For me it's a toss up between Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3.
Far Cry 2 had lots of elements that I liked. The weapon deterioration, the way the map and safe-houses functioned, the weapon balancing and general survival elements were good. Some were not so good. The malaria wasn't much of an interesting mechanic and I feel in the long-run it only padded out the experience rather than contributed any meaningful gameplay like the weapon degrading did. The approach to enemy encampments and how they re-spawned could have been tweaked to make back-tracking actually interesting but instead it was the same enemies in the same places. There was potential there to do something interesting but it got to a point where I was just driving past the enemies.
Overall, I feel it was a cohesive effort and a better direction for the series to integrate survival elements and smart use of open world to the series.
Far Cry 3 improved a number of aspects on Far Cry 2. It gave you more choice in weapons, attachments and the side quests to unlock new weapons in stores was fun. Less fun was the approach to open world design. This was a pivotal change for the series and I liked it less than Far Cry 2. The map was no longer a physical element with limited information but a menu option with an abundance of information that made the open world experience less enjoyable. Far Cry 2 may have had less to do but this limited information and using a map as an equip-able item meant I was communicating with the open world more. It was an actual map - not an abstracted check-list of repetitive tasks like the role it plays in Far Cry 3. This meant that I felt like I was communicating less with the map and more with the icons on the map. It was boring.
I think the outposts were handled much better in Far Cry 3. Liberating them was fun and I liked that some of the provided different set-ups of enemy position and structure. It was much more defined than Far Cry 2 and I definitely saw it as an improvement. Liberating the towers to fill your map with junk was not fun though. Other open world games get a hard time for having climbable towers but it's not the towers themselves that I have a problem with in Far Cry 3, it's their purpose. So the towers are these weird pseudo-platforming sections. You find the white rope to auto-climb and the wooden beams to get to the top. The solution is very rigid and there is no room for experimentation. It's a pretty dull challenge. So you get to the top and you activate it. It plops a bunch of markers on your map so there is no need to use the vertical space as a vantage point and there is no mechanic to even get to a point of interest from the vantage, you have a zip-line that brings you to the bottom and then you go to the next marker on the list. It's not an interesting game-loop at all...
The crafting stuff is sort of hit and miss. I don't mind hunting for materials and I think some of this can be interesting. I find it engages me with the map more than the other tasks but it would be more interesting if this stuff felt more meaningful. I don't feel I need all of the additional inventory and ammunition the crafting leads to simply on the grounds of the more action-focused approach to weapons in the game. It's not like I have all that much limitations to begin with. Some balancing here and tweaks would be good.
Overall I think Far Cry 2 presented a more promising approach to the open world and survival aspects of Far Cry. With some of the expansions made in Far Cry 3 such as the fun outposts and larger range for emergent situations to occur, I think the series would have been really great for me. Far Cry 3 had many improvements but flopped the open world design completely in my opinion. It's no longer a world you interact with in a meaningful way. The most interesting elements are the emergent moments but as games like Thief and Deus Ex proved; there is plenty of potential for emergent situations in a smaller space. Rather, the open world and map system was now diluted down to a check-list and the many ways you interact with your map were changed in favor of giving the player tasks immediately rather than seeking out points of interest themselves.
Far Cry 3 is a smoother, more action-oriented game with lots of things I really like but Far Cry 2, I feel, was a better blueprint for the series' future that Far Cry 3 didn't follow. That's my opinion. I would like if Far Cry 5 stripped back the abundance of tasks, the abundance of map information and the crafting stuff in favor of something more intimate and involving.
Log in to comment