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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.
Well darn. Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3.
For those not familiar, ME3 was the divisive end for the Mass Effect trilogy which premised a meta-narrative of your choices mattering and having consequences over a trilogy of games with choice carry-over being designed from the start. Except many of the characters were a mix of woobie and sycophant, and the developers hadn't actually written out or designed a trilogy structure, or even figured out how they were going to overcome their own overpowering arch enemy. They were making up a series and key lore as they went along, and wrote themselves into a corner where the end-game solution to an unstoppable fleet was a macguffin from precursors that, if built, can kill them before they kill you. This culminated in ME3's controversial ending of the player basically choosing to nuke galactic civilization in one of three colors of techno-magic. And the only ending where survival was potentially implied was the one where galactic civilization couldn't be put back together again via an army of genocidal squid-machines or the involuntary organic-AI interfusion of everyone.
For a series that to date had basically no blow back to any of the moral highroad / 'damn the risks, I'm doing what's right' decisions that were the audience and writer's preferred Paragon playstyle, it was a sharp whiplash of tone. Mass Effect to date had rarely been about having to make hard decisions, because it had always let you avoid the hard parts if you just picked the golden route / nice thing, while the most common consequence of not doing the nice thing in a previous game was less content in the next. Hard consequences were the consequence of being a jerk, which is why surviving a suicide mission with no casualties was by far the most common import state between ME2 and ME3.
But if you were willing to take the less-than-golden route from the start...
To this day, I maintain Mass Effect 3 works best as a war story if you go into it with a lot of the fan-favorite characters dead from the previous games. Doing so denied players the opportunity for golden-path 'flawless' successes along the way, and so reframed the ME3 ending from being an out-of-place anamoly to tonally and thematically consistent.
A large part of this was the lack of trilogy design though put into the cast of characters introduced into ME2, a game built around recruiting and exploring a cast of characters for a suicide mission where Anyone Can Die. A lot of thought and care went into the character designs and their missions and such, but at a design level the mere fact that they could die meant that any sequel had to be designed around the possibility that they would not be there. No one could be entirely load-carrying for the plot, because the plot has to happen. So if they are to play a role in a later game, they need a substitute who can do it for them.
This can be done by using other characters already existing in the narrative. In Mass Effect 1, for example, one of the genuinely best choices of the series is when you can only save one of your two starting marine companions on a planet called Virmire, made juicier that one of them may be your primary love interest. There is no golden way to save both, and it can be gripping. However, post-Virmire the Virmire Survivors collapse into a single character in the narrative, and fulfill eachother's roles almost identically. So in ME2 they are a cameo character investigating the big bad and your mysterious post-death return, whether they are your former flame or not, in ME3 there's a generally identical reconciliation arc (or not), and so on.
But you can also fill the narrative hole by introducing new characters. For example, another ME1 character is Wrex, a jaded warlord of a species that's been genocided for warmongering by a bioweapon known as the genophage. It basically reduces the once hyper-fertility race that overwhelmed with numbers to such a degree that the race's own disregard for life is dooming it to extinction. Wrex has matured past the worst of the species hyper-aggressive warmongering ways, but in ME1 when he hears the antagonist has been working on a cure he sees the salvation of his species as too precious to lose. You can talk him down if you've invested enough in the persuasion / morality system, but if it's your first run you may have to put him down- or your marine companion may put him down. This is also on Virmire, so this is the mission that could kill two companions, and your Virmire survivor decision may be shaped by who puts Wrex down.
But if Wrex dies, he is replaced by his otherwise-never-referenced brother Wreave. And Wreave is as awesome a narrative foil as he is a terrible person. He is the sort of short-sighted, hyper-aggresive, civilizationally ruinous warlord that makes you understand why the genophage was employed in the first place. Where Wrex has mellowed out and likes a good brawl but will try things like 'diplomacy' and 'restraint,' Wreave is a vicious and brutal warlord with the sort of cunning to also rise in power, but makes it clear any good relations are transactional and probably temporary. Put another way- Wrex is a noble-savage king who might ally with a female clan in a deliberate breeding alliance that is barely breakinng above replacement rates by reigning in their worst impulses, and Wreave is a savage-savage who monopolizes the females with all that implies.
