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RobertLiguori 4d ago

Great, that fixed it. Thanks.

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RobertLiguori 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"

If you as the game developer need to cheat and take away my agency when the mechanics you have given me up until that point say I can do X, because you need me to do not-X for your story to land, you are a bad game developer and/or a bad writer. The logical consequence of fully-engaging with murder-hobo gameplay is not "I decide to kill my friends for no reason and then the retarded Bad End happens", it's a cut to Citra's perspective as she is waiting for you to approach, is concerned that you are taking so long, turns to look a the captives, and when she turns back all of the Rakyat are dead and Jason is standing in front of her, machete out, with vacant stare and happy smile, because the fun isn't over and now he gets to do all the outpost liberations again. I buy that a drugged-out witch would delude herself into thinking "Aha, I am manipulating the American super-soldier into doing my bidding!" and not noticing that he's killing people he has reason to kill, and that this started before she met him, or even that the last three times her brother literally killed him and the hundreds of times he got maimed by bullets, fire, or crocodiles he just casually came back from the dead.

If the game disapproves of my choice to engage with it, then the game is dumb, and if the game is instead offering implicit approval of Vaas and Citra by saying that they weren't punished for their own murder-hoboism, then the game is just the authors engaging in contempt and sneering at their audience instead of trying to make a point, and said sneering says much more about them then it does about me.

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RobertLiguori 5d ago · Edited 4d ago

Man, Spec Ops was bullshit. (Spoilers for Spec Ops and Dishonored below, spoiler tags seem to be wonky.)

I'm just going to bring up one particular moment. In the madness arc, Walker comes across two men, and is told to execute one of them for various crime reasons (one man stole, the other man killed someone else trying to stop him, don't really recall, the details don't matter.) Both men are being covered by snipers who will shoot you instead if you don't make the choice. I, like many people his this and of course opened up on the covering snipers, and was able to get past them eventually, albeit with one of the two men still getting shot in the process (but not by me), and so I called that good enough and moved on. Later in the game, you get flashbacks to show how crazy you have been, and when you get to that bridge scene, there are no snipers and both man are long dead, and as you are speaking, not to the voice on the radio, but the voice in your head, as your squadmates grow visibly concerned.

But if this was a hallucination, I couldn't have been shot by it, could I? The game does not actually commit to having a real-world underlying layer and recognizing through the lens of mechanics what is real and what isn't. So, my read on Spec Ops: the Line is also malicious naivety; the correct interpretation is that everything happened, that djinn and demons stalk Dubai and blatantly supernatural stuff happens, and that "Fuck off, evil spirit using Konrad's voice, I'm not crazy and you can't gaslight me into thinking I am with some obviously-fake visions.", followed by being picked up by your fellow soldiers, is the true and correct ending.

I will absolutely defend the High Chaos ending of Dishonored, though. Yes, when Satan, who is causing a zombie plague spread by magic human-devouring rats, appears to you in durance and offers you power and revenge on your enemies, skepticism is the order of the day. Plus, the people you are dealing with are mostly police and soldiers; you kind of want them to be alive and obedient to the ruler once you've de-usuruped your government. And given what Emily goes through, having her be a tyrant who believes murder and specifically you murdering is the answer to all governmental problems feels natural and correct with the game as given unless you are taking steps to not teach her that lesson.

For myself, I actually found the Low Chaos path more engaging, maybe because I really did enjoy the heck out of Thief back in the day, but also because I did it first, and so when I got to the High Chaos play-through, it was just too quick and simple. It definitely felt like there were more interesting toys to play with on the Low Chaos path. And the game itself was fairly forgiving for how much chaos it let you have; if you were generally trying to be stealthy and avoid feeding the rats, you could still have plenty of exceptions.

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RobertLiguori 6d ago

First, I absolutely agree with the 3 is best Far Cry; I feel like it has the cleanest gameplay and tries to tell its story as well as it can, and even though I disagreed with a lot of what I felt the devs were doing, I could recognize that they were including X bit to evoke Y theme and so on.

But I do have some plot quibbles. First, there are some significant clues that Jason Brody has a bit more to him than his first impression implies. You've got the voice hallucination of his brother telling him that he's a natural with a gun, and there is a club flashback sequence where you knock someone the fuck out.

I also think that for games like Far Cry 3, there are really only two valid readings. First, everything the game shows happened. Yes, you killed literally hundreds of people. Yes, you got shot hundreds or thousands of times and walked it off with some very grim healing animations. Yes, the tatau representing your skill tree glows and redraws itself when you master a skill. Yes, the wildlife is absurdly hostile and yes, it does include extremely rare or outright-thought-to-be-extinct species. Yes, Buck is actually teleporting around. Yes, you did have crazy QTE murder-battles. And yes, if you do the Bad End, you don't just respawn to let you 100% the game, that actually happened, you just pop back up exactly like every other time you've died (both in gameplay and with Vaas), that is also entirely diagetic, and Citra is about very, very briefly have the Full Jason Brody Experience this time.

The other is to accept that there is enough weird drug and hallucination crap that you can't actually say what happened to anything, so it doesn't matter!

But the game is fun, and Blood Dragon by itself is worth the price of admission, so I also heartily endorse checking it out for yourselves.

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