Game Analysis: Far Cry 2

Jakob Lindh - 2009-05-24 - [email protected]

Table of contents

1.Introduction...... 3

2.Far Cry 2…………...... 4 2.1.A short history.…………………………………………………………...... 4 2.2.The game experience...... 5 2.2.1.Singleplayer...... 5 2.2.2.Multiplayer…………...... 15

3.Far Cry 2 and player created content...... 17

4.Conclusions…………...... 23

5.References...... 24

6.Bibliography...... 24

1.Introduction

This game analysis will be about the PC version of Far Cry 2. I will start with the single player experience of Far Cry 2, going through aspects like game play, player experience, characteristics, immersion and so on, before moving on to shortly write about multiplayer. I’ll then finish the analysis with a short in depth look at player created content and my work using the level editor.

The reason that I picked Far Cry 2 and player created content, was mostly because I have been working a lot with the level editor for this game. I have been building multiplayer levels for the course "Introduction to Level Design" at Gotland University in Sweden, using the level editor that ships with Far Cry 2. Therefore, I thought that Far Cry 2 would be the ideal game to choose for my final assignment analysis for the course "Introduction to Game Design" at Luleå University of Technology. I thought that both playing through the game, getting to know its foundation and playability, as well as getting an in depth look at the level editor and the player created content would be a strong combination for a game analysis.

Enjoy the analysis!

2.Far Cry 2

2.1.A short history

Far Cry 2 is a FPS (First Person Shooter) published by the French video game developer Ubisoft and developed by the subsidiary studio Ubisoft Montreal in Canada. Far Cry 2 was released on October 21, 2008 in North America, and on October 24, 2008 in Europe.

Far Cry 2 takes place in a made-up, although never named, African nation during present time. The nation is beset by civil war, closely followed by anarchy, and your part in this mess is easy; kill a man known only as “The Jackal”, an ill-famed arms-dealer who has supplied both fighting parts in the war with weapons.

Although Far Cry 2 is marketed as the true sequel to Far Cry, an FPS published by Ubisoft but developed by the German studio Crytek, released on March 23, 2004 in North America and on March 26, 2004 in Europe, it doesn't share any characters, settings or the likes at all with its supposed prequel, thus making it not a real worthy sequel according to me. Although I have never played the prequel myself.

Far Cry is set on a south pacific archipelago with beaches, rainforests and even ultra modern research labs with mutants and monsters, having quite The Island of Doctor. Moreau-feeling, making it rather different from Far Cry 2's more realistic setting in Africa with civil war . Also, the game play is different between the two, with Far Cry 2 having more open ended game play over a large play field, and Far Cry being more close quarters and compact.

Before developing Far Cry 2, Ubisoft Montreal also developed other Far Cry games for the X- Box and X-Box 360 such as Far Cry Instincts, Far Cry Instincts: Evolution and Far Cry Instincts: Predator, and also the game Far Cry Vengeance for the Wii. These games are all pretty much remakes of the original Far Cry game with some changes to the story, and the addition of "feral abilities" at the player’s disposal, including Feral Smell, Feral Strength and Regeneration. These abilities are not present in the original Far Cry or its sequel Far Cry 2.

Cover art from the various Far Cry games.

2.2.The game experience

2.2.1.Singleplayer

So let's get started. The first thing you do before you actually start playing the single player part of Far Cry 2 is that you pick one of nine pre-made character mercenaries to play as throughout the game. The characters have very diverse backgrounds, experiences and age differences.

In the podcast “Understanding players and player experiences”, Frans Mäyrä talks about Semiosis; sign-based meanings in games. He gives an example of how characters can be described in games. In Far Cry 2 you cannot play as a female, although having them appear later as mercenaries in the game. The question is if the game already here gives some kind of subtle message that it is geared towards a male audience. The females that are in the game are not portrayed as over-feminine like in some other games, but it is still an interesting question and heads up for which gender the developers had in mind for playing this game.

Anyhow, I think that being able to choose a character like this gives the game a deeper perspective. Although the information given about the different characters is rather slim, and could have been given a bit more effort to further the immersion for the player, it adds a role play element to a game that isn't a role playing game (RPG), or at least isn't marketed as one. Nonetheless, there are quite a few things in this game that are sniffing on the RPG genre, at least according to me. But more about this a little later.

A screenshot of where you choose which mercenary to play.

After you have chosen a character, you select one of four difficulty levels; Easy, Normal, Hardcore or Infamous, and then the actual playing starts.

