After complaining about Destiny and Watch Dogs, it's only fair for Jon and Spencer to talk about games they love. Jon loves Far Cry 4, and Spencer loves Far Cry 4.
Previously: Jon and Spencer hate Destiny and Watch Dogs. Haaaaaate them.
Jon Bois: I loved Far Cry 4
I'm somewhere in northern Kyrat, and I'm playing out the funniest, weirdest, loudest, stupidest, and most chaotic scene I have ever witnessed in a video game. I am sprinting in circles. I am out of bullets and ideas and everything has gone wrong and I am totally fucked.
Seven or eight minutes ago, I swear, the world of Far Cry 4 made sense. I was crouched behind a tree just outside this enemy outpost. I had a sniper rifle and assault rifle full of ammo, a few grenades, and some bait for luring away any wild animals. Through my binoculars, I was noting the patrols of every guard in the outpost. This guy walks circles around this building. This guy walks along the wall, but stops every time to talk to his buddy. This guy's asleep. There are probably a dozen of them. I am one guy trying to take down an outpost of at least a dozen men all by myself. I've spent the last hour trying to do this on the "hard" setting, and failing, and this does not bother me at all.
Moments like these are, to me, what elevate video games from forgettable time-wasting to fascinating experiences. The market is flooded with video games built with the idea that getting better at a game ought to be a product of putting in grunt work and clocking the hours, rather than actually getting better. There is no handier example of this than Destiny, a graphically marvelous celebration of stamp-collecting and errand-running that is one of the worst video games I have ever played. Games like Destiny aren't really about you getting better. They're about you appeasing whatever bean-counter of a god runs this game until you earn enough brownie points to earn a more powerful gun. In so doing, the game gets easier. The game gets to do all the evolving; you're just the jerk pushing the buttons.
There are plenty of things to collect in Far Cry 4, but whenever I succeed in taking down one of these outposts — there are dozens of them in this beautiful, terrifying micronation — it's always because I finally got smart. I had to take down guys in the right order, stay as quiet as I could, sneak over and shut off an alarm. This is the most surefire way to get me invested in a game: give me total ownership of whether, and how, I succeed. I could have done it ten different ways, but this is the way I did it.
The outpost missions are just one of many, many gameplay elements Far Cry 4 offers. You also hunt bears, climb ancient crumbling towers, break out of prisons, grapple up and down unforgiving cliffsides, and stagger through fluorescent LSD freakouts full of demons and magical tiger-gods. You assassinate agents of the totalitarian state with your sniper rifle, or maybe with the bumper of a 1990s-era minivan. You dork around in a little gyrocopter, hang off the edge, and spray bad guys indiscriminately with a knockoff Uzi. It really feels as though, at every turn, the makers of this game paused every five minutes. "Is this fun?" they would ask. If not, they'd toss it, and if so, they'd tweak it until it was more fun.
This is pretty clearly a game made with love, and its most stunning achievement is that all the little gameplay experiences that make up these games — intense and casual, demanding and relatively easy, driving with super-simplified controls and planning a one-person invasion — are all perfectly calibrated. They made the gameplay as simple and accessible as they could until they reached the point at which the depth of the game was compromised, and then they backed off. I imagine that is very difficult to do, by virtue of how rarely I see it pulled off with this level of mastery. I think one can walk away from Far Cry 4 with the stupendously wrong impression that video games are easy to make.
It seems unfair that a game as well-considered as this can also produce the batshit chaotic nonsense other games would kill for but can only aspire to.
I'm sprinting laps through this God-forsaken outpost. Sometimes I'll sprint by an unprepared guard; he yells "HEY" and I'm around the corner before he can draw his weapon. A lot of them are chasing me. So is at least one lion and a couple of wolves. Occasionally I'll make a lap and see that the lion is feasting on one of the guys who was chasing me a minute ago.
I run inside a hut and see a giant dude in heavy armor stagger toward me. In a state of panic, I inadvertently hit the button that makes me throw a little pebble. It bounces off his armor. Dink, it goes. WHOOOSH, goes his flamethrower. I am now on fire, desperately trying to pat it out, still sprinting, still chased by kleptocrats and wild animals. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH goes the alarm. "More reinforcements coming!" says the radio. "Thirty seconds out, from the west!" No, no, those are their reinforcements.
