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dkirschner's Far Cry 2 (PC)
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| [November 19, 2010 10:26:21 PM]
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I had such high hopes for this game because the first Far Cry was amazing, but this one has nothing to do with the first one, and suffers a lot of game-stopping problems according to me. I installed it and started it up just fine, and the first 10 minutes of the game are breathtaking as you take a taxi ride through an African countryside that is just beautiful to look at as the driver tells you about the current war going on in the country. As soon as I got out of the taxi, whoa, nausea alert! I never feels nauseous playing games, never ever, so my super deductive abilities tell me something is going on with the game. First, the mouse has a lag, like move the mouse and it takes half a second for the cursor to catch up to the movement. It makes aiming, running, looking around, feel sluggish like your character might be drunk or something. It gets 5 times worse in menus so it's difficult to click on an option. This got dizzying real fast. I looked up the mouse issue first, found that a lot of people were having it and people said it felt like console shooter aiming, which I realize it does. Computer games are supposed to be totally smooth and responsive. I updated the drivers for my mouse, which didn't do anything. Other people suggested tweaking various graphics options, including using DirectX 9 instead of 10 (lame!). I tried all this and nothing really worked. Changing DirectX helped a little, but I still felt sick playing. Some people had a fix to go into some file and change some mouse sensitivity values, so I did that and it also helped a little, but still there is lag. So then I gave up and started looking for players getting dizzy playing and, surprise surprise, found a lot of people having problems, and they appear to stem from the fact that the FOV is off, which was supposedly fixed in a patch that I downloaded, but I swear it's not. I think they fixed a widescreen issue where the game was cutting off the top and bottom of the screen, but they didn't fix the thing where, when you're on a console, you're sitting farther from the screen so your focus is going to be at a different angle than sitting closer at a computer. So this is what was causing people to feel bad.
Anyway, no real fixes for everything combined. I can get the mouse a little better and can turn off widescreen altogether, but I can tell it's still not right, and that's too bad. The game itself seems like it could be really fun, but already I found a super annoying thing that I know will get to me. The enemies respawn really fast. If you completely destroy a guard post to get to a quest objective, do the objective, and come back, the whole guard post will be rebuilt and repopulated. It's stupid. So you can't go anywhere without constantly being shot at, having your vehicle blown up, having to get out and fight a few soldiers. This wouldn't be so bad but the mouse thing is still sluggish and so more I have to try and aim, the more sick I feel! And if you load a saved game, hey guess what, all the enemies are respawned! Did you save the game with almost no health at a guard post? Well have fun loading it back and dying immediately because the guard post is respawned. There's also a stupid concept implemented, safe houses. Safe houses are places you can save the game. Except you can quicksave the game anywhere. So why do you need safe houses to function as save spots? Oh right, you don't! How pointless. You can also stock up on weapons there, but I find weapons of all enemies so I haven't felt the need to go get specific weapons.
Like I said, despite the respawning enemies and a couple other things, and imagining there are no nausea issues due to bad console porting, there are some cool things. The game feels like GTA: Africa. The map is huge and there are a lot of points of interest, like communications towers, private residences, military headquarters, and so on. The only problem with that is literally everyone wants to kill you. Everyone hates your character, and I for one have no idea why since I just arrived in the country. How does everyone know me? Why does everyone want to kill me? I feel this isn't part of the story and certainly doesn't make sense. Maybe later in the game after I've gained some notoriety it will make more sense. So you basically take jeeps, trucks and hatchbacks and drive through the jungle from objective to objective, stopping where you please to look and wander and kill soldiers. Or, you are looking for diamonds, the game's currency. You have this cool PDA map that alerts you when you're near a diamond. You follow the tracker and voila, cash to buy guns and gun upgrades. There are over 200 diamond caches in the game, and I found about 20, so yeah, there's a lot of space. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of time will be spent driving from point A to point B, and again, if enemies didn't respawn at guard posts along the roads every few minutes, this would be more fun, because I enjoy driving through the forest, just not being shot at all the time and being shot at at guard posts that I obliterated a couple minutes ago. At least make it more realistic and have them respawn once per day or something.
There's also a buddy system, where you encounter other mercenaries such as yourself who give quests, offer alternative ways to complete story missions, and help you out in need. One time I was (almost) killed and a buddy just came out of nowhere and dragged me to safety, then helped me clear out someone's private residence. It was pretty cool. Apparently you get reputation with buddies and factions throughout the game maybe the more of their missions you do or the more you interact with them.
What else...Yeah, that's about it. This one's going back on eBay and I'll find something less painful to play. LOTRO is on hiatus because I don't have a mount, I don't want to buy one, and I want to start an alt, but they're releasing a giant patch that's updating the Elf and Dwarf starting zones in a week, so I'll wait for that and then make probably an Elf Champion. Should be fun. Maybe I'll go try the Left 4 Dead single player. Sounds like a good idea.
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dkirschner's Far Cry 2 (PC)
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Current Status: Stopped playing - Technical problems
GameLog started on: Sunday 14 November, 2010
GameLog closed on: Friday 19 November, 2010 |
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dkirschner's opinion and rating for this game |
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Messed up FOV, mouse lag, respawning enemies, all make me nauseous and do not make up for the cool potential. I had to stop playing, which is too bad for how much I'd been looking forward to it.
Rating (out of 5): |
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This is the only GameLog for Far Cry 2. |
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