The game starts with a cut-scene of your character riding in the back of a jeep being driven by an indigenous taxi driver. He briefs you on the current situation between the two warring factions in the country, the APR (Alliance for Popular Resistance) and the UFLL (United Front for Liberation and Labor). Once you arrive at the hotel in the town of Pala, your character gets a malaria attack. That's right, your character suffers from malaria throughout the game which bursts out in attacks with intervals of forty minutes of game time. You need to take pills against the symptoms when they occur. If you ignore them for too long, then your character will die. When the attacks come, you are notified by the screen getting blurry together with a yellow tone.

A screenshot of your character being overwhelmed of a malaria attack when first arriving at the town.

You pass out after your first malaria attack upon arriving at the hotel. The next thing you see is a cut scene where you're lying in a bed in the hotel, very sick with malaria symptoms and the Jackal going through your things and finding your folder where it says that your "orders are to terminate" him. For some reason he lets you live though and disappears. You grab your gun, your knife and your folder and try to get up but fall to the floor due to a sudden explosion which blows a hole in one wall of the room. You get up from the floor and now finally the game really starts.

Your first face to face meeting with The Jackal in the hotel in Pala.

As the game starts out for you, you are equipped with your gun and your knife, and it is your task to get out of the hole in the wall that the explosion just created. Civil war has erupted in the town and you need to escape the mayhem or get caught in the cross fire. The game learns you the basic crouch, jump, aim, interact buttons as you make your way through the rubble and out of the building, and does this by pausing the game and telling you with written text in the middle of the screen which buttons to press for different actions. When you have read the information you can press an OK-button under the text and move on. As I am quite used to games of this type, it gets kind of annoying when the game pauses like this, although probably being helpful to players that have never played FPS's before. To a more experienced player I can feel that it disrupts the flow of the game to some extent though.

In a podcast interview made by Annakaisa Kultima with Jesper Juul named “Analyzing games, rules and narrative”, Jesper Juul talks about how maybe it is more legitimate in more playful and casual environments to show the controls and buttons, than in a more “serious” environment like the one in Far Cry 2. I have to agree since you are already immersed in the game with the intro having pumped you with adrenaline and you don’t want to break the immersion at this point, you just want to start unloading rounds with that new pistol of yours.

After having gotten out of the hotel in Pala, you pass out again. Waking up, you realize that you have been saved by one of the many foreign mercenaries working for one of the factions, and now it is time for you to work for him and his faction. It is from here that the rest of the game proceeds.

Far Cry 2 acts like a lot like other FPS's out there. There are a few things that make a FPS an FPS, and according to the podcast "Video Game Genres" with Janne Paavilainen, some typical features for this particular genre are the following: First person perspective, linear game play, virtual world, single key character, weapons, ammo and health, collectable items, different types of enemies, multiplayer features, and finally modding possibilities.

While Far Cry 2 can be said to have all the above mentioned characteristics, it gives some of them a certain twist. Far Cry 2 can be said to also have features from other genres which is also a common thing and also mentioned in the podcast above. Far Cry 2 can according to me be said to contain for example some features from, although not limited to, RPG's, Sandbox Games and Simulators.

A screenshot taken while driving a jeep in the game.

So, after being saved, your way through the rest of the game is for the most part doing missions and working for both the APR and the UFLL to get you closer to your final target;

9 the Jackal. The missions are however fairly repetitive and mostly about you killing someone, forcing someone to do something, or destroying a building or an object. This continues until the end. The missions can feel a little repetitive after a while, and driving your jeep, car, boat or hang glider back and forth between the missions over the vast distances that the game world has to offer can be tedious. Although, bus stations are scattered across the continent to allow for instant travel to any other bus station on your map. This is perfect and takes away some of the annoying feeling of long traveling times.

A screenshot of a map between to bus stations.

In Far Cry 2 there are side-quests to take, but they also, sadly, always involve killing someone or destroying something. These side quests can be given to you by local arms dealers, where you destroy a rivaling dealer’s supply truck and get access to new weapons and upgrades, or by unknown persons from cell-phone towers where you have to kill a certain person. Side quests can also be given by your buddies in the game. These buddies, who are mercenaries like yourself, often have a counter offer for your missions, allowing optional solutions, and they wait for you at your various unlockable safe houses around the map. Buddies can be unlocked by completing missions or coming across them on your own in the game world. They can also save you if you’re about to die.

