#yeah sure i think ai-based tools would be neat

[corvidexoskeleton]

The entire argument online about ai technology sucks because people only ever talk about LLM's that function by mashing a bunch of random shit together at random based on text prompts. If people were making actual tools to be used for specific purposes in order to help people do certain things, that would be one thing, because tools are actually useful. But instead we have people arguing about whether or not its morally correct to use chatgpt to cheat on your homework or justify firing your employees to avoid paying wages. Or people thinking the LLM's are sentient

[impurelight]

Far Cry Primal - I Hate Immersion

I have mixed feelings for Far Cry Primal. It’s one of those games that doesn’t have a very good ending. When I thought I had beaten the game I didn’t get any ending. So I looked it up online (Online! For an ending! Ridiculous!) and apparently you have to complete a bunch of what I thought were optional quests to get the ending.

It’s sort of like in Arkham Knight (1 ending for beating the game and 2 endings for beating optional missions) but you didn’t actually get the first 2 endings and it didn’t tell you how to get the third ending. Could you imagine how confusing that would be? Well, that’s how I’d explain Far Cry Primal’s late game content. Confusing.

My second problem with the game is immersion. You know the modding communities and they’ll say, ‘here’s a mod but it breaks immersion’? Yeah, it’s like a cult. And it feels like those people making ‘immersive’ mods made this game. Yeah, some things are good but most of them are bad.

For example the dialogue in Far Cry Primal is made up of a made up language based on what actual people would speak in 10 000 BCE. And the only way to understand what’s going on is to read subtitles. It sounds like a good idea but it really isn’t. In fact as the game progressed I started liking it less and less.

The characters in Primal are your normal Far Cry characters. Meaning very expressive and a little crazy. That just doesn’t translate well to the subtitles. I found myself reading a subtitle in 2 seconds and waiting 10 seconds for the character on screen to actually say the line. And it makes the plot hard to follow. I frequently found myself learning something that I could only assume was stated earlier that would have cleared some stuff up but I guess I missed because of the terrible subtitles. They should of just used english. It’s OK, it’s not like people are going to believe humans spoke fluent english in 10 000 BCE. We were all forced to read Shakespeare; we get it. And I read on forums some people recommend disabling subtitles to get more ‘immersive’. Insanity. Absolute insanity.

Also I believe ‘immersion’ was a factor in many other decisions. There’s this new quest type that involves following highlighted footprints or paw prints or whatever. Sort of like following footsteps in the Arkham series. Except it’s not because the footprints like to disappear and reappear. Why Ubisoft? Why?

I know what they’re going to say. Immersion. And I say, “I don’t care, just make my game more fun!”. Something else. You have the grappling hook in this game. It makes no sense. It’s the most technically advanced tool you use in the game and it feels out of place. Why? Because immersion of course. You think 10 000 BCE had the same terrain as us? Oh, hear that? That’s the sound of immersion cultists laughing at us.

I’m not sure these are the reasons these last two things happened. I’m not an expert in history but I hope they’re not.

So you may think otherwise but Far Cry Primal is a pretty good game. Yeah, it has it’s problems. The end game isn’t good. The story is poor. But I managed to finish it and enjoyed it and I can’t say the same for a lot of other games.

Let’s start with the most obvious change: the Owl. The Owl basically functions as a UAV. In the beginning you can use it to scout the environment much like you could scout it with the camera in previous Far Cry games. It’s a neat idea and one that I expect to see in future Far Cry games. I imagine in Far Cry 5 we’ll use drones to mark enemies instead of the owl. Imagine if you used one of those drones you throw like a paper airplane to start flying. That would be so cool. Also they could always just go with a Watch Dogs 2 style drone. That would be cool too.

Later on you learn skills with your owl. You can dive bomb enemies and drop grenades. My favourite is the berserk bomb. It makes enemies go crazy and kill their friends. I had so much fun using this. Just drop a few berserk bombs and watch the fun from your owl. And berserk bombs effect all non-boss enemies so they’re a little overpowered.

Speaking of being overpowered in previous Far Cry games you were definitely overpowered once you got a suppressed sniper rifle. In Primal I wouldn’t go as far as saying your underpowered but it’s definitely different. A lot of the media around this game focuses on headshots and your bow and arrow.