So now I am chased by, I don't know, 25 bad guys and some wild animals. An elephant has showed up in the outpost. Why? I don't know! He just fuckin' wandered in here, because clearly this scene was missing an elephant, stomping and trumpeting, either delighted or furious at what is happening.
You can't round up any group of 25 humans without ending up with at least one really dumb guy. That really dumb guy mans the mortar gun on one of the roofs and just starts letting it rip like a lawnmower with a bad starter. KABLOOOOSH. The mortars always fall and explode where I was four seconds ago. KABLOOOOOSH. If I stand still, I am dead. I am cursed to keep sprinting until I am dead.
I don't know how much time passes, exactly. All of a sudden, the mortars stop. Everything is quiet. I stop and turn, and I find that the mortar guy, in his indiscriminate stupor, has killed just about all his buddies, and probably himself.
There is one guy left. He opens fire at me. One of the wolves sprints out of a nearby building, takes him down, and eats him to death as he screams.
I won.
★ ★ ★
More from Jon Bois:Larry Walters' flying lawn chair adventure
★ ★ ★
Spencer Hall: I loved Far Cry 4
As I played, I kept a running list of ways I died in this game. I've never done that before, but Far Cry 4 made me do a lot of things I'd never done in a video game before.
Eaten by dogs
Eaten by wolves
fall out of hang glider
You can't really explain a lot of what's going on in Far Cry 4. Explanation ruins almost everything, but it really ruins a game built on the premise that a twenty-something dude with no military training could be dropped in the middle of DEFINITELY-NOT-NEPAL and immediately begin wrecking shop with no fewer than 65 highly specialized forms of weaponry.
That doesn't sound too different from other lurid shooters, you say? Well no, it doesn't, at least until I tell you about the demon-spirit world you have to conquer with the help of a spirit tiger you can command with your mind, or the mad side missions you run for a demented fashion designer named "Mr. Chiffon" who has zero respect for endangered species status. These challenges are called "Kyrat Fashion Week," and they involve shooting a carnivorous demon fish with a grenade launcher from a cliff while gunmen periodically empty a .50 cal into you from a gunboat. This is a SIDE MISSION.
shot by sniper
eaten by dogs
Rolled out of truck, died
blew up self with C4
I destroyed endangered species with high-powered weaponry for boots. I pushed a man in a cage perched over a cliff to his death as he screamed for one more chance to talk to his daughter. (He deserved it, but still: I did that.) I walked willingly into the tent of two known and sketchy drug dealers who had previously drugged me and left me for dead in the Kyrati wilderness. They drugged me again. My character woke up hallucinating demons in the middle of a very real forest fire. When I got out of the forest fire, I was immediately shot at by random gunmen, who were then themselves attacked by golden eagles the size of Pteranodons.
Once, I sat in a bell tower's staircase baiting bears with meat and picking them off with a hunting bow for ten minutes until the entire room was filled with a six or seven foot thick layer of black bears.
I did surreal, terrible things in this game.
fell off tower to death
eaten by bear
shot by sniper
shot by sniper
failed to open parachute on wingsuit
Far Cry 4 was fair, though. It did surreal and terrible things to me, but also to everyone in the game. Wingsuiting is a perfectly logical way to commute through the open world of Kyrat. (This kind of logic is baseline normal in Far Cry 4; weird goes into a very, very weird territory from there, and it is a long, long way up to those heights.) On what I thought was an innocuous flight over to something I needed to kill, I decided to land and try to sneak up on my quarry from a distance.
I hit the wrong button and hit the ground at 160 miles per hour. I did not die, but was really close to it, and hit the health syringe a few times to get back to full health for exactly two seconds. Because I landed in a pack of wolves. Wolves that immediately began snapping at my arteries while I frantically spun in a circle emptying a shotgun into the bushes. I set them on fire with a flamethrower-- because again, that makes sense in this game, at least until they attack you WHILE THEY'RE ON FIRE AND SET YOU ABLAZE.
