6 ms·

I can remember Far Cry 2 as one of the most immersing games I've ever played. It was far beyond other games from that era. Sadly, most players seemed to be over

by Kovah 7y ago

I can remember Far Cry 2 as one of the most immersing games I've ever played. It was far beyond other games from that era. Sadly, most players seemed to be overwhelmed by game, (or frustrated by bugs and some game mechanics) . I really miss this level of reality in almost all modern games. It feels like all of them are just meant to be taken as kind of an interactive movie, played for some hours and then to be forgotten. Games could be so much more. Does anyone knows other examples for great, immersing games?

alisonatwork 7y ago
This is a vague comment. What about Far Cry 2 made it especially "immersing", to you? What was the part that made it feel like "reality"? For me i found Far Cry 2 spectacular, probably the best first-person shooter of all time, because it constantly makes you feel like shit about the fact you are playing a mass-murderer. That felt confronting and "real" to me. Another game that does this is Spec Ops: The Line, although that is a much more tightly-plotted "interactive movie" type game where you are funneled along certain paths to advance the story. Another very bleak and depressing shooter is Metro 2033. It is horrendously difficult. You will never have enough ammo. Your gas mask will always break. I never finished it because it made me feel too miserable every time i played. Unlike Far Cry 2 you are forced down corridors, so there is no respite. You can't just go out in the jungle and watch the sunset for a while. If you are looking more for "open world" games where you can wander around on a big map and do your own thing, there are dozens of those. Personally i am not a fan so i can't give a specific recommendation, but you could check out any of the other Far Cry games, the Assassin's Creed games, Grand Theft Auto 3 and later, Fallout 3 and later, Red Dead Redemption, Stalker series, Metal Gear Solid 5 and probably the other ones too, etc. If you are more interested by the sickness and vulnerability aspect, there is a whole class of games called "survival games" that don't give you a storyline, they just set up random environments that you have to walk around and survive in. I imagine the better ones are similar to those times in Far Cry 2 where you crawl on your belly through the mud and the elephant grass desperately trying to make your way to the doctor who will refill your meds before you die of malaria. It really depends what you are looking for from a computer game. Personally, i get Far Cry 2 feelings mostly from games that don't follow shooter mechanics - walking sims, art games and adventures... but those genres are frequently likened to "interactive movies", so i think it depends a lot on your taste.
- hoorayimhelping 7y ago
  >For me i found Far Cry 2 spectacular, probably the best first-person shooter of all time, because it constantly makes you feel like shit about the fact you are playing a mass-murderer. That felt confronting and "real" to me. I hate when games do this. Far Cry 2 and 3 were really bad about it, as well as Bioshock. The game puts you in a situation where you have to react a certain way to play the inherently limited game world that was designed by a person, and the designers think they're like crazy insightful for pointing out that your character is killing hundreds of people. It's so tautological and annoying. "Oh my god, you just played this game the way we designed it and now your character is a mass murderer, how can you live with yourself?!" Eye roll.
  - lacker 7y ago
    I imagine that is also how real mass murderers feel, that life forced them into it somehow. You are always free to stop playing the game.
  - alisonatwork 7y ago
    I tried to play Bioshock and gave up after about an hour because i found all the mindless zombies running out to kill me kind of tedious. The story (if there was one) didn't capture me at all. Far Cry 2 was a totally different kind of game. Far Cry 2 wasn't leading the player on some voyage of self-discovery. There is no epic storyline. It is clear from the very beginning that you are a foreign mercenary coming into a war-torn country to kill people for money. You are a scumbag from the jump, and you continue to be a scumbag throughout the entire game. If you don't want to play that game, you don't have to play it. The thing i like about Far Cry 2 is that it never tries to shoehorn in some kind of redemption arc. It never tries to justify the violence. You take money from both sides. You double-cross everybody. Just like other first-person shooters, you kill pretty much everyone you meet. But unlike other first-person shooters, there is no implication that the people you are killing are "baddies". You are just a killer. The end. I don't think the designers are sitting around feeling smug about it. That's just the game. I thought it was a good one.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lacker 7y ago
Disco Elysium is fantastically immersive, a unique game and one of the best ever. You have to enjoy reading though.
spats1990 7y ago
>I can remember Far Cry 2 as one of the most immersing games I've ever played. It was far beyond other games from that era. Sadly, most players seemed to be overwhelmed by game, (or frustrated by bugs and some game mechanics). I downloaded it from Steam based on these comments and the article, but I haven't even gotten to do a proper mission yet. After the opening sequence in the jeep and escape from the hotel* my character woke up in a room and was instructed to get some weapons and meds. I ran over to the weapons and picked them up straight away and now nothing I can do will trigger the NPCs to recognise I've fulfilled those two tutorial things. It's only frustrating because I already sat through the opening sequence twice after the game crashed after the jackal's speech in the hotel the first time. That kind of thing I can always put up with. But to get out of being trapped in this room that teaches the player how meds work, I'm gonna have to do the story mode from the start again. Game cost ten bucks so I'm not mad. I'll get back to it. But yeah, found a bug. *(which was great - I was 10 or 11 when Half Life came out and still consider the opening train sequence one of the coolest game things I've ever seen -it's the best take on that intro concept I've seen)
- baud147258 7y ago
  I played HF for the first time last year and I found the intro sequence a bore. Like, yeah, it has not aged gracefully (unlike the gunfights of the game, which were still cool), but still I don't understand why it's praised to high heaven
  - spats1990 7y ago
    Maybe it's better in my memory then. But HL1 is ~22 years old. Any innovation that was groundbreaking for its time has been absorbed I suppose. It's like how the first time I heard the Ramones I thought they sounded really tame and more like the beach boys than anything else. Because I'd come to them after fugazi, minor threat, dead kennedys, and all the pop punk stuff that came after those. My context was all screwed up because of the intervening years. It's like how I read a comment on here once. Someone had read william gibson's neuromancer and thought it was really cliche and trite. I read that comment and I was like, yeah, it's cliche and trite because everybody copied it! We made it that way.
MisterTea 7y ago
I remember playing Crysis around that same time as after Far Cry was released, Ubisoft took over the Far Cry franchise and Crytek focused on Crysis which in my opinion is an excellent single player game... right up until the aliens come into play. Then the game play dynamic dramatically changes in a way that doesnt have the same appeal. Maybe it's just me but same thing happened in Crysis 2, aliens get involved and the game becomes much more linear. Crysis >=2 are not good games. They suffer from overly boring, linear consolitis gameplay. BUT I still recommend you pick up a copy of Crysis as it was one of the last great single player PC-first FPS games. The lush jungle graphics, AI and super suit along with large open-ish maps allow you to approach goals in many different ways. Very fun state of the art game from 2007. My brother thought Far Cry 2 was a technical achievement until he played Crysis and said the graphics blew away Far Cry 2's. He also complained of the repetitive convoy attacks and annoying malaria thing.