But surprisingly it doesn’t play a huge role. Headshots are fine but they’re not the way to take a camp undetected. For one thing if you miss they’ll detect you, if someone nearby dies they’ll detect you, if you hit them but they’re wearing a mask or something they’ll detect you. In the previous games you could just snipe from like 100 meters away so if enemies know where you are it’s no big deal. In primal when enemies know where you are it is a really big deal.

Sometimes you can see the silhouette of an enemy moving towards you and you know he knows where you are and you start freaking out. Also AI is really quick to spot you. If you’re just minding your own business it’s not that bad but I was caught by surprise multiple times when someone just happened to spot me without warning.

You really have to take advantage of all of your weapons to remain undetected. Like berserk bombs and takedowns and use your beast to pick off stray enemies. Might not be how you want to play but that’s how you stay undetected. Also you can throw rocks too in this game but it’s not as effective as before. Until you get the slingshot then you can just spam rocks at enemies until they die.

And your beast, that’s new. Far Cry gets more in love with animals every release and Primal is no different. You can now have a pet. I’ve heard it compared to Fallout 4’s companion system. Not really. For one you can command your pet to move so no more having your companion stuck in a doorway and your only option is to slowly push him out of the way. And it’s much more stream-lined. You can command your pet to attack, you can command it to move, you can feed it, you can pet it (yes, seriously), and for some pets you can even ride them when you have the right skill. You won’t be navigating through menus or anything to select the right option. Although I did have a problem when the feed/pet button ‘e’ was also the loot button. Stupid consoles and their limited controls. Am I right?

Also I definitely recommend using your pet if you plan to take a camp stealthily. As when your pet is discovered it doesn’t blow your cover so you can keep sending your pet in to kill enemies and then calling it back. There is one problem that I ran into that your pet likes to run into battle. It’s not that bad if your careful. It’s one more reason that Far Cry Primal doesn’t play like any other Far Cry game. Oh, and I did get a bug where my pet, upon being recalled, immediately returns to combat despite not being attacked. It’s a bug, I guess.

I also encountered a bug where after doing something like healing my weapon would switch to the bow regardless of what weapon it was before doing said action. At least I think it’s a bug, it’s pretty annoying. Also the lock on is a bit on the aggressive side. Especially when you’re too close to an enemy that circles around you really quickly. Then your reticle just follows it like it has a mind of its own. I blame consoles.

Another interesting new mechanic is the village. You can upgrade the important NPC’s huts. The way this happens is unfortunately disappointing. I was hoping for some Mad Max style cosmetic changes from upgrading. Sadly this was not the case.

Another village component is villagers. After beating certain missions you get villagers. And sometimes if you fail a quest you lose villagers, although this only happened I believe twice in the entire game and those two times were early on before I had my weapons upgraded. Unfortunately this feature doesn’t feel very well implemented. It’s not clear what, if anything, the villagers do except give you a nice pat on the back. And it’s pretty weird. I have over 200 villagers. Where are they? The ‘village’ in the corner of the map must have like 100 tops. Where’s everyone else. Although I have to say it would be cool if villagers were a replacement for exp. How cool would it be if things were like ‘8 more villagers to unlock’? There is one thing cool about the villagers. You know those missions where you have to save hostages in Far Cry 4? Well, they’re back. And the number of villagers you earn from those missions is determined by the number of hostages you save. It’s pretty cool.

Also there are now villagers everywhere. There can be enemy villagers that won’t attack you and run at the first sign of danger. Sometimes I accidentally kill them (it’s easy to perform a take down before you know who they are) and I feel bad afterwards.

Also it’s surprisingly difficult to determine who your allies are. It’s not like they’re wearing the neon team jerseys from the previous Far Cry games. I liked them.

For quests there’s a few different kinds. There’s important quests that are given by important NPC’s, some of these are ’story’ quests if you can call them that. There’s orange quests that generally have you doing random quests for people. And there’s random quests which happen randomly. They’re like the karma events from Far Cry 4. You get this beige indicator on the map, you run there, and it tells you to do something, usually kill two enemies and save one hostage. Also the orange quests are a bit weird. There’s actually 3 types. Village which start in the village, cave which start in a cave, and the normal ones. The normal and village quests appear to have to talk to someone and then move somewhere else to actually do the quest. This means you have to start the quest twice. Also you don’t get told which indicator goes to which quest. It’s a little weird. I thought it was a bug.

