Open World Unpredictable
Most of the way through my first FAR CRY experience, FAR CRY 5, and though not in the same league as a Rockstar open world game and suffering from a dearth of character and humanity beyond cookie-cutter arche/stereotypes – I’m still enjoying it: Hope County is beautiful to behold and a joy to explore – it’s a place you want to save; the missions are challenging – an area in which FAR CRY 5 actually exceeds Rockstar: no matter how rich and well-drawn the missions in RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2, they were never particularly challenging; and any game with a compatriot cougar named Peaches or a bear named Cheeseburger deserves our plaudits.
But as beautiful as Hope County is it’s nearly doomed by the predictable: the “resistance” meter and rote kidnapping / escape missions at defined progress points kill the game’s momentum – despite being designed to move the story forward – and ruin the essential component of any open world game: in order for a game to be truly open world, it must be, like life, an approximation of the unpredictable.
While it’s fine – and, indeed, essential – that all games, regardless of milieux, have defined points of progress, FAR CRY 5’s ultimate sin is that its points of progress are the same mission only with escalating zealotry and cruelty in the cutscenes – and that mission is, each time it comes on screen, a bore. Rote, predictable, and coming at predetermined points in the game, their existence almost defeats entire purpose of my character: if attempting to wrest Hope County back from the Peggi menace means that I have to endure one more fucking kidnapping mission, then, sorry, Hope County, you’re on your own; I’ll just go back to roaming the woods with Peaches the Cougar and punching and reviving Hurk the state senator each time he spews some right-wing malarkey (which is every time he opens his mouth).
The kidnap missions would have been almost bearable should they come at random, unexpected – unpredictable – points in the game, but, by making those missions inextricable from your progress, FAR CRY 5 manages to render what should have been a joyfully insane experience into one that’s still enjoyable (and insane), but skirting the line of forgettable.
