Far Cry 4 - *insert witty subtitle here*

[Valestein]

Looks like the patch that was supposed to come out this friday (to fix the god damn black screen issue) has been delayed to next week. http://steamcommunity.com/app/298110/discussions/0/624075566735483380/

MotherFUCK Ubisoft.

Good, they need to fix more important issues like black bars on 16:10 resolutions, so if more time is needed to get them into this patch then so be it.

Bro, I wish was having that problem instead. At least I'd be able to actually play.

 

[Zewp]

See, things like that are the reason why i enjoyed the game. At any moment you can get messed up.

See, there's your problem. You wrote 'can get' instead of 'constantly got'.

Doing a simple 1KM drive was a pain in the ass because it usually resulted in at least 10 stops to kill enemies who shot at you and then repair your vehicle. That's not fun. It's tedious.

 

[Jick Magger]

It isn't even 'could', it's 'would'. The entire gameworld was dotted with outposts, and 9 times out of ten your only options were to deal with them or skip them by taking a route that was often twice as long (and would inevitably lead you to another outpost regardless. It wouldn't be a problem if simply driving through them was an option, but it isn't. Each one has a minimum of one vehicle on standby, and the moment they spot you trying to get away they'll hop in it and chase you down to the ends of the fucking earth until either you kill them or they kill you. This happens constantly, and gets mind-numbingly tedious and aggravating specifically because, as I said earlier, it feeds the overall feeling that the game is just wasting your time. Every resource used is one you'll have to scrounge up somewhere else, every bullet fired is another chip in your weapon's degredation and another mandatory visit to the armory that much sooner, every minute spend is another closer to you running out of malaria pills and having to do another fucking boring as shit fetch quest, every single mechanic is dedicated solely to drawing attention away from the legitimately interesting parts of the game.

 

[Athelas]

I don't see the problem, it sounds like they really captured how harrowing civil warfare is.

 

[Jick Magger]

I don't see the problem, it sounds like they really captured how harrowing civil warfare is.

 

[adddeed]

Hey i understand why some of you hate the game. But for the exact same reasons i love it. If i want a different shooter i can play one. FarCry2 is a very particular game.

 

[Turisas]

Bro, I wish was having that problem instead. At least I'd be able to actually play.

Yeah, Ubisoft really fucked up with both this and especially AC: Unity. Guess a proper QA team would've cost too much, better buy some more ad space with that money.

 

[Wilian]

The only good games ubi releases are platformers.

Dunno, that M&M game they did was p. good blobber for this era.

 

[Weirdstuffinspace]

True. Their AAAAAAAAA line up is just horrid. The rayman games are fantastic platformers, and they even released the one before the newest drm free on dvd.

 

[chestburster]

It isn't even 'could', it's 'would'. The entire gameworld was dotted with outposts, and 9 times out of ten your only options were to deal with them or skip them by taking a route that was often twice as long (and would inevitably lead you to another outpost regardless. It wouldn't be a problem if simply driving through them was an option, but it isn't. Each one has a minimum of one vehicle on standby, and the moment they spot you trying to get away they'll hop in it and chase you down to the ends of the fucking earth until either you kill them or they kill you. This happens constantly, and gets mind-numbingly tedious and aggravating specifically because, as I said earlier, it feeds the overall feeling that the game is just wasting your time. Every resource used is one you'll have to scrounge up somewhere else, every bullet fired is another chip in your weapon's degredation and another mandatory visit to the armory that much sooner, every minute spend is another closer to you running out of malaria pills and having to do another fucking boring as shit fetch quest, every single mechanic is dedicated solely to drawing attention away from the legitimately interesting parts of the game.

STALKER does exactly the same thing yet it never feels boring:

"Every resource used is one you'll have to scrounge up somewhere else, every bullet fired is another chip in your weapon's degredation and another mandatory visit to the armory that much sooner, every minute spend is another closer to you running out of malaria pills Russian sausages or armor or radiation pills or whatever."

