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In my post on Halo from last month I mentioned that Clint Hocking's work on the Far Cry franchise probably deserved its own essay. In the process of researching that essay I discovered that another YouTuber had already beaten me to the scoop, covering much of the same ground that I had planned to.
I'm going to link his video below, but I still want to get this out because I find the franchise's central theme of choice, consequence, and the role that we as individuals often play in our own destruction/salvation, are highly relevant to conversations that have been happening elsewhere on this forum.
For the uninitiated Far Cry is a series of single player first person shooters produced by Ubisoft. The series follows an anthology format with each new game introducing a new setting and set of characters.
The first Far Cry game released in 2004 was essentially a glorified tech demo for Cervat Yerli's scalable dynamic rendering engine which he had developed in partnership with Nvidia and would later market under the CryEngine name. This technology enabled highly detailed and expansive exterior scenes with functionally infinite draw distances to be rendered on the hardware of the day without the need to rely on pre-baked lighting/shaders and forced perspective tricks the way contemporary 3D games like Half-Life 2 did.
If the first Far Cry was essentially a tech demo, Far Cry 2 released in 2008 was a gameplay demo. What narrative there is, is paper thin, but what Far Cry 2 did was codify the genre of the "3D open-world action game with crafting and collectibles". Blazing the trail that games like Skyrim, the Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham City, Ghosts of Tsushima, and Cyberpunk 2077, would all follow. It may be one of the most low-key influential video games of the last two decades.
The third game is where everything clicked. Far Cry 3 released in 2012 was the first Far Cry to have a proper narrative with fully realized characters who were more than stock archetypes like "Generic Action Hero Guy", "Mad Scientist", and "Femme Fatale". A lot of effort went into facial animation and voice acting to the point that it still holds up surprisingly well for a game that is over a decade old. Which brings us to the thesis of this essay.
If the measure of a piece of "literature" or "art" is the ability to tackle a complex or challenging ideas and make them accessible to the masses, Far Cry 3 deserve to be regarded as high art for how deftly it uses its own medium to convey and amplify the themes of the story it is trying to tell. Or as DJ Peach Cobbler puts it Far Cry 3 tells a story that only a video game could tell
You play as Jason Brody, a pampered rich douche-bro on vacation in Ersatz-Indonesia who, along with his friends, is kidnapped and held for ransom by pirates after they stray too far from the relative safety of their beachfront resort. Jason, with the assistance of his older brother Grant, manages free himself and escape into the jungle but Grant gets shot and killed during the escape, leaving Jason to face the Jungle alone and unprepared.
This is our first hint that the game might be operating on a deeper level than your conventional shoot-em-up. Grant is presented to us as the quintessential hero protagonist, handsome, charismatic, capable, brave, and he dies an ugly gurgling death bleeding out in the mud while his little brother panics. This all happens in the first 10 minutes of the game and the message is clear. You, the limp wristed trust-fund kid, are going to have to level up if you are to have any hope of surviving the jungle much less freeing your friends from captivity. And with that the game releases you into its world.
As you progress through the game, discovering landmarks, hunting animals, crafting equipment, and completing quests, you unlock new abilities, new weapons, better stats. You become more and more capable, and more and more of a killer till by the end John Rambo 'aint got nothing on Jason Brody.
This where things get interesting because without getting into spoilers it is made abundantly clear throughout the narrative that all this killing and "leveling up" is taking a toll on Jason's mind, that it is damaging his relationships with his friends, his family, society, morality, and ultimately reality. At the same time Jason isn't the one doing the killing, we are. YOU, the player, not Jason, are the one positioning the crosshairs and pulling the trigger. You, the player, are the one who made the decision to complete that extra side-quest so that you could unlock that sweet triple knife take-down, and having unlocked it, by God we're going to use it, because dopamine's a hell of a drug. By playing the game we have been manipulated into being willing and enthusiastic participants in Jason's descent into violence and madness. The daemon on his shoulder whispering "Yah, we got this" as we pursue our own destruction.
...and this is why I believe that that the infamous "bad ending" is the canonically correct ending for Jason's story, and that the people who complain about how the game "punishes the player" for making the thematic choice by wanting to keep playing are missing the forest for the trees. The fact that game gives you one last chance to reject the path of violence is what makes the ending so impactful.
These themes of player agency and choice would be explored and expanded upon in Far Cry 4 and 5 (4's "Secret Ending" being a notable example of this) but if you are going to play just one of the Far Cry games please play Far Cry 3. It is worth your time.
To calibrate, how did you feel about Spec Ops: The Line, and the "bad"/high chaos ending of Dishonored?
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.||
Just to correct you, the Outsider didn't cause the plague, the Lord Regent did. The plague originates from Pandyssia which is an uncharted landamass with extremely hostile and deadly fauna and flora.
But yes, that's what Corvo could've have thought, since that's the point of view that the Abbey would use. And probably the one he would believe too at that point.
On Spec Ops, I think the game's story is good, but the issue is that the game presents the choices as mattering to the player, but they only matter to Walker. It's a story that really doesn't take advantage of being a game.
But also the media talking about also I think made a huge disservice to it because they tried to present it as some kind of commentary to shooters in general, when it really doesn't work like that, and if you look at it from that perspective the game becomes much worse.
Like the way Dishonored gives you all these cool toys and then gives you a bad ending if you misuse them works way better as a game narrative than the white phosphorus scene where you don't have a choice to do anything else. Walker chooses it. He's the protagonist of that game. Meanwhile in Dishonored the player's actions that shape the narrative instead.
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