Currently Playing: Far Cry 4 Is A Comfortingly Unadventurous Adventure
It doesn't take a genius to recognise that the Far Cry games are build to a formula. Though the characters and details may change, the same core mechanics of running, shooting, melee, climbing etc, the animations, the core story, the basic models, are largely the same from game to game. A player who is new to the franchise gets the benefit of all of that accumulated work - dropped straight into a highly polished cinematic AAA gaming experience - but the repeat player, the fan who follows the series and buys in each time, gets a arguably diminished experience, because so much of it will be familiar, and so obviously iterated. If I pick up an Assassins Creed or Far Cry game, I know exactly what I am going to get - it's reliable fun, but the accusation of "innovation by spreadsheet" is not an unfair one. It is a very conservative approach but it does produce good, reliable results.
The formula in Far Cry 4 is refined in response to the learnings of Far Cry 3, and so on, making it better each time but never taking a wholesale leap into something truly unique. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. A familiar experience can be fun, even comforting. Your puppy running to the door to greet you when you come home from work still brings you joy day after day after day. But too much reliability can turn to routine, and routine is not fun. Routine is inevitability, and it quickly turns to boredom, and ultimately to resentment, that our lives are stuck in a pattern without change or agency. Joy, true joy, comes when something bright and fun and exciting comes into our lives unexpectedly, and it is novel, shaking up the routine and bringing with it a new perspective.
This is exacerbated by the open-world format, as players best memories of the game will come towards the end, when much of the skill/weapons/locations trees have been unlocked, and they are rampaging about with near unlimited freedom in something akin to God-mode. With the new game, the trees are locked up again, the map size is constricted, and the player's overriding emotion is of frustration at the memory of all the cool things they used to be able to do, which are now once again out of reach. Re-earning the abilities and perks they had come to take for granted results to a) a feeling of lingering disappointment, as things are always better with nostalgia and b) a realisation of the arbitrariness of locking the ability off to start with.
Yet, if we as game designers and creators did not lock off skills and abilities, the player would have no incentive to play at all. Play, and fun, does not come from getting the reward, it comes from the process of trying to earn it, and this is something few players ever actually realise. The reward is not the goal, the reward is a way of demarking the end of the fun, and aims to reduce the negative emotions associated with the end of fun by offering an alternative carrot. High quality rewards, in the form of unlockable abilities, create a "fun loop" by allowing the award to immediately be put to use in extending the gameplay and chasing the next reward. Good rewards increase retention and replayability, by keeping the fun flowing. Giving the player a grounds to wonder why abilities were locked off at the start is the video-game equivalent of breaking the forth wall - the player begins to question the foundations upon which the game's progression curve and balancing are built, and, without the Design Thinking framework to puzzle through it all, may simply conclude that the game is unfair, or padded with fluff to artificially extend its length.
This is why Breath of The Wild is so successful - it maximises Joy for the player, by permitting them the opportunity to discover the gameplay mechanics iteratively, experimentally, in short playfully, within a large open world. A player works out that they can cook by placing an apple in a fire. Then they try putting apples in a cooking pot, and get a new result! The routine action of taking apples from the inventory and placing them in a fire is shaken up by the new-found knowledge that there is another option, and the player discovered it organically. This encourages them to engage in further gameplay experimentation: what happens if I put lots of apples in the fire? What happens if I combine the apples with something else, like an egg or some salt? What happens if I put all three items - the egg, the salt and the apples - together, then what? The player is exploring the limitations of the rules of the system, and that is play. The reward of cooked food is only a vehicle to enable more gameplay interactions; in itself, it is after all only a collection of pixels pretending to be a plate of food. It has limited symbolic status, perhaps in a socially oriented game such a digital item might have some degree of social status, but as a practical object, it has no intrinsic status other than its utility in facilitating other, new gameplay experiences. When non-gamers identify games as "pointless," this is often at the root of their criticism. The game only produces more gameplay - there is no "end product" such as a plate of cookies or a scarf or a clay pot. The process is the reward, and for those who do not find the process of digital play engaging or accessible, it can be hard to grasp the appeal for those who do.
In a series such as Far Cry or Assassins Creed or Call of Duty or Mario Kart, genuinely new gameplay experiences are few and far between. In Far Cry, you know that there are going to be caves to explore, enemies to shoot, towers to climb, a way to fly, a way to swim, as there have been in all the games in the series previously. And these experiences are done well, but they do not excite the player as much as they did on first encounter. Because they are familiar, they do not spark Joy - familiar abilities do not prompt exploration and discovery. The player already knows the limitations of the ability, its intended uses and practical applications. They have no incentive to experience with what they can do; they already know. (This also applies in real life. When was the last time you really marvelled at your own ability to open a door or sweep a flooor? Yet if you try to teach yourself to juggle, the process of exploring what you can and cannot do, figuring out what is going wrong and working to improve your skills, is considered a kind of fun.)
Thus there is a kind of weird tension at the heart of my gushing enjoyment of Far Cry 4. I could wax on about how much I loved the beautiful vistas, the animals wandering freely across the huge and topologically varied map, the freedom of moment and opportunities for exploration, or the satisfyingly brutal weapons-based gameplay. I could claim that the setting of Kyrat, clearly influenced by Nepal, is what really drew me in - the chance to go to a place I've never really encountered before in any media, including video-games, and dip a toe into a brand new culture, is what made my time with Far Cry 4 so enjoyable. And it's certainly a part of it. Far Cry 4's themes and setting fascinate and excite me; Far Cry 5 leaves me cold, because its not a cultural story that holds any interest for me. Americana is not my thing, but the thrilling meld of culture, religion, symbolism, tradition, violence and serenity explored thematically in Far Cry 4 gave me a good opportunity to mentally flex my sociology muscle.
But fundamentally, the reason why I enjoyed Far Cry 4 so much is that its been a while since I last played a Far Cry game. I had to learn how to play a Far Cry game again. I remembered the broad stokes: guns go bang, falls go ouch, tigers go rawr, but the familiar was mixed up with just enough that was new - new characters, new places, new missions types, and that was forgotten - which button is the jump button again argh honey-badger run away!! - that though it did not feel completely fresh and innovative, there was still enough that was new to entice me to explore and interact. My memories of previous Far Cry games were positive, and the game did a good job of invoking that positive nostalgia, by using familiar Far Cry building blocks - the lone protagonist, the sadistic antagonist, the wild world - and adapting them to a new setting without really challenging me to learn something new or hard. Far Cry 4 was one of my favourite games of 2017, but I'm not going to kid myself that it was clever, or innovative, or daring. It was just fun, and pretty and daft. Far Cry is comfort food gaming, but that's no bad thing.