Therefore the fundamental cause of the issue is not the things you described, but that the skirmishes are boring and predictable. Unlike in STALKER which has free roaming AI and skirmishes can happen literally anywhere on the map, FC2's battles are usually severely limited to the areas around the outposts. Once you've done one of them you've seen all that the game can offer.

So how did Ubishit go about fixing Far Cry 2 in Fag Cry 3 and 4?

Instead of improving upon their already decent AI (at least compared to other AAA games), they went to directly address the superficial issues you listed. Now in Fag Cry 3 and 4:

Maps are now dotted with stuff you can collect. Weapons have no degradation. Every time you do ANYTHING, you gain "XP" and useless shiny loot as the Pavlovian reward for your trouble. No malaria/hunger meter/armor degradation to manage. Every animal you kill, you get "upgrades" to "unlock" stuffs that are locked and later unlocked for the only reason to give you the artificial sense of "progression".

And they further dumbed down the AI and the fire propagation and the stealth from FC2.

 

[Gerrard]

The thing is, in STALKER you can carry 500 bullets to a gun that kills in 1-2 hits, while in FC2 you can carry 40, and the gun will explode after firing 80.
That didn't stop the respawns in SoC from being annoying as fuck though. Oh, you're going through garbage? Better spawn some bandits attacking the hangar. You're going through wild territory? Better spawn some mercs at the construction site.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Only the shitty dropped guns explode and jam in FC2. Just buy the decent ones at he hangar and pick up dropped ammo instead. I never used the shitty ones because from the start of the game you have enough diamonds to buy at least a decent rifle or pistol (which still require way too many shots to kill a single enemy but that's another matter).

 

[toroid]

Both Far Cry 2 & 3 had shitty elements that ruined what could otherwise have been decent games.

Such as? Coz right now FC3 is 5 bucks at Gamersgate and the last FPS I've played was Crysis 1 couple of years ago so I'm thinking I could go for it.

Well for startless there's the endless checklist of stupid collectibles, radio tower, outposts, memory cards, relics, vases.

There's some fun sandbox stuff in there, but if you actually try to do everything in the game it starts to become really tedious.

Ah, so it's like Black Flag with its pointless idiotic filler collectibles up the wazoo? Yeah, fuck that then.

Not totally pointless. Some of the best weapons in FC3 are unlocked by doing these tedious things:

Spoiler

Signature Weapons Unlock Guide

Note: Once unlocked, these special weapons become available for purchase.

AMR

• Weapon Type: Sniper Rifle
• Cost: $4800
• Unlock: 20 Relics Discovered

Bull Shotgun

• Weapon Type: Shotgun
• Cost: $3010
• Unlock: 10 Relics Discovered

Bushman

• Weapon Type: Assault Rifle
• Cost: $3800
• Unlock: All Radio Towers Activated

Cannon

• Weapon Type: Revolver Pistol
• Cost: $2790
• Unlock: Uplay Reward

Japanese Tanto

• Weapon Type: Machete Upgrade
• Cost: N/A
• Unlock: 6 Letters Discovered

Ripper

• Weapon Type: Light Machine Gun
• Cost: $4200
• Unlock: 6 Trials of Rakyat Completed

Shadow

• Weapon Type: Pistol
• Cost: $2600
• Unlock: 17 Outposts Liberated

Shredder

• Weapon Type: Submachine Gun
• Cost: $3275
• Unlock: 10 Memory Cards Collected

You'll definitely want the Shredder. It's a suppressed SMG that fires .45 ACP at a really high rate of fire. Crazy high dps, and great for stealth murders.



Also, the thing that irritated me most about Far Cry 3 was the intense bloom effect of the illuminated aiming reticule in the optical sights. It's so bright and bloomy that it keeps you from seeing what you're aiming at. Fucking incompetent ubisoft retards. There is a mod called khenaz's better sights (which was never updated to work with the most recent version of the game) that fixes this issue. I ended up updating it myself, and I also integrated an improvement (made by someone else) which removes the "dirty optic" effect. Here's the mod if you want to use it.

