No more crises in the sandbox

I like urgency in games. I like sandboxes or other non-linear games. I don't like them combined on a large scale. Full disclosure: I used the word sandbox because it sounds better than "No more crises in the non-linear game that also features structured quests" and I'm a paid lobbyist for a national sand and box chain. In related news, silica exposure is an imaginary problem, why do you think crabs don't get lung cancer?

Imagine that a cult is summoning a demon and that this demon is going to more or less destroy the world when it gets here. Certainly you're no going to jump right into saving the world; you are an exceptionally weak mage after all. But after a bit of practice you'd be out there investigating, turning in amulets, and finding bastard offspring. Oblivion is my reference point here, but the general notion is widely applicable in games that allow you to explore while using a crisis as a central plot point. The combination ends up being completely absurd.

The crisis isn't just rumor; it is often directly explained to you. In Oblivion it is what gets you released: the Emperor thinks you're the one who is going to save the world. The world could end tomorrow without your intervention. You opt to join a murder cult and hunt down old trinkets for the nobility. That never showed up in any training montage. Though I suppose it is a bit more directly applicable than painting fences or picking up coats.

Maybe Fallout 3 works better, at being ridiculous. Your father has ditched you and you've been kicked out of your formerly safe home. You set out to find him. But before you save your dad from potential death / reunite with your only family, you first do some things along the way. Some of these make sense: someone has information and wants something in return. There's not much you can do about that. A detour to slaughter a town of slavers or disarm an atomic bomb, that's just what anyone else would do, given the ability. Other things, don't make much sense. Do you leave your dad out there so you can find Future Coke for an addict? What about tackling a housing discrimination case? At some point I started to wonder if my character had an attachment to his father at all, or the reverse, given some of the dialog.

Far Cry 3 features a similar level of insanity. Your friends and one brother have been kidnapped, the other brother killed while you were escaping. Since you're just a jackass frat boy you're not a very good hero for a rescue mission, so logically you spend some time getting tattoos, which in this universe makes you more powerful, so it makes sense. Yet there comes a point when it becomes absurd; you're driving all over the first island for days, capturing pirate outposts, fixing radio towers, and going hunting, and doing nothing at all to rescue your friends or gather intelligence on your enemies. This would at least make some sense if it seemed as if it was the result of the player shaping events through decisions, trying to help the island as a whole before worrying about his friends. The delay is never addressed, and in fact doesn't seem to have happened.

That's one of the persistent oddities in open-world games: what you do in the sandbox stays in the sandbox, while sometimes your actions in the little time bubbles leak out into the sandbox, even undoing your progress or canceling out what you have done.

This is when a more personal (by which I mean selfish) story can come to the rescue, a story based only on the player. In Fallout: New Vegas you get shot in the head and that's about it as far as the main plot goes. You're not destined to save the world. You're just a guy who got shot in the head and probably wants a bit of revenge. Given the difficulty of travel, it's not as if the other guy is going to escape; he thinks you're dead anyway. In this scenario there is no rush at all, so why not go exploring? The world isn't going to wait for you and that's just fine, because as far as you know, you're completely irrelevant.

Or consider a game such as Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. You have amnesia and a quest to kill a man, and you don't know from whom. Given that beginning it is not surprising that you'd end up doing some wandering and searching for odd jobs. You're lost in a terribly dangerous place, so making yourself useful to nearby people with information and guns is sensible. Eventually you discover a big mystery and pursue that, but at no point is there a sense that if you're not acting toward goal A, then you're putting your life and the existence of the entire world at risk. Though, it turns out the entire world is at risk, and you might have made things a lot worse, or better, or who can really tell given the strangeness of events in the Zone.

Adding some sort of stagnation/stalemate can help as well. One of my favorite game series ever, Escape Velocity, featured all manner of ongoing wars. But they were stalemates and therefore we could expect them to keep going about as they are without our influence. It helps that in fictional universes outside of Civ IV there is no such thing as war weariness. If the war isn't changing one way or another and you're just another small-time shuttle pilot, why wouldn't you go out and see the galaxy?

We could also look at most MMOs in which something is busily trying to destroy the world, yet for some reason we're off picking apples. Surely the locals would be telling us to get out there and fight. The government would be throwing piles of gold at us to get us back out there. Imagine if General Patton had decided that fighting Rommel just wasn't that pressing and took a detour to go hiking in Peru? We'd have put him in an asylum, or at least threatened to turn the whole operation over to Montgomery, unless the Englishman was off learning the bagpipes as a way to scare rats away from grain silos (if that quest does not yet exist, it should).

I love non-linear games, games where I can choose what to do and when. But when the game is overshadowed by an imminent threat, well that tends to overshadow everything else. It turns side quests from fun distractions into absurd detours that no sane person would start. Yet insanity isn't really an option either, because the games never acknowledge that you were doing anything other than what they told you to do. Instead you're apparently some sort of transubstantialmultidimensionaltwoinone being who is simultaneously inspecting caves for bandits while also not doing so, at either the same time as, before, or after, saving the world.

I want even my bad people to be good

If you've not seen American History X, I recommend seeing it rather than reading this post.