Which makes the ME3 core plot arc of 'build a galactic alliance against the Reapers' so much more juicy, since both Wrex and Wreave are basically holding out on alliance in exchange for the same bribe: a cure to the genophage. This is pure crisis bartering for both of them, a demand they know will only be given in an existential crisis. They'll be your army if you remove the shackles driving them to extinction, except the extinction is because they'd be able to survive regardless if they weren't so self-destructive. But while Wrex is a guy you can see has been trying to make a society that maybe you could trust to not rampage across the galaxy, Wreave makes no such pretensions- it's just that that is the next generation's problem if you can survive the current apocalypse.
Which is what makes the story arc's big decision- do you sabotage the genophage cure- such an interesting option. You have the option to secretly sabotage the genophage, but let the Krogan think it worked for a time. Eventually the evidence will be clear, but that is the next generation's problem if they can survive the current apocalypse.
Saving Wrex and delivering the genuine genophage clear is part of that paragon golden route, and it's not even subtle about it. Basically all the cultural drawbacks and survival-through-reform themes from before are thrown out and not mentioned again. The morally nuanced and internally conflicted alien doctor Mordin, from the species that made- and re-enforced- the genophage, goes from grappling with his conscience and competing ethical complications and responsibility to a moral certainty that this is the right thing. There's even a 2010s feminist Krogan female who's introduced, subtly named Eve, who is wise and virtuous and the key to saving the hyper-masculine testosterone-poisoned species. If you do this golden route, despite the genophage being about reigning in massive broods, the post-credits slide (after the 'improved' endings post-controversy) show a nuclear family of two parents and a single child. All is good, and nothing is implied to happen.
Have Wreave, though, and the context changes. He's clearly not interested in listening to the advice of the wonderful woman that is Eve. He fantasizes of the wars he's going to fight. He is a giant alarm bell of the future, and even the guilt-plagued genophage doctor Mordin can be convinced that, no, sabotaging the cure is for the best. This is treachery, no doubt about it, but it's for the best. It doesn't hurt that Wreave is an idiot. He won't know until it's well, well too late.
But Wrex isn't an idiot. And the best / most deliciously painful writing in the arc comes from if you betray him. Your friend. Your homeboy. And your other homeboy, Mordin.
See, Mordin's character arc has always been grappling with the genophage, something he felt was necessary because of how bad the Krogan had become, but regretted all the same. With the golden route of Wrex and Eve, he doesn't think it's necessary anymore. In the culmination of the genophage arc, if you try to sabotage the genophage, Mordin does something almost no companion character franchise does-
He defies you, and disregards your choice. Rather than submit to your take-as-long-as-you-need dialogue option to decide the fate of the species, Mordin goes 'no,' and moves to cure the genophage anyway. The actual choice to sabotage the golden path is if you literally shoot your companion in the back via a special in-cutscene decision. He dies, gasping, in the fires that consume his hopes for the krogan species. Your sacrifice for a bitter-sweet betrayal of the golden path.
And when Wrex puts the pieces together, he is furious, and tries to murder you in the middle of the galactic capital. No evasion, no dialogue checks. He even brings up how you talked your way out of that Virmire situation long ago. He's throw accusations, and you've really no choice (other than death) but to kill him. Two friends lost to the same narrative decision.
But what makes it best? The local police chief (who you know) who comes to assist asks what's going on. And accepts a lie because, well, everyone knows Krogan are irrationally aggressive. There was no helping it. Life goes on, despite the loss. This is the sort of narrative tone for the early and into mid-game that makes the ME3 ending feel in place, and not shoehorned in for 'forced tragedy.'
But the meta-mechanics of 'why' this tension worked- why Wrex was better than Wreave- apply elsewhere.
Go back to survivability design. If a character can die, future stories must exist without them. If the character is absent, another must fill in. Put another way, though, the future plots exist without the killable-character, and the returning character is just a cameo in their own episode plot.
But, Mass Effect was a franchise built around the characters. They are the central appeal in otherwise middling writing. Moreover, the characters from ME2 were introduced as 'the best of the best.' They are awesome, far more awesome than random replacements. But they've also generally arrived at the end of their character arcs, since most characters from ME2 had self-contained character arcs that were concluded by the suicide mission they could die in. Because, for narrative purposes, helping them find closure is the secret ingredient for them surviving the suicide mission.
So you have characters, who have already concluded their character arcs, who may or may not be coming back as cameos. How do you make those cameos the fan-servicey things they are?
