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'Far Cry 4' And The Problem Of Too Much To Do

Paul Tassi
This article is more than 6 years old.

A week or two ago, Erik Kain wrote a great piece on the "gamification" of many RPGs, namely how inserting a crafting system into any and every game that can hold one is killing a lot of the inherent fun of loot. Requiring players to collect 20 plants or 30 metal scraps in order to build something is a little mini-game inside games like Dragon Age: Inquisition that really wouldn't lose much without it, and would gain a less cluttered world as a result.

I want to expand on that idea of "clutter" and how it relates to Far Cry 4 specifically. Though Far Cry will be my touchstone, given that I've sunk 30 odd hours into its the past two weeks, these lessons can translate to Ubisoft's other flagship open world franchises, Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs, but also games like Just Cause, Grand Theft Auto, or even Dragon Age.

In the case of Far Cry 4, we have an inarguably great game. The mechanics are excellent, the world is vast and well designed, and the characters are lively. Not to mention you can storm an enemy camp launching grenades off the back of an elephant.

The game has been described as "Far Cry 3+" a classification deemed either as fair or unfair, depending on your views on what constitutes "recycled" game design. Far Cry 4 is certainly much, much larger than Far Cry 3 with lots more to do, yet mechanically and even thematically it is nearly exactly the same game as 3. Fortunately, FC3 did its own thing so well, only a few are complaining that this new game is more of what worked the first time.

And yet, I fear that Far Cry best exemplifies what "too much of a good thing" can look like in video game land. There's simply too much to do, and as a result, it can feel like you're sitting through the eleventh hour of a Lord of the Rings movie. Like, three hours is fun, four hours for the special edition can be good depending on your tastes, but few will have the stamina to complete an eleven hour film, even broken into chunks. Even if it's a quality film, at a certain point you start to get sick of it, particularly if there are other movies you want to watch. The video game equivalent might be a standard 10-15 hours for a story-based game, but once it stretches into 40 or 50 hours, exhaustion sets in.

Far Cry 4 may have the most "stuff" to do I've ever come across in a game, though I skipped Assassin's Creed Unity so I won't get to figure out what this nightmarish map of icons actually feels like in-game.

But let's break down exactly every type of activity found in Far Cry so you can get the scope of what I'm talking about here. There are:

- Main story missions done for the Golden Path, usually for one of two local leaders which present two branching paths for the storyline depending on who you side with

- Sub-story missions given by specific figures like CIA operative Willis Huntley, ex-warlord Longius, or burnouts Yogi and Reggie

- Tower climbing puzzles that open up sections of the map

- Outpost takeovers that rid areas of enemies

- Fortress takeovers which are much tougher, much larger outposts

- A gladiator arena that has you surviving rounds against tough enemies with limited weapons

- A handful of missions based in the spirit world of Shangri-la

- Vehicle-based side-quests including races, survival runs, protecting a moving truck

- Hunting-based side-quests including killing rare animals, hunting for food, surviving animal assaults

- Killing-based side-quests involving covert or loud assassinations, hostage rescue, bomb defusal, destroying propaganda centers

- Random world events including destroying enemy convoys, hijacking enemy supply trucks, helping rebels with periodic skirmishes, improvised assassinations or hostage rescue, defending locals from animal attacks

- Permanent collectible-hunting missions which involve tearing down propaganda posters, crushing serial killer masks, spinning spirit bells, finding lost journals and letters

- About ten thousand lootable crates

And I may even be missing some.

It's just too damn much.

Even though I'm tempted to blame some of this on my "gaming OCD" which has me obsessed with side-quests and collectibles and often unable to tear myself away from them in pursuit of the main questline, games these days are literally being designed as giant collection of mini-games where the actual story component is perhaps, 10% of the total content. But more and more often, all of these side activities are becoming less and less optional. Back in the early days of Grand Theft Auto, you might do a rampage or racing minigame for fun, but it was far from mandatory. Now? In the era of Far Cry 4, they're a lot more than even just "encouraged."

