As I stated
previously, I’m going to start with the bad stuff. Sadly the bad stuff is so
bad that to avoid having you folks have to read a seven page essay of grumbling
nerd bullshit in one go, I’m breaking it up. So, let’s start with..
Being
Kidnapped Sucks or How I Learned How Much I Valued My Agency
In games
like Elder Scrolls or Final Fantasy, the main quest is a thing you opt into or
out of. Meteor won’t hit even if you spend hours breeding chocobos and Alduin
won’t progress his plan until the Dragonborn goes looking for him.
Far Cry 5
says ‘screw that.’
One of the core
mechanics of Far Cry 5 is the idea of not putting off the Main Quest. In Far
Cry 5, one of the major conceits is the idea of having to defeat Joseph Seed’s
three Lieutenants (Faith, John and Jacob) before taking on the big man. Typical
stuff.
In previous
Far Cry games, you’d pacify regions and take on people like these Lieutenants
through normal gameplay, doing missions, side-quests, blowing up fancy targets
and capturing outposts. And while you were out capturing bases, the regional
bosses would sit fat dumb and happy inside their fortresses until your
triggered your mission to go deal with them.
The
villainous cult leaders of Far Cry 5 say ‘bollocks to that.’. Now, as you hit
certain categories, they come and kidnap your happy ass and force you to
do main quest content.
You can’t
escape them. You can’t evade them. You can’t even suitably fight them off.
These omni-competent flunkies will get you, and then you’ll be trussed up
somehow and forced to listen to one of the three maniac’s brand of nonsensical
bull (weird self help for John, Darwinism for Jacob and Saccharine Happiness
for Faith). I started referring to this as ‘being Wolfensteined’ because
I have a similar low opinion for how that franchise seems to think the only way
we can interact with bad guys is by being rendered helpless and being forced to
watch a cutscene of the villain being an asshole to us.
Mind, I like
the idea that the main quest comes a’calling if you ignore it. I especially
like it since the game has the theme of an onrushing apocalypse, that’s going
to get you if you’re prepared for it or not.
As for the
main quest coming for you, it can be done right. See, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim
did something similar with one of its DLCs, Dawnguard. Dawnguard was their
‘vampire’ DLC where you were either a vampire hunter, or a vampire. However,
the way that they got you interested was by globally increasing vampire
attacks.
This was
clever. Why? Because it could be ignored, but it didn’t go away. The vampires
would keep attacking, you could manage it, but it had the overall effect of
being dangerous to a low level character and being supremely irritating to a
high level one. They endangered friendly NPCs too. I used to refer to them as
my Six O’Clock Vampire attack because of their regularity.
How do you
stop the attacks? You resolve the Dawnguard main quest. And given that the
in-character reason for going to the Dawnguard was ‘to stop the vampire
attacks,’ it made sense.
Why am I
here as a player? I want to stop the annoying vampires.
Why am I
here as a character? We have to stop the annoying vampires!
Far Cry 5’s
issue could have been solved by having you be attacked by the kidnappers, and
having to fend them off, or being able to initiate the quest on your own. It’d
give a sense of realism to the world, and simultaneously would give you options
for re-playability.
I believe
the reason for this is that quests in Far Cry 3 and 4 could be cakewalks if you
went through them with the right equipment (earned by going through the open
world). However, since several of these missions
strip your equipment anyway, that reason seems dodgy to me (particularly as you
can level up by getting perks without progressing the bar that triggers the
kidnap squads).
Still, it’s
annoying.
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