You must also do side quests for the people of the country, trading passports for malaria medicine. Side quests is a feature often found in RPG's, this is also mentioned by Janne Paavilainen, making Far Cry 2 kind of a hybrid for including them. Another feature that adds to the hybrid feeling is also the fact that you can pilot the different vehicles mentioned above. This adds kind of a simulator feature to the game as well. The fact that there is a large 3D virtual world to explore also gives Far Cry 2 a hint from Sandbox Games, as this is a feature also described by Janne Paavilainen.

One thing I really like about Far Cry 2 is the feedback you get from your characters actions. For nearly every action your character takes there is visual feedback that is embedded into the game in a sleek way. You can for example see almost everything that your character does with his hands, holding maps, repairing cars, pulling bullets out of his leg when seriously hurt etc. In Frans Mäyrä’s podcast mentioned in the beginning, he talks about this kind of immersion using three kinds of game play immersion forms, the SCI model, standing for: Sensory, Challenge-based and Imaginative. The sensory part talks about immersion in the way of seeing how the different elements on the screen are operating. A good example of this is of course the visual feedback of your characters’ actions that I just presented.

A screenshot of your character pulling a bullet out of his knee, using only his knife and a pair of pincers to get the job done.

On the list of coherent things that makes sense in Far Cry 2, we can find things like the already above mentioned visuals, realistic fire, weapons jamming etc. Incoherent things in this game are for example the respawn-speed of enemies at enemy outposts. Return five minutes later and the outpost is re-garrisoned. This doesn’t make the player feel empowered, which is a key feature in games according to the book “Beginning Game Level Design” by John Feil and Marc Scattergood. There are also some other things in the story which I find somewhat incoherent, like you going after The Jackal only for the money. Why would you do that when he supplies weapons as fuel for the war, probably allowing you to make even more money by repeatedly working both sides of the war? Nevertheless, going after The Jackal doesn’t feel quite motivated enough, surely not when he also saves you from trouble at one point in the game.

By breaking the coherence for the player to much, especially in a realistic and story-based game such as Far Cry 2, You can make the player lose at least a part of his or her interest in the game I think. Read my blog post “Coherent or not coherent…” for more information on coherency in Far Cry 2, there is a link provided under references at the end of this analysis.

Four screenshots showing the course of event when a fire spreads in Far Cry 2. The top left screenshot shows the start, continuing through the top right, bottom left and bottom right.

In the podcast interview with Jesper Juul mentioned above, Annakasia Kultima asks Jesper if “The fictional worlds have to be coherent?”

An interesting fact that Juul states is that some players tend to accept a certain kind of incoherency in games such as; respawns in multiplayer, multiple lives, etc, because otherwise the game would be too hard. I agree with this, although the things that I have mentioned above wouldn’t make the game harder if they were changed. On the contrary, maybe the game would be easier without respawns at the camps etc. But I guess that players don’t want the game to be too easy either, because then it would not be a challenge.

Jesper also gets the question what emergence is, and he answers it with what he thinks characterizes an emergent game; simple rule-sets, being able to have more strategies that are greater than the rules. This is interesting in such an open ended FPS as Far Cry 2 since it follows the most basic rule-set for FPS’s but can allow for a huge variety of strategies to overcome your obstacle. Should you attack that base at night, taking advantage of the game’s day/night-cycle? Or should you charge with your jeep and go in with guns a blazing in broad daylight? Perhaps a combination of the two? What weapons to use? There is no doubt that Far Cry 2 allows for a lot of strategies that outweigh the rules. Thus I think making it a highly emergent game.

A screenshot of your character trading passports in exchange for malaria medicine.

In the book “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals”, writers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman talks about meaningful play as being the goal of successful game design.

“Meaningful play occurs when the relationship between actions and outcomes are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game.”

The book describes two terms: discernable and integrated.

“Discernable means the result of the game action is communicated to the player in a perceivable way.”

Knowing what discernable is, I think that the visual feedback discussed above, besides acting as coherency, also communicates game actions in a perceivable way, allowing for meaningful play.

Integrated is explained as the following:

“Another component of meaningful play requires that the relationship between action and outcome is integrated into the larger context of the game. This means that an action a player takes not only has an immediate significance in the game, but also affects the play experience at a later point in the game.”

Far Cry 2 also uses the term integrated, for example if you buy a new machine gun for all of your current diamonds (the in game currency for buying things), you might be able to easily take out that group of enemies out in the open. But this will affect the game play later on where you might get a mission to blow up a truck and can’t afford an RPG (Rocket Propelled Grenade) launcher to easily blow that truck up, which now will be much harder. I think this as an excellent example of how the integrated term could work in Far Cry 2.