For starters, you have to ascend towers to clear up the map so you can see where the hell it is you're going at any given time. And after that, you have to clear out outposts so the roads aren't infested with enemies whenever you try to go anywhere. You realize you'll never be able to upgrade your storage capacity for items or weapons unless you go hunting. You realize you won't get the better set of "signature" weapons unless you sink some serious time into side-quests (though thank god they're not microtransaction DLC). You can barrel straight through the main story if you want, but without all these upgrades assembled through an enormous amount of side-activities, you're going to have a bad time.

Far Cry 4 has you constantly saying "Well....just one more." That can mean one more side-mission given that there are three or four in every base you unlock. That can mean bounding over the hill to grab that one loot crate (only to find five more nearby), or chasing that one convoy (that takes you ten miles in the wrong direction). And then sure enough, three hours have gone by and you're halfway up a mountain covered in snow leopard blood with no idea what you were even supposed to be doing in the first place.

This philosophy can be fun, but it hurts the story you're trying to tell. It creates these yawning expanses of time in between the narrative where you lose all track of what was going on in the story. I've seen this time and time again in open world games recently, from Assassin's Creed to GTA 5, and to me this is a big reason why open world games often have far less compelling stories than more linear games. Games like The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite simply don't let the players escape from the story or its characters for too long, but in games like Far Cry 4, an already wobbly plot is made even more tough to keep track of given that 90% of the game you're nothing more than a Go-pro strapped to a faceless protagonist who only speaks to curse at eagles attempting to claw his eyes out.

Sometimes this "side quests are the game" philosophy can work. That's the case with Skyrim, unquestionably one of the best open world games ever made. That game will also constantly distract you from the main questline, but in a way that opens the world up with new environments, new characters and new quests that are just as interesting, if not more so, than anything you'd be doing in the main storyline.

Not so in a game like Far Cry. The map is beautiful and enormous, but hardly diverse. It's all mountains, forests and ramshackle buildings, even once you break into the North of Kyrat which simply fills the same kind of terrain with tougher enemies.

I always laugh when you climb a tower and the game shows you three local "locations" that will usually house a collectible or two and a pocket of enemies or civilians. They're all a random assortment of nearly identical buildings (a sill, a farm, a school), animal homes (a bear cave, a tiger cave, a wolf cave) or holy sites (a shrine in a cave, a shrine on a hill, a shrine by the road). And what few unique areas there are will almost certainly be a part of some future story mission, and remain dead or inaccessible until then. All of this creates the illusion of diversity without actually being diverse. You will not meet any other characters other than the specific four or five who give you missions and appear as giant letters on your map. There's a whole world to explore, but it's carefully segregated into little sections with premade activities that get incrementally harder over time. There are thousands of things to do, but only a few dozen that have any meaningful story component to them at all.

This is why so many games are left unfinished these days. I've sunk 30 hours into Far Cry 4 so far, and even though I've had fun, I'm getting too exhausted with the content to be motivated to see it through to the end. I know I will, but I can't blame those who would set their controller down and move on. If there's an upward limit to the amount of stuff you can cram in your game, Ubisoft has to be reaching it here. At a certain point, the sheer volume of content outweighs the quality of that content, no matter how good it is. I'm sure there's probably a mathematical equation for it no one has put to paper yet.

And given how key these side-quests and collectibles are to leveling your character and being able to access and complete the actual story missions of the game, the problem isn't even just players being distracted easily (though that is still a problem). Progression now requires you participate in a fairly hefty amount of these types of activities, as without them, you're facing $40,000 ammo refills when you're broke, a character who has two stealth skills out of a possible dozen, and you're forcing him to take on a mercenary army with found-on-the-ground weapons that have trouble executing goats, much less soldiers. "Just collect ten more masks" the game calls to you, tempting you with upgrades and gear. "Just shoot five more rhino. Just save six more hostages. Just diffuse three more bombs." It never ends.

I just don't believe bigger is necessarily better, and I think there's a problem when you've sunk 30 hours in a game and experienced no more than two or three hours of story. What used to be fun "diversions" from the main game are now practically the entire game themselves.

I don't know. Maybe if the minigames are fun enough it doesn't matter. Maybe there's no good answer for this, as the opposite side of the coin is a game being "repetitive and empty." But maybe open world games are starting to go on tilt, and they need to pull back and refocus a bit on meaningful content, not just abundant content.