by Kovah 7y ago

alisonatwork 7y ago

This is a vague comment. What about Far Cry 2 made it especially "immersing", to you? What was the part that made it feel like "reality"? For me i found Far Cry 2 spectacular, probably the best first-person shooter of all time, because it constantly makes you feel like shit about the fact you are playing a mass-murderer. That felt confronting and "real" to me. Another game that does this is Spec Ops: The Line, although that is a much more tightly-plotted "interactive movie" type game where you are funneled along certain paths to advance the story. Another very bleak and depressing shooter is Metro 2033. It is horrendously difficult. You will never have enough ammo. Your gas mask will always break. I never finished it because it made me feel too miserable every time i played. Unlike Far Cry 2 you are forced down corridors, so there is no respite. You can't just go out in the jungle and watch the sunset for a while. If you are looking more for "open world" games where you can wander around on a big map and do your own thing, there are dozens of those. Personally i am not a fan so i can't give a specific recommendation, but you could check out any of the other Far Cry games, the Assassin's Creed games, Grand Theft Auto 3 and later, Fallout 3 and later, Red Dead Redemption, Stalker series, Metal Gear Solid 5 and probably the other ones too, etc. If you are more interested by the sickness and vulnerability aspect, there is a whole class of games called "survival games" that don't give you a storyline, they just set up random environments that you have to walk around and survive in. I imagine the better ones are similar to those times in Far Cry 2 where you crawl on your belly through the mud and the elephant grass desperately trying to make your way to the doctor who will refill your meds before you die of malaria. It really depends what you are looking for from a computer game. Personally, i get Far Cry 2 feelings mostly from games that don't follow shooter mechanics - walking sims, art games and adventures... but those genres are frequently likened to "interactive movies", so i think it depends a lot on your taste.

