This will be a quick sort of follow-up to the last post, but I feel like it's still worth it to bring this up. So apparently, Far Cry 3 was supposed to be a satire, but it didn't work. At this point, I'm reminded of something my instructor said to me years ago when I used to practice Tae Kwon Do: if you're practicing a technique with the class and you notice everyone else is doing it differently than the way you're doing it, there are two possibilities. Either you're the only person in the whole group actually doing the move the correct way, or you're doing it wrong. Which is more likely?
Having played it, I can safely say that John Walker's assessment in that first interview is correct: the game doesn't work because we're conditioned to expect first-person shooters to feature over-the-top, clunky narratives. It's kind of a given for a genre predicated on the player mowing down lots and lots of dudes over the course of the experience. But from the way the writer is talking about it, it doesn't seem like this is the sort of cop-out Tommy Wiseau pulled with The Room, namely a retroactive attempt to cover his ass. It really does seem like the original intent with the game was to produce a satire of first-person shooters, or perhaps even violent, "gritty" video games as a whole.
The thing about satire is that it has to walk a fine line, and that requires subtlety. And with Far Cry 3, along with arguably Max Payne 3 as well, nuance is going to be very hard to pick up on. To be sure, this is partly because players aren't expecting to find any in big budget titles like these, but something has to be said for presentation too. It's not that players aren't receptive to nuance and satire, it's just that these elements are bound to get lost in a work where the player's primary interaction is shooting a bunch of similar looking "bad guys", which they'll do dozens of times over the course of the first half hour of play. For satire to be effective, it should only fool a fraction of the people exposed to it, not the majority. When that does happen, as with Far Cry 3, you're left with a game that just feels clunky, trying to comment on something without ever making it clear what it's trying to say.
I feel like I'm sort of retreading the ground I covered in the post I linked to above concerning the merits of Max Payne 3 versus Spec Ops: The Line and which one better confronted the inherently ludicrous nature of video game power fantasies. But that's kind of just because Far Cry 3 sort of serves as a more high-profile counterpoint in the argument. Spec Ops resonated because it made itself clear about its intentions. And we can argue all day about the artistic value of that as opposed to a more nuanced approach, but the fact is that it resonated in a big way, while Far Cry 3's narrative has gotten a mixed response. Games are at a weird spot now, where the desire to tell a deep story with a real impact is crashing up against a bunch of mechanics that can undermine the whole endeavor from the start. While Spec Ops drew attention to how crazy the mechanics were, Far Cry 3 didn't, or at least didn't do it well enough, leaving a bunch of people scratching their heads, which apparently isn't the response that Jeffrey Yohalem was aiming for.
As for me, I must admit: the game was a hell of a lot of fun. It was basically an RPG that played as a shooter, and it did a very good job of giving the player freedom to play how they wanted and explore a vast, open world. It also had some really awesome sequences where the player character got to trip balls and go on vision quests, which, when pulled off well, automatically qualifies the game for at least 3.5 stars out of five (This is on the Sam Scale, a.k.a. the only one that matters). Story-wise, yeah, it was a mess, but at least it was an entertaining one.
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