Why Far Cry 3 Is Not Game of the Year

There have been a lot of great games that came out for Christmas of 2012, and Far Cry 3 is pretty much sweeping everyone’s “Game of the Year” awards.  While the game is really solid in many areas, there are some  glaring issues that reviewers should consider before handing out their coveted award badges.

DRM and Achivements

This doesn’t affect Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 users, but the PC version is plagued with Digital Rights Management issues.  Many PC players purchase their games through Steam, which is probably the least-intrusive method of DRM that still works.  When you launch Far Cry 3 via Steam, you are forced to use Ubisoft’s “Uplay” system to launch the game.  Unfortunatley, some PC players have run into issues with the service being down.

This PC game does not have the “Games for Windows” certification, and therefore does not tie into a gamer’s Xbox 360 account.  You can spend many hours getting achievements in Far Cry 3 (some of which aren’t that easy to attain), but you get no credit for it when bragging to your online friends.

 

The achievements you do get are tied to your “Uplay” account, and do not show up in Steam, which is a second-best popular achievement system.

The game auto-saves at certain critical points in the game’s story, and you never really know when the last save was.  There also is no “load” feature, so the only way to go back to your save is to kill yourself (by letting pirates or various wildlife have their way with you).

I was going for an ability which is unlocked if you liberate two outposts without being detected, so I wanted to restart if anyone saw me.  Unfortunately once I was seen I had to let the band of knife-wielding  pirates carve me up, run into a brush fire, or have tigers gnaw on my virtual skull until I died.

When you do go into the menu and manually save, then your respawn point is not where you were standing at the point of save, but the nearest “saveable” location.

In the game you have to skin animals in order to fashion bags for more item and ammunition slots, which requires a decent amount of hunting.  It happened on several occasions that I skinned the required animal, crafted the bag, and was then mauled to death.  I had to re-do the difficult hunt to create the bag again; and this happened way too frequently.

 

Since the save system is linear, you really can’t explore multiple options when carrying out an assault.  Do you open a caged tiger and let the animal run amok in the camp, or do you mark everyone for death and snipe them, or do you sneak in, disable the alarm, and silently knife everyone in the neck?  You don’t really get to explore every option because of the limited save system.

The story has got to be the largest glaring issue with Far Cry 3.  The main villian, Vaas, is plastered on the box cover, and was featured during the summer at E3.  Vaas certainly is a memorable character that will go down as one of the best in gaming history, but he is killed about one-quarter of the way through the main quest… in a dream sequence of all things!

Vaas is not the main villian in the story, but all of the marketing would make you believe the contrary.  I feel just as duped as all the Walmart shoppers who pick up the “Kiara the Brave” movie for their step-grandchildren because it features a red-haired girl (who doesn’t even appear in the movie for more than two minutes) that looks similar to Pixar’s princess.

The main storyline likes to use drugs in various ways, which I believe was an excuse to show off some cool graphics technology.  Unfortunately when you wake up you don’t know what really happened.  Is Vaas really dead?  I am Vaas?  When did it happen?  After the final knife fight with Hoyt (the main villian), you wake up to find a room full of heavily armed (but slaughtered) soldiers that you apparently went all “Dragonball Z” on and somehow destroyed.

The end of the main story forces you to make a choice of saving your friends (which you’ve been rescuing the entire game) and leave the island, or kill them and have hot sex in the jungle.  It seems like the choice should be obvious for all of the men playing this game, but Citra kills you all praying-mantis style after getting  impregnated with your manly warrior-spunk.

Whichever choice you make, you end up back on the island so you can complete all the stuff you didn’t get to…  so you can get achievements that nobody is going to see because they’re tied to Uplay.

The game is a hell of a lot of fun, and the graphics are amazing.  Once you build your character up, you are a complete bad-ass and it is still fun doing all of the gunplay battles.

There are lots of other PC games released this year that are worthy of “Game of the Year”.  Some that come to mind are Borderlands 2, Hitman: Absolution, Xcom: Enemy Unknown, Assassin’s Creed 3, Dishonored, Max Payne 3, The Walking Dead and Mass Effect 3.

While Far Cry 3 is one of the most beautiful and funnest games of 2012, the other PC game contenders don’t have messed-up save systems or leave you scratching your head that what you just accomplished wasn’t a bad drug trip.