hoorayimhelping 7y ago
>For me i found Far Cry 2 spectacular, probably the best first-person shooter of all time, because it constantly makes you feel like shit about the fact you are playing a mass-murderer. That felt confronting and "real" to me. I hate when games do this. Far Cry 2 and 3 were really bad about it, as well as Bioshock. The game puts you in a situation where you have to react a certain way to play the inherently limited game world that was designed by a person, and the designers think they're like crazy insightful for pointing out that your character is killing hundreds of people. It's so tautological and annoying. "Oh my god, you just played this game the way we designed it and now your character is a mass murderer, how can you live with yourself?!" Eye roll.
- lacker 7y ago
  I imagine that is also how real mass murderers feel, that life forced them into it somehow. You are always free to stop playing the game.
- alisonatwork 7y ago
  I tried to play Bioshock and gave up after about an hour because i found all the mindless zombies running out to kill me kind of tedious. The story (if there was one) didn't capture me at all. Far Cry 2 was a totally different kind of game. Far Cry 2 wasn't leading the player on some voyage of self-discovery. There is no epic storyline. It is clear from the very beginning that you are a foreign mercenary coming into a war-torn country to kill people for money. You are a scumbag from the jump, and you continue to be a scumbag throughout the entire game. If you don't want to play that game, you don't have to play it. The thing i like about Far Cry 2 is that it never tries to shoehorn in some kind of redemption arc. It never tries to justify the violence. You take money from both sides. You double-cross everybody. Just like other first-person shooters, you kill pretty much everyone you meet. But unlike other first-person shooters, there is no implication that the people you are killing are "baddies". You are just a killer. The end. I don't think the designers are sitting around feeling smug about it. That's just the game. I thought it was a good one.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lacker 7y ago

Disco Elysium is fantastically immersive, a unique game and one of the best ever. You have to enjoy reading though.

spats1990 7y ago

>I can remember Far Cry 2 as one of the most immersing games I've ever played. It was far beyond other games from that era. Sadly, most players seemed to be overwhelmed by game, (or frustrated by bugs and some game mechanics). I downloaded it from Steam based on these comments and the article, but I haven't even gotten to do a proper mission yet. After the opening sequence in the jeep and escape from the hotel* my character woke up in a room and was instructed to get some weapons and meds. I ran over to the weapons and picked them up straight away and now nothing I can do will trigger the NPCs to recognise I've fulfilled those two tutorial things. It's only frustrating because I already sat through the opening sequence twice after the game crashed after the jackal's speech in the hotel the first time. That kind of thing I can always put up with. But to get out of being trapped in this room that teaches the player how meds work, I'm gonna have to do the story mode from the start again. Game cost ten bucks so I'm not mad. I'll get back to it. But yeah, found a bug. *(which was great - I was 10 or 11 when Half Life came out and still consider the opening train sequence one of the coolest game things I've ever seen -it's the best take on that intro concept I've seen)

baud147258 7y ago
I played HF for the first time last year and I found the intro sequence a bore. Like, yeah, it has not aged gracefully (unlike the gunfights of the game, which were still cool), but still I don't understand why it's praised to high heaven
- spats1990 7y ago
  Maybe it's better in my memory then. But HL1 is ~22 years old. Any innovation that was groundbreaking for its time has been absorbed I suppose. It's like how the first time I heard the Ramones I thought they sounded really tame and more like the beach boys than anything else. Because I'd come to them after fugazi, minor threat, dead kennedys, and all the pop punk stuff that came after those. My context was all screwed up because of the intervening years. It's like how I read a comment on here once. Someone had read william gibson's neuromancer and thought it was really cliche and trite. I read that comment and I was like, yeah, it's cliche and trite because everybody copied it! We made it that way.

MisterTea 7y ago

I remember playing Crysis around that same time as after Far Cry was released, Ubisoft took over the Far Cry franchise and Crytek focused on Crysis which in my opinion is an excellent single player game... right up until the aliens come into play. Then the game play dynamic dramatically changes in a way that doesnt have the same appeal. Maybe it's just me but same thing happened in Crysis 2, aliens get involved and the game becomes much more linear. Crysis >=2 are not good games. They suffer from overly boring, linear consolitis gameplay. BUT I still recommend you pick up a copy of Crysis as it was one of the last great single player PC-first FPS games. The lush jungle graphics, AI and super suit along with large open-ish maps allow you to approach goals in many different ways. Very fun state of the art game from 2007. My brother thought Far Cry 2 was a technical achievement until he played Crysis and said the graphics blew away Far Cry 2's. He also complained of the repetitive convoy attacks and annoying malaria thing.