In short, by making things turn out better when they are around. New sympathetic characters who have to be introduced in ME3 can survive if fan-favorite returns from ME2. Menacing threats can be dealt with just in time with returning champion. The AI who learned what it meant to have friends becomes the key to saving two species from an AI-vs-organic war. ME2 cameo characters, in other words, become the key to the golden path.
But the golden path leads to narrative dissonance with the ending. And often isn't better writing, as much as saccharine.
For another example- take the character of Jack.
Jack is the ultimate woobie, destroyer of worlds. If you remember that scene from the first Deadpool movie where Deadpool and his love interest trade who has the worse childhood abuse backstory, that's Jack, except played striaght instead of laughs. Jack has the most powerful space-magic telekenitics in the galaxy because of how much she was abused as a child by inhuman experiments, which were done for the sake of giving her the most powerful space-magic telekenitcs in the galaxy. Don't ask how human child abuse by human specist-extremists makes a woman strong, it's symbolic and characteristic of that era of Bioware. Jack's ME2 character arc is about overcoming personal trauma and starting to heal. (Naturally, this progresses most explicitly comes out in the romance scene if you sleep with the traumatized girl.)
Jack's ME3 cameo is that she goes to a school for other space-telekinetics, and became the cool teacher. The school is attacked by the same human-extremist that kidnapped and traumatized her, and whose current style is to take people and make cybernentic slave-soldiers out of them. Its up to you and Jack to save the kids, but really this is Jack's epilogue story and you're just enabling her. With Jack on board, the mission is a triumph over past abusers, an unmitigated victory, and Jack basks in the adoration of her adoring students. Those students exist merely as background cheerleaders as she trounces the enemies, and at the very end one over-eager one has to be saved to give Jack her big goddamn hero moments. At the end, the moral decision is whether your conscript these young adult-age level telekinetics into the space army against the apocalypse, which Jack doesn't like the thought of but hey, she'll be there to make sure the worst doesn't happen.
If Jack is dead, the academy is still attacked, and those students have to save themselves, learning to fight for themselves or be enslaved to fight for others. A cathartic victory romp is instead becomes a harrowing school shooting / hostage rescue, as the students band together to try and resist an overpowering opponent systemically dismantling their defenses. The students are cracking, but under pressure from adversity the models that would have been caricatures of adoring fans in another timeline have to develop into actual characters in another. It's not the longest mission, but it's long enough for one of them to stand up and emerge as a potential leader, someone who can hold the team together and get them safe.
In another timeline, this is the student who Jack saves in her big goddamn hero moment. In this timeline, he still needs a big goddamn hero of his own, as he's being a hero to others. But Jack isn't here, and he is shot. The other students are saved, but traumatized all over again- the rising hero that was inspiring them cut down, as so many are in the greater apocalyptic war.
Now do you conscript these traumatized, but blooded, teens to be soldiers instead of students during the apocalypse?
As with the genophage, this is the sort of writing that makes a hail-mary play with no ideal outcomes feel tonally consistent.
In your golden route paths, nuking civilization galaxy-wide is so jarring because it feels it should be unnecessary. You basically roll from victory to victory, and if it's not enough that just means you should just keep playing and saving the day more. You've always taken the high road to date- why should it fail you now? It's only when it fails that the saccharine sweetness becomes apparent.
But in your 'inferior' routes, the routes you get by 'failing' to save people before, you are already steeped in losses. Your world is 'objectively worse' than the golden route, but also much more visceral and gripping. You get character drama and tragedy, as competing visions of greater goods leads to betrayal, and as the promising potential of the future dies and the survivors are scarred/corrupted just to keep fighting. Survival at a cost, at almost any cost, without losing your humanity even if human nature isn't as noble as you'd like.
But then, I'm also one of the minority of people who unironically enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda as a deliberately campy B-flick story of alien first contact and exploration, so what do I know.
My preferred example of this is Dragon Age 2, which deserves a longer post than I can make right now, but which I much prefer to read as a tragedy, and therefore is accentuated and heightened by 'bad' decisions.
I think DA2 is a tragedy even if you play it 'optimally', for the best outcomes. Even in the best possible version, DA2 is a story about Hawke, the protagonist, seeking his/her fortune in a new city, rising from a penniless refugee to the height of political power, and none of it being worth a damn. No matter how good your decisions, or how diligent you are about sidequests and doing all the content, the city of Kirkwall is doomed to descend into anarchy and civil war. It does not matter how good your judgement is, or how canny a political operator, or even how skilled you are with a sword. The forces of social division and entropy tearing this city apart were set long before you ever arrived. Moreover, no matter your choices, you are going to lose friends and loved ones. This city will chew up and destroy everyone you ever cared for.
