Games We Can Learn From: Far Cry 2 Shows Us Emergence In Action

I find the experience of reviewing games to be incredibly, painfully subjective, and I couldn't imagine using my blog to tell people what games they may or may not like.

I do, however, think there are a lot of games that, if you're interested in the development of gameplay systems and interactivity, you should play just for the experience, and I'd like to start with the most recent experience I've had: Far Cry 2.

If I could use an analogy to sum up the Far Cry 2 experience, I'd say it was like taking a hooker to an expensive restaurant.  Both good things in their own right, neither makes the other less enjoyable, but they just don't really gel together properly.

Despite being a game of emergent elements, open exploration and tense narrative with both political and personal elements, Far Cry 2 is, at its heart, still an action-shooting game (see this interview with Ubisoft Montreal's Narrative designer Patrick Redding).  The game packs a real emotional punch, but this feels at odds with a world in which flimsy pretenses are used to explain why everyone - and I mean everyone - you meet in the world seems to want you dead.

Thats not to say that the game is, in any way, flawed by this.  As an arcade shooting game, Far Cry 2 excels, and its reliance on emergent elements is perhaps the key - the game's fire-propagation system, for example, not only leads the player to develop their own mostly-emergent strategies for  dealing with problems, but encourages this behaviour.

During my time with the game, shooting out oil lamps and gas cylinders to start fires that flush enemies out of cover became a staple tactic for dealing with emplacements.  This was balanced with similarly emergent risks - the status quo of a reliable technique was shaken up on occasion by random "wandering" enemies stumbling on me while I was focussed on picking off the fleeing guards; at other times, fires would spread to and set alight the ammunition supplies I was looking to swipe, while another time a petrol tanker explosion blew debris into the air that fell on top of me and almost killed me.  Then there was the gas cylinder I punctured, sending it spiralling and snaking around the camp, propelled by the tiny flame of escaping gas, which set alight to the dry reeds I was hiding in, surrounding me and forcing me reluctantly out of hiding ...

Yet the game also contained elements such as the "buddy" system, wherein you met recurring characters that (provided you could keep them alive and healthy) would bail you out when you were injured and offer alternative solutions to your missions, and the political elements of the missions themselves, which lent the game a sense of depth that the gameplay didn't match.  It jars the senses - first of all, when approaching a checkpoint in the roads for the first time, and later when the game would happily let an important character, with whom you've built a rapport and friendship, die from an errant sniper bullet from your own gun, or your failure to get to them and administer first aid in time.  In the latter case, giving you the option (which they often beg for if their injuries are bad enough) to finish them off yourself, and recording these actions and having other characters respond to you accordingly just twists the knife in your already wounded heart.  

So Far Cry 2 is an action shooting game with elements of things we don't normally expect to find, but yet is somehow isn't.  The intense shooting action doesn't quite marry up to the tense political storyline, or the emotional impact of the interactions with the game's characters.  In essence, Far Cry 2 offers two seperate but overlapping experiences, both extremely enjoyable, and both expertly crafted.

If there's one other thing Far Cry does well, though, its the ending.  Few games risk an understated ending - nothing feels worse than coming away from 40+ hours of gameplay feeling short-changed and frustrated - but so many games (Fallout 3, for example) feel like they labour the point of their emotional impact that Far Cry 2's nice, simple ending feels both fresh and rewarding.  While its not hard to see the twist coming, it feels good when it does, and when the story wraps up, it does so in a simple moment that offers so much pathos, its hard not to feel moved by it.

So what can we learn from Far Cry 2?  Regardless of whether you feel Ubisoft did it successfully or not, we can take away the knowledge that grafting new elements (emergent gameplay, exploration, in-depth character progression) onto familiar gameplay structures (shoot anything that moves) is a complex process, but one that can be worth the extra effort and risk.  We also get further evidence for the idea that the "sweet spot" of gameplay lies somewhere between scripting and emergence, that the game should encourage a player to play freely with their toys, and not punish them for trying things the designers didn't necessarily expect.

All in all, Far Cry 2 is one to add to the list of games we could all learn something from, so - if you haven't already - pick it up and give it a shot; and if you already have, drop a comment and let us all know what you thought of it!