Another new big addition to this hastily put together list that I didn’t know I was doing until I got to this sentence is darkness. Darkness is a huge part of Primal. When I said I hated the immersion I only meant immersion that makes the game frustrating to play. Darkness is one of the immersive properties that’s genuinely good. Now in my game I had the brightness way too high. So I didn’t need fire to see in the dark. Good thing I changed that.

The darkness is not perfect dark. It’s a nice compromise. And when it’s dark such as at night (yes, there’s a day night cycle now) or when you’re in the cave it’ll usually be so dark you can barely make things out. So you’ll need to set things on fire. Fire has always been a really great part of Far Cry (since at least 3) and primal is no exception. You can now set any weapon on fire and when you do and it’s dark it’ll give this really nice illuminated by fire lighting. Although it appears the light/dark is on some sort of binary scale because there was this one cave that lighting my club on fire didn’t do anything and I think that was because the game thought it was supposed to be bright. Well, it only happened once.

Speaking of caves there are a few caves scattered around, not to be confused with the cave missions which require to ‘explore’ a cave (and by explore they mean enter and then immediately leave and for some reason you can’t leave the same way you came in). These are only for completionists because they only give you collectables and exp. You follow footprints to find the cave painting. But there’s also a thing called a dasha hand somewhere in the cave too. Sometimes it’s pretty easy to find but sometimes it’ll be so tough the only way to find it is to look on youtube. Think of these like the Tombs from the Tomb Raider reboot just with all the fun sucked out of them.

Oh, and these footprints are only visible using an alternate vision mode. It’s just like the survival instinct from Tomb Raider except no cool sound effect and animation. I have historically never liked these alternate vision modes. I always thought there’s no real reason to have them and they just get you to look away from the pretty graphics. Even Watch Dogs 2 has an alternate vision mode which I think really subtracts from the experience. Oh well.

Speaking of Tomb Raider this game has quick time events. When you get attacked by an animal sometimes you have to quickly mash W/A/S/D and if you fail you die, as usual. I really hate these quick time events because they’re unpredictable.

Also animals are tough. I don’t mean when you attack them. That’s easy. But when they sneak up on you they’re really hard. If a mammoth sneaks up on you early on the game you’re dead. Or worse. Your pet. Then your pet is dead and there’s nothing you can do but spend herbs to revive it.

So that’s Far Cry Primal in a nutshell. A really interesting new experience that isn’t as fun as I wanted. In fact, I don’t think the previous actually illustrates just how different this game is. It’s not just Far Cry with a bow and arrow and a beast. It might as well be it’s own game.

Let’s start with cars. There are none in this game, obviously. But this really shakes things up. Without cars you have to walk everywhere which means things are really close. I’m starting to think of most open world games as driving sims. It’s games that don’t have a very strong narrative and a lot of roads. Mafia 2, GTA 5, Watch Dogs 2. Like in GTA 5 I drove across town to a mission and the guy told me to put some pants on so I had to drive across town to change and drove back. If that’s not the definition of a driving sim I don’t know what is.

Primal carefully skirts around this issue. I originally didn’t like walking everywhere but it’s not too bad and started to really like it towards the end. Especially with fast travel. Nothing is too far away.

There’s also a new ‘previously’ section. I really like this. Only a few games did this before like the Arkham series and Life is Strange. Unfortunately it only updates after certain key missions so it can be a bit bland. And, of course, the aforementioned subtitles hurt it a lot.

Also there’s fog. In the settings they call it ‘volumetric fog’. So, yeah, it’s fog for the volumetric lighting effects. Personally I think it’s overdone. Some times it’s OK but others, especially at night, there’s way too much fog and you can’t see like a few meters in front of you.

Finally Far Cry Primal is the most cinematic Far Cry game I’ve ever played. The forest is so detailed with trees topled over, tons of vegitation, and animals hunting each other. When you’re walking in the jungle you can hear animal sounds all around you.

When you feed or pet your pet you get a nice animation and when your beast hunts you’ll get a snazy animation as it strangles the prey to death. Once while playing 2 rhinos burst into where I was and I killed both of those.

Far Cry Primal is not a traditional Far Cry Game. Some of the improvements are good, some not so much. But overall it’s a welcome change to the series and represents the next evolution of Far Cry.

3.5/5 Enjoyment 5/5 Quality -> 86%