 

[Jick Magger]

STALKER does exactly the same thing yet it never feels boring:

"Every resource used is one you'll have to scrounge up somewhere else, every bullet fired is another chip in your weapon's degredation and another mandatory visit to the armory that much sooner, every minute spend is another closer to you running out of malaria pills Russian sausages or armor or radiation pills or whatever."

Therefore the fundamental cause of the issue is not the things you described, but that the skirmishes are boring and predictable. Unlike in STALKER which has free roaming AI and skirmishes can happen literally anywhere on the map, FC2's battles are usually severely limited to the areas around the outposts. Once you've done one of them you've seen all that the game can offer.

So how did Ubishit go about fixing Far Cry 2 in Fag Cry 3 and 4?

Instead of improving upon their already decent AI (at least compared to other AAA games), they went to directly address the superficial issues you listed. Now in Fag Cry 3 and 4:

Maps are now dotted with stuff you can collect. Weapons have no degradation. Every time you do ANYTHING, you gain "XP" and useless shiny loot as the Pavlovian reward for your trouble. No malaria/hunger meter/armor degradation to manage. Every animal you kill, you get "upgrades" to "unlock" stuffs that are locked and later unlocked for the only reason to give you the artificial sense of "progression".

And they further dumbed down the AI and the fire propagation and the stealth from FC2.

The fundamental difference is that STALKER did it well. Running out of sausages is just a matter of looting some more off of dead bodies or finding one of the numerous friendly stalkers in the game world to trade with, and even then it's hard to run out of them if you remember to ration properly. In Far Cry 2, malaria isn't something to 'manage', it's a periodic inevitability. You can't try to ration them, you have to take the pills when the game tells you to take them or else you die, and once you run out every 2 or so hours the game forces you to drop absolutely everything you're doing to force you to drive to the opposite corner of the map to get some more. These weren't 'superficial' issues, they were a series of nagging issues that combine into one big ulcer of an experience. Constant, fixed, unavoidable skirmishes, combined with weapons that'll fucking explode in your face after 4 magazines of shooting, in a game world that's utterly fucking barren save for those outposts (unlike STALKER), does not an enjoyable experience make. I'll agree that Far Cry 3's solution to the issues of Far Cry 2 wasn't perfect, but I'll pick it any day of the fucking week over Far Cry 2's abysmal attempt at creating a 'STALKER-like' experience.

 

[DalekFlay]

I wouldn't even call Far Cry 2 and STALKER remotely comparable, but maybe that's me. In either case Far Cry 3's good aspects are fun stealth invasion missions and animal hunting for upgrades, not hardcore challenge or RPG-lite mechanics.

 

[chestburster]

So this explains why Fag Cry 3 is so bland and shitty:

Child of Light is one of a number of titles like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Valiant Hearts which are the result of a new initiative at Ubisoft to try out smaller projects and give developers creative freedom and control.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, Plourde said the project more than made back Ubisoft’s investment in it.

“It’s not as profitable as Assassin’s Creed is profitable, but it’s profitable enough that we would have been able to fund a sequel,” Plourde said.

“Or if it had been my company, I would be driving a Ferrari and doing donuts.”

That probably sounds like a lot of money, but for a company as big as Ubisoft it may be just a blip in the charts and not of much interest to investors. Still, the existence of Child of Light and similar endeavours, like Alex Hutchinson’s upcoming project, creates diversity in the publisher’s catalogue and is a good way to foster and reward talented development staff.

“The main reason why I got greenlit on the project was because I had carte blanche for making Far Cry 3,” Plourde said.

“I didn’t want to make Far Cry 3, but they said, ‘Pat, if you do that and help build that brand, we’re going to give you a free shot at the game you want.’”

Plourde said that the personal creative project was rewarding in a way big triple-A games had not been, as his playable poem touched players in different ways.

