golden Path. Stuff like stopping enemies from invading outposts I just liberated. Stopping an enemy supply truck and delivering it to a destination. Stopping an enemy courier who has “valuable information.” Jumping in to help Golden Path allies stop enemies or animal invasions. Granted, while these are optional, you’re encouraged to do them due to the karma system, and it just bogs the game down considerably.

Far Cry 4 basically became my new “podcast game” – a game I absentmindedly play while listening to the Giant Bombcast, Sawbones or It Was a Thing on TV – but I just wasn’t enjoying myself while playing. The closest I had to having some fun was hunting to upgrade items, and even that was a chore just to kill enough yaks and rhinos with a bow to get double the skins and extra Karma. I just wasn’t having any fun with it, what with all the questionable design decisions and hackneyed plot.

I don’t play a lot of Ubisoft’s games these days, and I think I figured out why. There’s an article from the wonderful site Point & Clickbait called “Ubisoft Game: The Review” that I recommend you read. While Point & Clickbait is a satire site, it does make the point that Ubisoft games often tend to feel similar, and that seems to be the case here.  

I’m reminded of when I played through The Crew in 2016 and Watch_Dogs in 2017, and how that had a lot of the same trappings that Far Cry 4 here does of having so much unnecessary junk and questionable game mechanics that it just feels like Ubisoft was reskinning their games to have the same gameplay loop in each one, whether you’re an assassin in ancient times, a guy with a cool car, some dude in a jungle, or Aiden Pierce and his Iconic Hat in modern-day Chicago. That combined with it feeling more of the same that I already went through before, it just made me want to abandon Far Cry 4 just as I finished Act Two.

Honestly, I’m starting to appreciate Far Cry 3 more after playing 4 for a good amount of time. While the story in 3 felt tonally inconsistent and the game had a fair share of the same problems, I was enjoying myself in spite of it. Playing Far Cry 4 just feels like a chore, and games shouldn’t feel like a slog to play. I can’t really recommend playing Far Cry 4, especially if you’re familiar with the Ubisoft free-roaming formula. It’s just another one of those, and I don’t really need another one of those.  

In all honesty, I wish Far Cry would go back to its roots from the first game and the Xbox-exclusive Far Cry Instincts and be more of a linear first-person shooter. At least that would be refreshing coming from Ubisoft despite how played out that would be. It’s why I’m not really jonesing to play Far Cry 5 or New Dawn, or I’m not even hyped for Far Cry 6 despite having Giancarlo Esposito in it. I’m just done with Ubisoft’s cookie cutter formulas.

I might come back and finish it some day, but for now I’m willing to play anything else than some AAA big budget shooter. Perhaps I need to find a mediocre-to-bad game to enjoy instead. To me, that’s the kind of catharsis I need after playing Far Cry 4 at this point.