In some ways I see the game summarised well in the character of Gamlen. Gamlen is the player character's uncle, someone you were hoping to make contact with and ask for help in your desperate flight at the start of the game. Instead you discover that he is a washed-up drunk and a gambler, who has lost the family's wealth and even sold their estate to cover his debts. It is easy to feel contempt for him as you set about rebuilding the fortune and reclaiming your estate.
Even so, by the conclusion of DA2, well, at least one of your siblings has been killed by monsters, the other has either been killed by monsters or has been lost to you by joining/being-conscripted-into an isolated organisation of fanatics, your dead father's legacy is in disgrace, your mother has been murdered by a serial killer, and your friends have mostly fallen apart as well. By the end of the game I wanted to head down to Lowtown and say to Gamlen, "...I get it now. Pass me a bottle."
If you try your hardest to make optimal choices you can take the edge off the tragedy a little, but to me that always feels like missing the point of the game. Both your siblings should die. Merrill should end up killing her entire clan. Isabela should end up fleeing the city, feeling guilty and abandoned, while the qunari burn the city searching for a book that isn't even there. Anders should die on a bloody block, killed by someone he thought was a friend. This is miserable, but the game is about misery.
DA2 is a game about losing what you love, about betrayal, and entropy, and being the last one standing, hands covered in blood, amid the burning wreckage of everything you were trying to defend. The more strongly that theme comes through, the better and more affecting the game is, and that means that I think the 'good' choices, which let you salvage small bits of success from amid the wreckage, make the game weaker as a whole. DA2 is, unavoidably, a game where you the player lose. Kirkwall defeats you. The game is better if it leans into that.
Another point of comparison might be Rannoch in ME3, which I notice you didn't mention. I think the Rannoch section works vastly better if, in the end, only one race can survive. I have my objections to the actual writing of the Rannoch segment, which is mostly bad, but I like the final choice. The quarians will survive or the geth will survive. Choose. It is a genuinely difficult and even heartbreaking choice. Unfortunately, BioWare are cowards and give you an option to just save everyone, which I think is frankly pretty pathetic.
To an extent I have the same objection to Tuchanka. Both Tuchanka and Rannoch have more-or-less the same premise. You have two very sympathetic characters, Wrex/Mordin and Tali/Legion, both of whom are fan favourites, both of whom the player has probably come to really care about in previous games, and who are on opposite sides of a contentious, morally complicated issue. Wrex wants to cure the genophage; Mordin wants to preserve it. Tali wants the quarians to survive and prosper; Legion wants the geth to survive and prosper. They cannot both get what they want. The case for each side has been made to you at length by a sympathetic, emotionally compelling character. Now choose.
Unfortunately in both cases ME3 wimps out. For Tuchanka it just has Mordin change his mind and become anti-genophage despite that being the opposite of his position in ME2; and for Rannoch it just lets you convince the geth and the quarians to put a history of genocide behind them and make up. You can argue Mordin changing his mind is justified if you pushed him in that direction in ME2, but he changes his mind even if in ME2 you encouraged him to believe that what he did was right and justified. It reminds me of how Garrus in ME2 is always a rogue who's quit C-Sec to become a vigilante, even though his entire character arc in ME1 was about choosing whether to go rogue or play it straight and stay in C-Sec, and both options were supported there. There are a lot of places where BioWare handles player choice very well, but that just makes these failures all the more jarring, especially when they go against the ME series' promise to give you genuinely hard choices. What is the point of promising hard decisions if the games are always going to back out and give you a third option? The golden routes are BioWare losing their nerve and failing their own games.
I have similar vibes on DA2, including empathy for Gamlen. Who- despite being the character encouraged to be viewed with contempt- is a bit of a tragic character in his own right who was the unfavored child who none the less shared what he had when his long-absconded sister showed up asking for aid.
For ME3, I think the Rannoch arc is one of those where it gets much, much better if you let a ME2 character die. Namely, Legion. With Legion, the Geth are cast as extremely sympathetic 'we didn't mean to do that / we don't want conflict.' Without Legion, the ME3 Geth are just as much the original victims, but far more menacing.
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