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Comment by dumdumchan | Hacker News Reader

They peaked at far cry 2 and it has been down hill ever since

Far Cry 3 was miles better than the first two. In fact it was because of the success of 3 that every later game was just a copy of it, and the franchise stagnated.

Far Cry 3 and subsequent games were pop fun with little replayability. FC2 was a game I've lived in, with a printout of the map, marked up for patrols, so I could navigate safely from A to B for each mission.

Better? I'd rather say less challenging, more accessible, but also far less rewarding. More successful, no doubt. But the only sequel I spent a lot of time in was Blood Dragon.

There's a lot to be admired by Far Cry 2: the environmental mechanics, the introduction, the lighting effects, the gritty and exotic atmosphere... but to me it was not a fun game. Not in the way that Far Cry 1 was fun.

The immersion is what sold it to me. No hud, no on screen markers. Need to look at map? Pull it out, hold it in your hand and look at it. I'm surprised no other AAA game has tried this formula.

You might want to take a look at the latest entry in the Metro series

I absolutely loved far cry 2. Dynamic fire and gun jamming were standouts.

FC1 lost its fun with the mutants. FC2 never stopped being fun to me, because it was essentially a giant open world game of Thief: get from A to B without being detected (since enemy patrols respawned, there was no point killing them).

> (since enemy patrols respawned, there was no point killing them)

This is the main thing that made it not fun for me, lol. There really is no point in partaking in random combat in the open-world. It's always better to run away or sneak past them. Fine in a stealth game, but FC2 didn't have great stealth mechanics beyond crouching and staying far away from enemies.

I thought it simulated reasonably well the dynamics of a lone gunman on a mission in a civil war. It seems to me the only way to navigate such warzones would be stealth or disguise.

All the other FC games are stealth games too, BTW. The later FC games made it even more explicit, with bonuses for never setting off alarms and so on.

True but it just felt too fast with the respawns. Maybe my memory is wrong but it felt like going far away enough to despawn that zone from RAM was enough to make them respawn. I would have preferred a few days. If I clear a camp enough, maybe have them bring backup.

I stopped playing the series after 3 because they did feel that way, but without gameplay features I wanted to match. Games that rewarded stealth, but without stealth-specific mechanics like you'd find in Hitman or MGS. It feels like the writers want to encourage stealth but the game designers didn't. At least for 1-3. The original I definitely accepted it more because of the era.

If they’d re-release Far Cry 2 with graphics on par with FC 5, I might never play anything else. I could hike around all day admiring the scenery in FC 5, or ride a jet ski from one end of the river to the other. But the story was hokey and tropey, most of the characters were uninteresting, and the ending was enough to put me off of Ubisoft for good. FC 2 had a great story, great characters, lots of interesting mechanics. And of course, the Standard Ubisoft Paradigm (climb a $TALL to unlock a map quadrant, sneak into $PLACE and fight $HEAVY, $SNIPER, and $LIGHT, have a $FORCEDENCOUNTER with $SUBBBOSS for some exposition), was still new enough that we weren’t tired of it yet.

> FC 2 had a great story, great characters, lots of interesting mechanics. And of course, the Standard Ubisoft Paradigm (climb a $TALL to unlock a map quadrant, sneak into $PLACE and fight $HEAVY, $SNIPER, and $LIGHT, have a $FORCEDENCOUNTER with $SUBBBOSS for some exposition), was still new enough that we weren’t tired of it yet.

FC2 didn't have that. FC2 was set in Africa. It's still my favourite of the bunch for a lot of reasons (only a little because I understand the local language the mooks are screaming to each other when you're in the middle of a firefight).

It's funny, when I first bought FC2 I played for about 8 hours and I hated it.

When I went back to it after about 8 years, I found that I appreciated the immersion a lot more, and it quickly became my favourite.

I liked Far Cry 4's setting and characters, but the game otherwise seemed very lazy and uninspired. Bland map and very little do to in between outposts. Little emergent fun to be had, except for doing missions or clearing outposts. Same complaint with Far Cry Primal; really neat idea but lazy/rushed execution.

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