@tincanrocket The things I wrote about weren't things that happened but things that should have. The upshot is, there's nothing with the story to spoil because it is fucking shit.
Did anyone read the interview on Penny Arcade where the guy was saying the story is actually brilliant, just misunderstood? I think he is trying to say that the story nods to Alice in Wonderland (like maybe Buck is the Cheshire Cat because he smiles and vanishes a lot, and sexually assaults slaves) and because it has references to things, it's not actually stupid but really good. He also outright says that the reason the game is packed with stupid, cliched tropes is because it is a brilliant comment on stupid, cliched tropes.
What the guy didn't seem to realize was that all that was (to me at least) pretty obvious, but it was a totally hamfisted and bullet-point "ironic comment on gaming" theme which had been done just about masterfully in Bioshock, and some other games, and so when it came to Far Cry 3, even their ironic attack on cliched tropes was itself a cliched trope. The word "trope" itself has become horrible overused, because you sound smart when you say that about (film/game/thing)
Here's what I'd say to that guy about video game stories: a good one informs the gameplay, and vice versa. Bethesda are pretty terrible storytellers and yet you know what you are doing, why, your options of how and it all tends to emerge from the story - eg in Skyrim you are drawn eventually to a fight with a dragon, which leads to discovering you can eat the things and gain new powers, and through that, eventually save the world. The story is about dragons and it affects the gameplay from moment to moment in a manner which differs from the previous Elder Scrolls games.
Far Cry 3's story doesn't lead to any gameplay that wasn't in some other game already. You can make that out to be a brilliantly ironic gift for understated commentary, or you can call it a derivative game design process with a bunch of dissatisfying nonsense slathered over it.
Edited by ubergine at 16:23:00 18-12-2012
Did anyone read the interview on Penny Arcade where the guy was saying the story is actually brilliant, just misunderstood? I think he is trying to say that the story nods to Alice in Wonderland (like maybe Buck is the Cheshire Cat because he smiles and vanishes a lot, and sexually assaults slaves) and because it has references to things, it's not actually stupid but really good. He also outright says that the reason the game is packed with stupid, cliched tropes is because it is a brilliant comment on stupid, cliched tropes.
What the guy didn't seem to realize was that all that was (to me at least) pretty obvious, but it was a totally hamfisted and bullet-point "ironic comment on gaming" theme which had been done just about masterfully in Bioshock, and some other games, and so when it came to Far Cry 3, even their ironic attack on cliched tropes was itself a cliched trope. The word "trope" itself has become horrible overused, because you sound smart when you say that about (film/game/thing)
Here's what I'd say to that guy about video game stories: a good one informs the gameplay, and vice versa. Bethesda are pretty terrible storytellers and yet you know what you are doing, why, your options of how and it all tends to emerge from the story - eg in Skyrim you are drawn eventually to a fight with a dragon, which leads to discovering you can eat the things and gain new powers, and through that, eventually save the world. The story is about dragons and it affects the gameplay from moment to moment in a manner which differs from the previous Elder Scrolls games.
Far Cry 3's story doesn't lead to any gameplay that wasn't in some other game already. You can make that out to be a brilliantly ironic gift for understated commentary, or you can call it a derivative game design process with a bunch of dissatisfying nonsense slathered over it.
Edited by ubergine at 16:23:00 18-12-2012