A screenshot where I have just launched my RPG on an unsuspecting enemy encampment down the road. You can see the explosion in the distance.

2.2.2.Multiplayer

The multiplayer in Far Cry 2 is not much different from other FPS. There are four different game modes available, which are;

1: Capture the diamond. Same as capture the flag but instead having a diamond suitcase replace the flag for each team.

2: Uprising. Each team has a player captain that can take over three points on the map. Once your team has taken over all points, you must kill the enemy captain to win. Having more bases when time runs out also results in victory.

3: Deathmatch. Everyone fights each other for the highest score of kills.

4: Team Deathmatch. Same as above but with two teams playing against each other.

When playing in teams like some game modes let you, one team play as the APR and the other one as the UFLL.

Far Cry 2 has, like the popular Battlefield 2, different classes to choose from when playing multiplayer. These have different weapons to fill different roles, such as long range, medium range, close range etc. Weapons can also be upgraded depending on how good you play.

According to Jesper Juul, stated in the above mentioned interview podcast, there is a huge difference between singleplayer and multiplayer;

“Singleplayer allow you sort of a pure learning experience kind of game, but if you play a multiplayer game there are all kinds of interesting social dynamics that come into play. There are some people that you would like to win against. So if there is somebody that you are slightly angry at like in regular life, it makes you extra motivated to win against them in the game.”

As any other multiplayer game, this theory can of course also be applied to Far Cry 2 and its multiplayer aspect, which allows for player versus player combat and communication by text.

A screenshot of a round of multiplayer Team Deatmatch on a player-made level. You can see one of my teammates to the upper right and the enemies and their base in the far distance.

3.Far Cry 2 and player created content

Lately, we have seen more and more games ship with developer tools for creating your own content for your favorite games. Not only Far Cry 2 allows this, but also games like Little Big Planet and the yet to be released Dragon Age: Origins. I think that there is a lot to the future of player created content, and that that is why we also see a rise in the demand for tools that allow you do this, as well as games that give the players easy access to these tools from the beginning. This is an interesting aspect that I bet we haven't seen the end of by far. Before we delve deeper into player created content for Far Cry 2 and the level editor that you use, let us get some basic knowledge of what player created content is, how it works, and how we view it.

Player created content, or modding, which comes from the word modify, can be considered to be a pretty wide field within games. According to Tanja Sihvonen, who is being interviewed in the podcast “Player Created Content” by Timo Nummenmaa, it is not just making levels, maps and items for a game;

“It is a vast concept that includes things like cheating, bending the rules and exploiting all kinds of bugs and glitches in the game code. Players not just play the game but do all kinds of things with it.”

Tanja goes on and explains that for example taking screenshots, making machinima, modifying hardware to play pirated games on consoles, creating manuals and walkthroughs, creating stories for a role playing game etc, are all parts of player created content. I can definitely see why, since all of these aspects are created by the players after all. Although, since the size of this analysis is rather restricted I will stick to the player created content made in the editor.

Far Cry 2 ships with a level editor. This level editor allows you to build multiplayer levels for the game, using nearly all objects that the original level designers used while creating the game. A rather unfortunate thing though, is the fact that you are not able to create any singleplayer adventures with cut scenes, placing of enemies, npc-scripting and so on. This is a shame as the original Far Cry game allowed you to do this, and this fact also makes the editor kind of limited in comparison to other editors that allow this. On the good side though, is the fact that the editor is really easy to use. There is great built-in help in the editor itself, but if you do get stuck, Far Cry 2 also has a great community forum concerning map making for the game. I have turned to this forum myself a couple of times when I had to figure something out.

A screenshot of the level editor in Far Cry 2. This screenshot shows a map that has just been started, and as you can see there is nothing there yet.

With the editor being so easy to use and already having a lot of premade objects that you can use, you can in a matter of hours have something that really starts to look like a finished level. Although being easy and fast to use which is a good advantage, I myself would prefer to have more objects that were not premade to use in my levels. Having so much premade objects kind of limits you to build levels with the same settings that the level designers of the game used while making the game. I would prefer to have a little more freedom to build your own buildings for example, and thereby allowing for a bit more originality and diversity.

Far Cry 2 also has a great feature for easily uploading your maps to the community servers. This helps aspiring level designers to spread their work in a really broad and fast way. Internet has had a very great impact on the spreading of player created content according to Tanja Sihvonen, mentioned in the interview podcast above, and especially in this case it is true with the easy uploading feature available.

