Tue, Dec 18, 2012 | 14:08 GMT
Far Cry 3: writer believes we’ve missed the point of the game’s plot
Far Cry 3′s perilous island paints an – at times – stereotypical view of certain races and cultures which has raised some questions. However, the tribal nature of the game is actually a statement on how we perceive such cultures, says the game’s writer Jeffrey Yohalem. He’s concerned that we’ve all missed the point of what he was trying to say. Get his musings below.
Speaking with Penny Arcade Report, Yohalem discussed his motivation and the messages he was trying to convey in Far Cry 3.
On the issue of how developers treat gamers when coming up with high game concepts, Yohalem said, “What I’m hoping is that through talking about this game and the Internet talking about this game, is that all this stuff will come to light, and the audience will say next time, ‘We want more of this.’
“This all comes from my sense that players shouldn’t be talked down to. For me, there’s a kind of caustic relationship that’s developed between players and developers. It’s really a bad, abusive relationship, because developers say ‘Players won’t get it anyway, so we’re just gonna do something that holds their hand.’
“It doesn’t respect them, and then players say ‘I hate this,’ or ‘I hate that,’ or ‘This game sucks,’ and that hurts developers. So it’s like a cycle. It also feels like critics aren’t looking for meaning in the game, either. So it’s like all sides have just stopped listening to each other.”
On the game’s setting he added, “It’s set on an island in the South Pacific. So immediately the thing that comes to mind is the white colonial trope, the Avatar trope. I started with that, and it’s like, ‘Here’s what pop culture thinks about travelling to a new place,’ and the funny thing is, that’s an exaggeration of most games, they just don’t expose it.
“For example, GTA is a colonization game. You come to New York, you colonize New York. Most open world games function that way. Ezio comes to Rome and colonizes Rome. To take that to its extreme, exaggerating those tropes is how you reveal them. The exaggeration of that trope is what happens in Far Cry 3.”
But still Yohalem is concerned that gamers and critics missed this commentary on the open world genre. What’s your take on what Far Cry 3 symbolises or attempts to say? Let us know below.
Thanks PCGamesN.
8 comments
#1
j1015
18/12/12, 2:11 pm
That it was f*cking awesome
#2
Alexsnow5
18/12/12, 3:17 pm
I played a lot of games this year, but this one is just amazing. To bad it’s not on SPIKE GOTY list.
#3
oldschoolsoviet
18/12/12, 4:10 pm
There was a plot ? I certainly didn’t see anything coherently resembling one tbh, just a jumbled mess of shallow undesireables or ‘zany’ NPCs and mystical hand-waving nonsense. Oh, and ‘edgy’ Alice quotes.
Shooting might’ve been adequate, but the script certainly wasn’t.
Far Creed 90210 indeed.
#4
YoungZer0
18/12/12, 8:17 pm
“‘We want more of this.’”
And you didn’t deliver. I wanted more interaction with the characters, i wanted more depth from the story and definitely wanted the game to be more like … you guess it Spec Ops The Line.
#5
Christopher Jack
19/12/12, 9:14 am
I dislike how they dealt with Vaas, the way his ending was handled leaves me with a suspicion that they may bring him back with DLC but if that really was the end of him, I’m disappointed.
Another thing that annoyed me was that the natives sounded identical to New Zealanders- their accents annoy me.
#6
Dave Cook
19/12/12, 9:21 am
@5 Spoilers dude?
#7
Christopher Jack
19/12/12, 9:29 am
@6, Kinda, If you feel it does spoil go ahead & change it. I just didn’t think mentioning that the natives sounding like Kiwis was much of a surprise.
In all seriousness, I intentionally excluded any details.
#8
ps3fanboy
19/12/12, 11:41 am
after seeing the horrible framerate droppings, screen tearing, texture popping and the graphical vaseline/blurryness effect on consoles… i missed the point of the game to.