I liked the main character of Derek (the neo-Nazi), even before he renounced racism.  He was racist and a murderer, yet he was not a valueless sociopath.  He was a someone trying to be a good person, to do the right thing, but with a distorted view of what the right thing was.  He wasn't just some punk using violence and hatred to fit in.

I have a few examples.  Decide for yourself if this is merely selective perception.  After the murders he makes no attempt to run away from the police or fight back.  Was it because they were white or because he knew he was caught red-footed?  Either way, he was demonstrating that he wasn't purely a violent individual.

When in prison he reprimanded the other neo-Nazis for smoking pot.  I'm not opposed to the practice, nor do I think his explanation that "weed is for niggers" is sound logic, but he had some idea of right and wrong.  Despite it making him stand out and perhaps even being dangerous, he did not hide or hide from his values.

He was still a bad man, a violent, murdering, racist, but he was a high-quality bad man.

I was reminded, though not in quite the same way, with the character of Buck in Far Cry 3.  He bought slaves.  He was violent and worked for an even more violent person.  He manipulated the main character to get what he wanted.

That was all fine by me.  He was a villain and didn't make any effort to pretend otherwise.  I dislike it when people pretend to be something that they are not.  And thus, I hated him in the end.

It's funny to me what sort of behavior I'll let slide as long as someone is the villain.  Rape.  Murder.  Kidnapping.  Torture.  All in the name of some strange interpretation of capitalism (perhaps he's an Objectivist).

Yet at the very end he betrayed his word to the protagonist.  That's not right!  Murder me out of nowhere, fine, but don't make a deal and back out on it.  Hell, string me along and leave no ambiguity about your intention to betray me, but don't do this "I'm just a capitalist making a deal" crap and then redefine the terms at the end.  I never want to think that my problems would be better solved with a lawyer than a gun.

Maybe that's why I liked Vaas.  He was a straightforward insane sociopath.  He never told a lie.  If you felt deceived it was entirely due to your own misunderstanding of the situation.  I appreciate a bit of honesty in a villain.

Jumping Puzzles: High-Inertia Rubber

Have you ever jumped and hit a wall?  What happened?  Did you by chance ricochet away at a random angle, flying through the air as if coated in repulsion gel from Portal 2?  This is how the radio tower jumping puzzles work in Far Cry 3.  You fly over obstacles, and plummet off the other side.  You ever so slightly graze a bit of sheet metal and bounce off, falling to your death.

Even when the towers are not killing me for the slightest straying of my character, they are simply annoying.  You climb up and then look around for the next set of ropes.  It's a challenge of having the patience to stare at the area long enough to see the path.  It tends to be highly repetitive.  Climb.  Look.  Climb.  Look.  Climb.  Look.  Jump, miss, die, respawn at the bottom.

In my earlier post I'd complained about the interaction, particularly in the case of grabbing unwanted weapons.  On the second island that hasn't been an issue.  Maybe everyone is a little fatter and therefore hide their guns when they fall.  But the towers...  I hate the towers so very much.

Far Crying out loud, fix your interaction

I've been playing Far Cry 3 a bit lately.  I'll have more to say on it later, but for the time being, here's this: It's a fun game, but the interaction needs work.

The key e, by the way.  And that's fine.  E is a great interaction key.  I'm a fan of it.

What matters is the interaction part.  There's a lot of "Hold E to interact" or "Hold E to loot body" or "Hold E to swap your fancy upgraded Swiss-made weapon for a $5 AK-74 knock-off made using duct tape and hubcaps".

The latter bits are one of the bigger annoyances.  It's a good idea to loot corpses, so I aim at the corpse and...  hm.  Nothing.  Maybe if I turn my camera this way a little and hit E.  Oh, I just threw my weapon on the ground.  Okay, hit it again ans switch that back.  Swivel slowly... slowly... and corpse looted!  Rinse and repeat for every single corpse because everyone drops a gun and you don't need it.

A similar problem occurs with skinning.  I must look strange, shuffling in a little circle staring at a dead tiger.

The problem, as best as I can tell, is that the size of bodies for interaction purposes is far smaller than their visual size.  Guns appear to be the reverse.

Space lets you climb ledges.  If you're facing just the right spot.  Otherwise you jump up and down.  Sometimes when you jump you'll end up mousing over the right spot to look at, just so it can taunt you.  "Ha ha!  Jump, pet!  Jump!  You almost had it!  It's right here!"

I learned the annoying way, it would be silly to call it the "hard way" that when they say "mash [key]" they mean "spam [key]".  In my mind, mash means to hold down.  Maybe they mean it in the banana complex, but then I'd need my hammer.

You'll soon realize that you only need a few of each animal skin to craft the items you need.  If you somehow need more, hunting isn't all that difficult.  Though deer are skittish.  Get a sniper rifle.  Thankfully, skins can be sold and there is a quick-sell option.  But that only sells vendor trash.  Crafting materials must be done one at a time, with a confirmation dialog on every single one.  I learned not to skin or gather plants unless I am actually sure that I need that animal, which I don't anymore.

As an unrelated tip, when they give you the hunting quests, you only need to use the weapon type, not the actual weapon.  So feel free to bring your slightly-less-terrible bow or really awesome signature SMG.  Stick with their rocket launcher, because that's really the True Hunter's way to kill a rapid dog.