Its funny how as soon as an open world game like FarCry 2 appears on consoles, its called repetitive and nobody is allowed to be creative in the way they approach missions. Yet Crysis is praised to no end for being an open world game with endless ways of completing every mission. Heaven-forbid a PC exclusive could be repetitive.marklarmer
Unfortunatley Far Cry 2's design has fundemental flaws, and a 'sandbox design' that is far more garish and unrefined than Crysis's, despite it being so different in nature (yet comparable).edit - I will elaborate on this.
To quote myself:
The problem is there arent many options of approach.Level design is quite restrictive most of the time; there are usually 3 ways of approaching a location, which boils down to - sneak for a few kills - spotted - (or initially -) go rambo - persist; due to a lack of actual stealth mechanics and alert systems. Problem is that these scenarios repeat and repeat, and become more and more mundane.
Its not like Crysis where you have a large linear level - an objective and a huge scope of options to approach this one objective in a level.
Its the opposite.
You have a single massive open enviroment with a huge amount of small missions with more restrictive ways of approaching.
Its just not very good open world design....
Even things like the complete lack of a global a.i makes the world boring and mundane - a stark contrast to a game like STALKER.skrat_01
The problem is its design template is fundementally repedative.Giving a player a set of objectives that play out in a similar fashion - for the entire course of the game, then have the player approach them with a variety of tools will get mundane quickly.
Why?
Because the objectives dont have the variables to make approaching things any more interesting than the last, and players tend to pick a play sty-le and work with it - repeating it again and again doesn't make it any better.
Another issue is certain playsty-le punish the player. Want to go in stealthy? Its a waste of time, a few kills in you have alerted the gaurds and are engaged in a fire fight until the area is cleared.
Things like the frequent checkpoints aggravated the design too. Frustration between moving between missions makes the player *not* think of prerperations or planning, they are too busy dealing with immediate threats. There is no build up or suspense.
sigh.
Its a pity as there is so much damn potential.skrat_01
Now of course certain fanboys would have such bias towards an exclusive like Crysis, but this is more of the case of Far Cry 2 being fundamentally flawed. This is why it has copped so much flack, next to titles like Crysis.
Hell saying that, I thought Far Cry 2 was set to completely push the genre in new directions as far as design is concerned - admittedly I was pretty crushed by the final result. I suppose ArmA 2's design might be rather striking in a similar regard that FC2 promised... however I'll have to play it before judging fully.
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