Child of Light cost Ubisoft a “couple of million”, mostly salaries for the 40 staff who worked on bringing it to multiple platforms at launch. [/spoiler]

http://www.vg247.com/2014/11/20/child-of-light-made-plenty-of-money/

 

[Astral Rag]

Even with a GTX 980 in play, we still see frame-rate drops as we move around the landscape - with 50ms stutter commonplace. It's particularly bad when driving vehicles, suggesting a background streaming issue. We wondered if this was a VRAM issue, but swapping in a 6GB GTX Titan made no difference whatsoever. For those wondering, AMD graphics cards are similarly affected. Various fixes have been suggested but as things stand, we believe that only by disabling mipmaps can you minimise the stutter. To do this, go to the 'My Games' folder in the 'My Documents' folder, then open 'EditorGamerProfile.xml' in Notepad. Change DisableLoadingMip0 = "0" to DisableLoadingMip0 = "1", and make the same change to GPUMaxBufferedFrames="0". All other solutions do nothing for us across a variety of PCs and graphics cards, and even this only lessens the problem - it doesn't eliminate it. We note that GPU VRAM utilisation drops by 1GB, so there may be a reduction in texture quality. Overall, this issue sounds very much like the disastrous Watch Dogs texture streaming situation - which remains a problem to this day. We just can't quite understand why an issue that caused Ubisoft a lot of problems in the past wasn't addressed, let alone why it has manifested again in another top-tier product.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-far-cry-4-face-off

 

[Gerrard]

Only the shitty dropped guns explode and jam in FC2. Just buy the decent ones at he hangar and pick up dropped ammo instead. I never used the shitty ones because from the start of the game you have enough diamonds to buy at least a decent rifle or pistol (which still require way too many shots to kill a single enemy but that's another matter).

The weapons degrade based on the amount of total ammo you can carry. So for example the dart rifle, for which you could only have like 6 shots, would break after firing less than 20 times from brand new.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Never had that issue. Then again, I always enter storehouses to refill ammo (pick up another copy of the gun) when given the chance, which could influence it. (I've also read that dropping a gun makes it dirty and it behaves like a shitty enemy weapon if you pick it back up)

 

[Metro]

Even with a GTX 980 in play, we still see frame-rate drops as we move around the landscape - with 50ms stutter commonplace. It's particularly bad when driving vehicles, suggesting a background streaming issue. We wondered if this was a VRAM issue, but swapping in a 6GB GTX Titan made no difference whatsoever. For those wondering, AMD graphics cards are similarly affected. Various fixes have been suggested but as things stand, we believe that only by disabling mipmaps can you minimise the stutter. To do this, go to the 'My Games' folder in the 'My Documents' folder, then open 'EditorGamerProfile.xml' in Notepad. Change DisableLoadingMip0 = "0" to DisableLoadingMip0 = "1", and make the same change to GPUMaxBufferedFrames="0". All other solutions do nothing for us across a variety of PCs and graphics cards, and even this only lessens the problem - it doesn't eliminate it. We note that GPU VRAM utilisation drops by 1GB, so there may be a reduction in texture quality. Overall, this issue sounds very much like the disastrous Watch Dogs texture streaming situation - which remains a problem to this day. We just can't quite understand why an issue that caused Ubisoft a lot of problems in the past wasn't addressed, let alone why it has manifested again in another top-tier product.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-far-cry-4-face-off

Clearly they need 16 gig vram.

 

[DalekFlay]

Ubisoft make the best quality PC ports!

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Wondering whether to pick up the PC or Ps3 version...not really in the mood to deal with shitty ports. Then again, it probafly won't take long until some kid on the internet that's somehow more skilled than Ubi's best fixes it...

 

[Metro]

Neither, it's a bad game.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Did I say that was an option, you fucker? Stop fucking mansplaining me.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Wondering whether to pick up the PC or Ps3 version...not really in the mood to deal with shitty ports. Then again, it probafly won't take long until some kid on the internet that's somehow more skilled than Ubi's best fixes it...

That would depend on your computer. I have a pretty modest i5 3570k running at 4.2ghz and a 770gtx 2gb and can run at a combination of very high/max settings close to a constant 60 fps.

I would imagine that unless your rig is severely dated, at worst you can cap your maximum framerate to 30 with something like nvidia inspector or msi afterburner and at least get settings on par with the ps4/xbox one version running without problems. I see no reason therefore to go for the ps3 version which probably runs sub-20 fps most of the time besides looking like shit.