I finally killed them all, and stood satisfied and only slightly charred in a patch of scorched earth on the edge of a scenic Himalayan cliffside.
Then an angry yak blindsided me, butted me off the cliff, and I died.
shot by soldiers
shot by soldiers
set on fire by ninjas
stabbed by ethereal blue demon
stabbed by ethereal blue demon
stabbed by ethereal blue demon
stabbed by ethereal blue demon
Sometimes it doesn't even involve you. Late in the game, I had to go back to a base to help defend my compatriots' territory. When I got there there was the usual firefight, but with a special bonus at the end: a pack of wild dogs was ripping up one of my soldiers, and in need of help. But before I could act, I heard the whooosh-slip of an RPG round from somewhere to my left, and in the dark I saw a flash of yellow flame and heard honestly one of the most ungodly sound effects in a video game ever.
Somewhere there's a file in Ubisoft's vault labeled "the exact sound of ten wolves and one man being blasted to Valhalla by a rocket launcher." Like Werner Herzog in Grizzly Man, I have listened to the unlistenable, and command you to never hear it yourself. (And that's how the AI acts toward itself. What it does to you is charitable by comparison.)
set on fire by demon
set on fire by demon
set on fire by demon
set on fire by demon
set on fire by demon
There's a villain you end up liking way more than anyone else in the game, and allies you desperately want to vaporize the instant you meet them, and all the morally complicating factors a lot of shooters sort of half-assedly throw at you. That's all there, but there's a lot more extremely mean-spirited fun, too. Did you know you're told the solution to the game in the first ten minutes of the game, and that if you just follow directions you'll be taken to the spot where you leave your mother's ashes, which is why you were doing this in the first place? But you didn't, right, and just jumped straight to the shooting and mayhem and setting things on fire, because deep down this game knows you're not actually into solving problems with anything but a sniper rifle and a flame thrower?
clubbed to death with rifle butt
fell from cliff
clubbed to death
shot? I dunno, could have been like seven things at once
shot by sniper
shot by helicopter
shot by helicopter
blindsided by rifle butt while shooting at helicopter
And that the game-- through that malicious but extremely charming villain-- basically tricks you into becoming him? Which was the point of Far Cry 3, sure, and also a hundred other games and movies and stories where the camera pans to you and all but writes YOU ARE BECOME A DANG MONSTER on the screen? But here seems less like thunderous moral judgement, and is instead more like "Well, wasn't that a fun way to play a mean and fiery trick on you, and no fewer than three thousand unfortunate lackeys along the way?"
shot by helicopter
shot by sniper
fell off giant buddha
set on fire
fell off giant buddha
It has the widest streak of mean-ass humor of any video game I've ever played short of GTA V. I might have even enjoyed it more for that because the GTA series is so bound to a specific context. Far Cry 4 gets to start with a relatively blank slate, and make its jokes out of the brutal slapstick you walk into every five seconds or so. Yes, that Himalayan landscape is beautifully rendered, but you can't gaze too long because you just stepped on a honey badger and he's not happy about it. Yes, we know that's an African animal, and this is the Indian Subcontinent. But look, this is a game, and we'll put honey badgers in it if we want, along with rhinos, and yaks, and whatever else we want to arm the landscape with in order to turn every moment of the game into a potential predator/prey situation.
Sometimes I'd just sit on a cliff at sunset on my elephant and throw meat into an enemy camp until large, hungry predators ate everyone in the place. Inevitably, there would be the sound of gunfire cracking from across the valley, and the wreckage of the 87th gyrocopter I'd crashed into a cliffside in the background. It's always a beautiful morning in Kyrat, I'd think to myself, watching henchmen frantically swat at hordes of growling honey badgers swarming on them below.
And then I'd hear the rocket launcher go pffffffft out of the tube from somewhere in the bushes, and blow me and the elephant straight back to the respawn point.
trampled by rhino
eaten by wolves
rammed off cliff by two-ton cargo truck
eaten by wolves
fell to earth after chasing plane in wingsuit
clubbed to death by rifle butt
attacked by dog while on fire