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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.||
My tl;dr for why Spec Ops is bullshit:
The game is trying to make you, the player, feel bad about doing all of these horrible things, that you cannot advance the game without doing, and the smug retort whenever you point this out is that you could have actually chosen to quit the game.
Excuse me? I'm supposed to delete the game I paid for instead of experiencing it to its conclusion?
There's more than a nugget to this.
Commercial art as a message partly depends on people recognizing the message they'll be seeing in advance. Video game purchases aren't a random loot box dynamic where you know in advance that you don't know what is coming out. Player's money, and time, is limited, and so they're trying to select for their desires. If you want a horror game, you don't look for a highschool rom-com game, or vice versa. There's a reason even Doki Doki Literature Club has great big warning labels, just in case you are confused.
Subverting expectations is a delicate balance between surprising and delighting the audience with a twist they didn't see coming, and the writer being a pretentious twat. When people went to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, they wanted a sequel to a known property. And when they went back for episode 8 after the fanservice feel-good nostalgia baiting of episode 7, it's because they had an expectation of what they were going to get. However, Rian Johnson was a pretentious twat who thought subverting expectations was a pass to shit on the audience's interests, and low and behold interest in the Star Wars properties, and merchandise, and everything else promptly and sharply declined.
Spec Ops: The Line isn't Rian Johnson tier subverting expectations, but it very much is a product that does a bait-and-hook. Come for the modern warfare shooter gameplay, stay for the... warcrime simulator? Emotional masochism?
Don't get me wrong. On balance, I like Spec Ops: The Line. I think it has some artistic merit. But that artistic merit is when it's focused on the central character, not the player who doesn't know what's coming. The player is being carried along by pre-commitment bias, not agency of deliberate choice. They don't know what's coming, and that's not their fault when it's the artist doing the bait-and-hook.
I am extremely sympathetic to the people angered by the 'you could stop playing any time' after they paid. I am more sympathetic than I would be if, say, the developers got an attendance commission to go to a convention, and then got pissed on with the threat their attenndance commission being forfeit if they left rather than take it. At least the developers would have been led there with the prospect of something they wanted, money, if they put up with it. The Spec Ops players already got their money taken. Making them the subject of ridicule by proxy is just rubbing salt in a wound they weren't expecting and were misled into paying for.
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