Far Cry Design Review
July 30th, 2011I played Far Cry (yes, the first one - on the PC, by the way) a few weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it (well, a good 90% of it, anyway). While I'm pretty tolerant in general and don't often find a game that I don't like, there were a number of interesting design aspects of Far Cry that I think made it good. I wanted to look at a few of those, as they are things that others can easily emulate and that I think are better than their common alternatives.
I'm generally one of those people who says, "oh boy, it's another generic first-person shooter where you can kill completely unrealistic numbers of generic aliens/soldiers/terrorists while following the terrible linear plotline". And yes, Far Cry is this. But Far Cry does this in an extremely interesting and fun way that made forget about its genericness and really enjoy playing it. The main reason for this is the amazingly believable and interactive world Far Cry's designers have crafted. They have somehow created a world that is fun to interact with and explore, even though it's built around a cheesy rehash of the old Time Crisis mad scientist theme and populated by a really unlikely number of mercs.
How do they achieve this? What Far Cry has done is thrown out every cop-out design choice commonly used by designers of first and third-person games and replaced them with elements that serve the same purpose, but also feel like a natural part of the world. I guess the word to use here would be "immersion", though it seems overused in this field. I've picked out some of the great features of Far Cry's world below.
There are no hard world boundaries or "invisible walls", at least none that are reachable in the course of normal game play. The gating that keeps the player moving roughly along the route built by the game designers is incorporated realistically into the world. For example, steal a patrol boat and attempt to leave the island for the open sea? Almost every other game would place an invisible wall at some point out in the ocean, or perhaps kill the player with no good explanation as to his cause of death. We've come to accept these methods, and we don't (conciously) hate them, even though they are lame and immersion-breaking. But Far Cry does better. If you try to do this, the NPC narrator who keeps in contact with you via radio warns you that the mercenaries' radar systems will spot you on the open water. If you proceed, an attack helicopter flys to your location and guns you down. If you're looking the right way, you can even see the helicopter take off from the jungle and pursue you. This doesn't feel out-of-place or even unfair - I've neutralized attack helicopters before, and I feel like I have a chance against this one, but they're powerful enough that I don't feel cheated when it does get me. Most importantly, it doesn't break immersion like the repeated and highly unlikely excuse that there are "enemy mortars covering the area", the "return to the battlefield" warning, or the invisible wall.
The other common gating cop-out Far Cry revises is the "jungle path". Games that take place in a jungle, as Far Cry dominantly does, often try to keep the player on their neatly laid-out rails with walls of impassable shrubbery on either side of the path, or perhaps embankments that are just too steep to climb. These sorts of methods have the effect of slashing away huge portions of the game world in the player's mind. It doesn't feel like one world that they happen to be currently inhabiting a small jungle path within. It feels like a small path that exists only for them to run along it and complete the level. Far Cry, however, thrives on its small but (seemingly) unified world. It avoids this "jungle path" effect in two ways. One, it rarely tries to restrict the player closely to a path. Most games have to do this because they have laid out their enemies and their cover such that they expect the player to approach the encounter from a specific point, and if the player were to approach from a different direction entirely, it would break the difficulty of the encounter. Far Cry allows its level design to ignore these narrow restrictions because its enemy placement and AI are designed around this idea. The enemies mind their own business in camps and outposts until the player is spotted, at which time they are capable of taking cover, providing covering fire and attempting to flank and attack, and no matter where the player approaches from, they are capable of reacting dynamically to preserve the difficulty of the encounter. This allows Far Cry to achieve a very cool unity in its world, despite the fact that it is technically linear and divided up into a number of completely seperate "levels" as most games are.
I could go on, but I'm going to stop there for now.