Storytelling in Far Cry 2

I've now spent a lot of time with Far Cry 2 (not finished yet), and the story generation is still linear. The first half of the game is very open, but around halfway you are sent to a second map where stories are set up via linear terrain. Here, look at the maps.

Note the path from one map to another, that's a classic gate. Then look at the lower map (which is the second one). Note the very linear valleys in the lower right. I guarantee you that's the climax of the game right there. Note that what you've got on both maps is a hub and spokes structure. Most of the time you get a mission from the middle of the map, and you can see that there are very definite paths outward (to whatever objective), so each mission becomes essentially linear, though you have choices on how you're going to get there, but that's really just how many shootouts you're going to get into on the way.

So while they were touting some sort of emergent story, what they've really got is 5 types of missions:

1. Main story missions which advance the plot and get money
2. Buddy missions to build "history" with your buddy and give you perks at safe houses
3. "Good" missions to get malaria medicine
4. Weapons missions to unlock better weapons
5. Tower missions for lots of money

The player mixes and matches and the particular mix they choose is the "emergent" story. They talked about doing too many Buddy and Tower missions giving you "infamy" so the "Good" missions dry up, but in practice players mix and match the missions just to give themselves some variety (that's what I did, because the Tower missions are always assassinating someone, and the Weapons missions are always blowing up a convoy, which get boring if you do them over and over). In comparing my experience to others, the main story plot points are all the same. The people who give me the missions may change, but the missions themselves remain the same.

Two things from a recent interview with the designer back me up:

From Game Informer Online:

GI: Why did you split the map up into different sections?

Hocking: The game world was divided into a Northern and a Southern region for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was to allow for a progression in the story and a place for the player to be ‘exiled’ to after the coup by the leading faction at the end of Act 1. It also allowed us to have a broader architectural and environmental art palette and to show a progression in the look and feel and mood of the game over time. The Northern region is more ‘spotted’ in the way the jungle, woodland and grassland environments overlap, and is dominated by shanty and industrial architectural features. The Southern region obviously has the lake and larger sections of desert (especially in the north of the Southern region) – it also features more indigenous and colonial architectural elements. The Southern region also includes the so-called ‘Heart of Darkness’ – it’s own natural environmental art palette. Needless to say, with all the streaming going on, we were not able to have all of these environments and architectural styles in close proximity to one another, and so in addition to using these styles to show a progression, it allowed us to control the technical problems of streaming much more effectively.

GI: It seems like the game is at its hardest early on, before you get decent weapons or allies. Was that intentional?

Hocking: We wanted the game to seem difficult at the start when you are sick with malaria and vulnerable in combat (and you have crappy weapons and few allies) – and then for you to get rapidly more powerful through the mid-game as you get new weapons, allies, equipment, and your symptoms fade and your reputation increases. However, this high level of power in the mid-game is supposed to be the peak… in the end game, after you get your supply of malaria medicine cut-off, you are supposed to get weaker and the game systems should force you to be more brutal – using more and more powerful weapons and confronting enemies who are more and more easily and frequently wounded. In the beginning, you should be fighting to survive because you don’t have a choice, in the middle, you should be enjoying the luxury of good health, a moderate reputation and fairly good weapons… you should be able to use an ‘appropriate’ level of aggression to solve the game challenges. In the end, the game systems should be almost forcing you to be as aggressive and brutal as possible. In short, the game should first teach you to be brutal, then force you to be brutal. The difficulty should be shifting from a technical difficulty of reflex skill and resource management to a psychological challenge that asks you how far you are willing to go to achieve your ends. I’m not sure the extent to which we succeeded with that, but we tried.

So despite all the talk at last year's GDC, Far Cry 2 is still a mission-based sandbox game that is closer to GTA than, say, The Last Express.