mittense
November 22, 2016, 1:59am
9
I also just posted what may be the first post I’ve written about game design in almost four years (I got tired of it for a while). It answers some questions people have had about the game as well as starts to go into my design philosophy a bit: https://joy-machine.com/devlog/a-systemic-approach-to-ground-up-game-design
To this day, Far Cry 2 is still one of my favorite games – if not being my favorite game. I played it on my Xbox 360 which means that my saves were isolated to finding one of my safe-houses (the PC version has quick-saves/loads – it’s awful). This resulted in any major enemy encounter playing out with me yelling desperately at a television hoping that “please don’t break, please don’t break” or “please don’t hit the ammo canister I’m standing next to because it would hurt in a deadly way” would somehow impact gameplay. And everything that went down in this encounter, regardless of how ugly and sad my game skills were for it, was borderline “permanent” because my last save was so inaccessible (yes, 5-10 minutes is a lot okay) that everything I did mattered. One of my other favorite games, Monster Hunter, has a similar quality to it. You join a mission (with or without friends/rando-allies) and you have three “lives” to accomplish that mission’s goals. And, much like Far Cry 2, the amount of ugly, awful, stupid, ridiculous things you do as a player during those missions is a testament to the strength of the anti-quick-save design of the game.