The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Far cry 5. Spoilers ahead and if you have yet to play it I highly recommend you experience this firsthand rather than reading it here.
So each zone had its own gimmick. The zone lead by the super militant guy had a trippy segment where you basically ran an obstacle course while shooting people. He yelled at you to go faster and every iteration started the same as the last ones but got longer. They were also actually timed. Hallucinations were a big part of the game, and this was clearly one, so I didn’t really think much of it. I started breezing though it trying to get good times. At the very end of the last run was a lone person standing in a room. I snapped off the quickest headshot on him and was pretty happy about it, only to have the following scene reveal that I just fucking domed the leader of the resistance that I was helping. I didn’t even know if I could’ve discerned who it was during the sequence because I didn’t even look before shooting.
It tripped me out so hard because generally when games take away player agency, there’s a disconnect between the player and character. Like “welp my character is brainwashed so I gotta do bad things now.” But in this case, they genuinely got me, the player, to willfully do their bidding by pushing all the right buttons in my head. I had to pause to appreciate his hard I got got.
My number 2 would be project wingman. Wasn’t expecting much from the story but I nearly cried at the end.
People like to hate on FC5 but honestly it’s my favorite one
I just hated being railroaded into the drug trips. Like, in the northern region, there is literally no way to escape the hunters with bows who drug you. You can be in an enclosed helicopter a hundred feet off the ground, and they still hit you with an arrow.
Otherwise, great game, beautiful game, and honestly not awful co-op.
I seem to remember FC to have been rather railroady at times since at the very least FC3. But agreed, these scripted events often end up being kind of silly.
Agree. It’s still my personal favourite, but the forced kidnapping was really unnecessary. It wouldn’t have been any worse if they just did a standard “here’s your next story mission location” and the mission has a scripted kidnapping scene. Trying to force it at a random time just ended up feeling unrealistic and annoying.
I just hated seed. To me a religious extremists is deplorable beyond redemption, so I found nothing about him cool or interesting, I didn’t wanna hear his ranting I just wanted to kill him. Maybe that was the point, but I got used to farcry being the series with the cool villains you grow to love, but Joseph seed to me was very one dimensional, boring and i had zero interest in him to the point where I never finished the game when I found out the ending.
“So, you found some borders, buddy?”
Wait, wrong psychopathic pilot.
For how small the game (and the dev team), its surprisingly hits the level of much bigger titles like ace combat. And Jose Pavli has made a great ost, the violin motif in Calamity just hits right.