During my work in the level editor for Far Cry 2, I created three different multiplayer maps which I became pretty satisfied with in the end. My levels could handle all game modes and

18 they were set in three different natural settings; jungle, desert and mountain. Below are some screenshots from the finished versions of these levels.

A screenshot overview of my desert-level called Desert Doom.

A screenshot overview of my jungle map Jungle Juggling.

A screenshot overview of my level Mountain Madness.

When building my levels I constantly had in mind the patterns for level design mentioned in "Level Design Patterns: Looking for the Principles of Unified Level Design", a project report written by Simon Larsen. These patterns are suggestions to what makes multiplayer levels fun to play, and I tried to incorporate at least some of them into my levels. The patterns are;

Multiple paths. Making sure that the player has a lot to paths to choose from.

Local Fights. Smaller spots on your maps that are more or less closed off for fighting.

Collision points. Places where the players are sure to meet so that battle occurs.

Reference points. Landmarks to help navigation.

Defensive areas. Areas that are easily defendable, but not impossible to overtake by the enemy.

Risk Incentive. There must be some risks in the level. Taking dangerous paths for example, but there must also be some kind of reward like a new weapon or a tactical advantage.

While not having all of the patterns worked into all of the levels, I think that they’re all still fun to play. During my work with the levels, I played them through over and over again, but I also had friends which came over to me and tried them out to see if they were enjoyable and to test that the game play worked. This can be considered playtesting with trustees, which Janne Paavilainen talks about in his podcast “Playtesting”. Janne states that the downside with trustees, as they can be your friends, which in my case is true, is that there is a risk that they are subjective. My friends who tested my levels were at least according to me fairly critical though. Nevertheless, my work resulted in three playable multiplayer levels for Far Cry 2.

4.Conclusions

During my analysis I think that I have given interesting angles of approach to the points; game play, player experience, characteristics, immersion and so on, but also to the player created content for Far Cry 2.

Theories and thoughts from the podcasts given at the course, has helped a lot by opening up one’s mind on the topics of the analysis and really getting behind the scenes. An example is that before doing this analysis, I didn’t really see all the points about player created content that Tanja Sihvonen points out in her interview podcast, I kind of just narrowed it down to what could be done in a level editor. Also, such a thing as coherency becomes much more apparent to you, and how much it can do to lift a game, or put it down. This depends on what kind of game it is of course.

When you analyze a game like this, you understand more of how it is built and how the developers thought while creating it, but you also find flaws in the game design, and this knowledge can be helpful to you for future analyses’ or work in the game business.

Had this been an analysis of greater magnitude, there are a lot of things that could have been explored further with this game, as it is a large game and rather complex, with a lot of elements to it. I would have liked to go a lot deeper into the game play experience of Far Cry 2, analyzing it by the addition of more theories and thoughts to really touch all parts of it.

For the player created content, I would have liked to further explore all the sides of what it really is and all the possibilities that the phenomenon presents, not laying my focus only on the level editor. By doing this I would get a much greater view of what player created content can be and how it is done.

5.References

The podcast “Understanding players and player experiences” by Frans Mäyrä, University of Tampere, Finland, 2009. http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd_06.mp4

The podcast interview “Analyzing games, rules and narrative” with Jesper Juul by Annakaisa Kultima, University of Tampere, Finland, 2009. http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd_05.mp3

The podcast "Video Game Genres" by Janne Paavilainen, University of Tampere, Finland 2009. http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd_04.mp4

The book “Beginning Game Level Design” written by John Feil and Marc Scattergood, published in 2005 by "Thomson Learning".

The blog post “Coherent or not coherent…” by Jakob Lindh, 2009. http://intro2gamedesign3.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/coherent-or-not-coherent/

The book “Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals” written by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, published in 2003 by MIT Press Ltd.

The podcast “Player Created Content” by Timo Nummenmaa, University of Tampere, Finland, 2009. http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd_11b.mp3

Ubisoft Mapping Forum. http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/3171037696

The project report "Level Design Patterns: Looking for the Principles of Unified Level Design" written by Simon Larsen, IT-University of Copenhagen. Published in April 2006.

The podcast “Playtesting” by Janne Paavilainen, University of Tampere, Finland 2009. http://pod.gscept.com/intro2gd_15b.mp4 6.Bibliography

Far Cry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_cry

Far Cry Instincts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry_Instincts

Far Cry Instincts: Evolution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry_Instincts#Evolution

Far Cry Instincts: Predator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry_Instincts#Predator

Far Cry Vengeance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry_Instincts#Predator

Far Cry 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Cry_2