Penny Arcade - When working on Dishonored with my co-creative director Raphael Colantonio, Raph and I would often race over to excitedly share stories with one another after some moment during a solo play session. While these moments were sometimes related to a gorgeous vista the artists had cooked up, or a payoff moment in some level designer’s mission, our most intense reactions were reserved for those times when - as a result of player input and systems - something dramatic happened that we consider emergent, rather than embedded, narrative.
If you’re new to this long-running franchise, we’ve got you covered.
I recently tried 3 for the first time but the frame rate was a turnoff.
I liked 5 and 6 though.
If you have a Series X or S, the Xbox 360 version runs at 60 fps with fps boost. It's a shame the remaster doesn't.
2 and 3, pretty much the only ones i really enjoyed. 1 was amazing for the time but aged quite poorly. 4 has the elephant gun, all i can praise from any entry after 3 lol
Ummmm 3 than stop.
Okay maybe two as well. But yeah probably 3 and then move on.
Far Cry 2. People constantly rant about games now being too easy, holding your hand, having too many unnecessary RPG-lite leveling features, etc. People specifically complain about open world games being too focused on tons of collectibles and "checkmarks" that just waste time.
Far Cry 2 is an answer to all of those complaints. It was made by Ubisoft before they fell into all the traps discussed above (and before they started inserting towers into their games to defog the map). It has respawning enemies, weapons that degrade, and the collectible diamonds are very useful in the game (which you find in a similar way to the way you find shrines in BOTW with a radar system). The map you have is an in game item you pull out while playing, not a pause menu that is unnecessarily detailed. Also the enemy AI and physics are much better than later entries in the series.
It has a mixed reputation because people at the time said it was too hard, the weapon degradation was annoying, and then respawning enemies were annoying. FC2 came out in 2008, so this was before games like Dark Souls and BOTW had come out and made it cool to like these types of features.
Far Cry 2, the one with the AI that find you through walls and trees, can one shot you from a mile away and have 100% accuracy? That was frustrating not fun because cheap AI.
Uhh, I mean, it isn't one of these games where once the enemies have detected you they will magically forget you exist because you walked behind a wall or went into a bush. And yeah the AI isn't stormtrooper level accuracy. Again, these are positives, not negatives to me.
To be fair, I'm really directing this at the people most critical of "Modern Ubisoft" or "Modern Open World" design elements. Like the type of people who fawned all over Elden Ring because it had a clean UI because they are so burnt out by the "checkbox" type of open world design.
If you like those types of games, then a later FC game like 3 and especially 4-5 would be more your style.
GF365: "There are some games with extraordinary visuals that impress us to this day. Here are old games with outstanding graphics."
Same as Killzone 2 and 3, uncharted 2 and 3, Infamous 2, Heavy Rain, Resistance 3
I wish this was entirely true, but you might want to load up Killzone 2 and Resistance 3 again.
@jason I watched some gameplay videos of KZ2 and R3 on my full screen. They are on par or succeed graphically to the first person shooters mentioned in the article that also launched on the seventh generation of consoles. Try the same and see what you think
Killzone 3 was super impressive! I could not believe the graphics back then as I was regularly pausing the game to stand in awe looking at the surroundings! Resistance however did not impress me that much. Heavy rain is also another amazing graphically speaking game. It almost felt next gen
I always thought the first 3 Gears of War games looked great and still hold up for today.
They did for their day. I recently played gears judgement with on the 360 and the draw distance was so blurry. The characters up close look great though
Far Cry 2 was awesome. In addition to having demonstrably better physics and AI than later games in the series, it had a lot of design decisions that, criticized at the time, have since been praised in games like BOTW and Dark Souls.
It might not be super amazing by today's standard but I thought Mgs3 looked really good
The Far Cry series’ best game – not Far Cry 6 – just got more brutal and realistic thanks a mod than revamps and remakes the classic Ubisoft open-world FPS
Far Cry 2 where your guns never ever jammed until you got into a gunfight is their best? I disagree.
I liked 3 more.
The malaria angle was more annoying than immersive.
And, the enemy AI had too good of eyesight to allow any stealth. They’d spot you a literal half mile away, I hated it.
Yeah, some weird mechanics for sure, some did really enjoy it, I certainly didn't.
The map was designed badly and an absolute pain to navigate from what I can remember too. You ended up having to go to the same few places all the time and there was a huge inaccessible area between them that you had to go around.
It definitely had the best physics system of the entire franchise, but a lot of the mechanics took the enjoyment out of it.
It was fun for its time but a bunch of those systems today won't survive a launch weekend.
I'd say it was their most ambitious and had the best setting to date next to the original island.
But gameplay wise it was clunky and maybe it was released to early if the teams had modern systems to build it on the game would have been much better less corridors more open and less gaurd outposts that auto regen
Yes and you could do that for hours in FC2 with a gun and it wouldn't jam, not hard to grasp is it.
Far Cry 2 may certainly not be the most "fun" game in the series but from a narrative standpoint it definitely is the most interesting of the bunch. FC2 couldn't be further away from the pointless fragfests that the following episodes turned out to be.
hells yeah, good read
Yeah, good read. It's too bad I never got to find out about all the emergent gameplay that had hope to experience in this game. I spent 2 weeks trying to cope with the first couple missions that played more like a crappy jungle jeep driving sim than a FPS... That and a super lame story along with a "is it over yet?" MP were the 3 strikes necessary for this game to get a swift trade-in.
That said I respect the FarCry series for the emergent gameplay, just wish they coulda convinced me from the get go instead of not giving me a taste of what had me hyped right off the bat. I'm really curious if FarCry 3 is more polished in that regard...
When I acquired FC2, I didn't really have the hardware to run it well, and it seemed like a slow starter at best. I think I'll give it a second chance.
I do wish they didn't pick such a drab set of colors, though. It seems like everything is dark brown or dark green, especially after playing through FC3. But regardless, what I'm after is the emergent experiences discussed in the article. I've had some great experiences like that in Red Dead Redemption and during invasion moments of Demon's Souls.