Twitter included a tweet I sent this weekend about fishing in Far Cry in one of their "trending story" bits. I woke up this morning to my phone having a seizure from all the "likes" and "retweets".
I've given up on Far Cry 5 for now. I can't stomach pressing on knowing that I missed a significant mission and I don't want to start over just yet.
So I loaded up Watch_Dogs which I abandoned a long time ago. I still think Aiden Pearce is one of the worst "pro"tagonists I've ever encountered in a game, but I'm having a lot more fun with the game now than I did before.
These minigames are still a bunch of garbage, though.
I've enjoyed this game far more than I thought I would despite the garbage story. I wasn't even planning on buying it until a bunch of friends picked it up and I wanted to take part in the conversation. Now, I've done everything except some of the fishing and have restarted to play through it again.
DietarySupplementStill not approved by the FDADublin, OHRegistered Userregular
Well, finished it off last night. Here's some musings (spoilers)
A lot of people had problems with the ending after getting it spoiled without playing the game, and I initially wrote those people off as not having the sense to play the story to see how it wound up there. And you know what? They're half right. The ending, specifically WHY it ends the way it does, is not well done at all. I made a comment a page or so back about how I (somehow) missed every single radio message about the "state of the world" so if you're me, it completely comes out of nowhere that the world is going to end in a nuclear war. However, it isn't that hard to see where the writers were trying to go for there, and that was the prophet was right all along, and you, as a gung-ho guy, could have spared a lot of lives in the process if you had just walked away. The outcome would have been the same. Seeing the message for what it is, it's an admirable goal. It's handled poorly, though, and I think that as altruistic as Joe tries to spin it, lives are *still* lost in the process. If you don't step in, your friends die. If you do, they live just long enough to see the world end. I do believe that being a hero in Hope county, regardless of how many people you kill, still makes it a better place for the residents, but it's all zero sum. He says it best at the end: "not every problem can be solved with a bullet." I feel like they're trying to evoke some "Spec Ops: The Line" vibes. I just wish the writing had been a *tad* stronger. For instance, say instead of a crazy religious cult, they were just white supremacists/terrorists? He could give you the same speech, right? Here you come, to save the day from racism and oppression, but you know what? Everything was circling the drain the whole time. Maybe the writing abandons Joseph as being "right" about the end of the world, but doesn't a scenario like this make things seem stronger?
I really thought that Jacob's and Faith's regions were handled really well. I did John's first, then Faiths, and I thought the progression and pacing was good. Jacob's region, though, felt the weakest to me. Maybe it was because the terrain was a little more difficult to move around in, or the fact that I just had a psy-ops trippy region with Faith that it made it just not click for me. So I'm a sleeper agent for Jacob? It felt more rushed than any other part of the plot up to that point. I felt that was the weakest part of the game, easily, and the only region that felt like a chore to slog through.
Speaking of the final sequence, I can't say I'd ever want to watch mushroom clouds explode, but that's about as near a thing as I think we'd experience. I was terrified. Yes, you have to make to a checkpoint before a certain amount of minutes expire, but birds falling out of the sky on fire, wildlife helplessly scurrying about... it was all just so bleak. And then the muffled explosions in the bunker with creaks and moans in the earth, and you just know the outside world is dying... man, it was something to watch. I'm still thinking about it today.
If anything, I think the game suffers in the end because once regions are liberated and the outposts are cleared, there's just nothing to do. The random encounters on the road or in the air go away.
tl;dr I really enjoyed the game. Whether it was stalking trough the woods with Jess and Peaches silently taking people down, or cruising with Sharky and Hurk and causing mayhem, it helped offset some of the repetitiveness. I also thought the guns and fangs for hire were really cool and well implemented, and the characters were funny and memorable, too. My favorite pairing was Jess and Sharky, just for the banter alone.
I didn't spring for any DLC, but I'm going to strongly consider it eventually if I can snag it in a sale. I'm probably going to tool around a bit in the arcade before I uninstall, but yeah, I thought this was a totally enjoyable game that I'd recommend over Far Cry 4 and Primal. 3 is still my favorite, and 2 was good (but I played it at launch when it had a bunch of problems, or at least I did) but yeah, solid game.
Well, finished it off last night. Here's some musings (spoilers)
A lot of people had problems with the ending after getting it spoiled without playing the game, and I initially wrote those people off as not having the sense to play the story to see how it wound up there. And you know what? They're half right. The ending, specifically WHY it ends the way it does, is not well done at all. I made a comment a page or so back about how I (somehow) missed every single radio message about the "state of the world" so if you're me, it completely comes out of nowhere that the world is going to end in a nuclear war. However, it isn't that hard to see where the writers were trying to go for there, and that was the prophet was right all along, and you, as a gung-ho guy, could have spared a lot of lives in the process if you had just walked away. The outcome would have been the same. Seeing the message for what it is, it's an admirable goal. It's handled poorly, though, and I think that as altruistic as Joe tries to spin it, lives are *still* lost in the process. If you don't step in, your friends die. If you do, they live just long enough to see the world end. I do believe that being a hero in Hope county, regardless of how many people you kill, still makes it a better place for the residents, but it's all zero sum. He says it best at the end: "not every problem can be solved with a bullet." I feel like they're trying to evoke some "Spec Ops: The Line" vibes. I just wish the writing had been a *tad* stronger. For instance, say instead of a crazy religious cult, they were just white supremacists/terrorists? He could give you the same speech, right? Here you come, to save the day from racism and oppression, but you know what? Everything was circling the drain the whole time. Maybe the writing abandons Joseph as being "right" about the end of the world, but doesn't a scenario like this make things seem stronger?
I really thought that Jacob's and Faith's regions were handled really well. I did John's first, then Faiths, and I thought the progression and pacing was good. Jacob's region, though, felt the weakest to me. Maybe it was because the terrain was a little more difficult to move around in, or the fact that I just had a psy-ops trippy region with Faith that it made it just not click for me. So I'm a sleeper agent for Jacob? It felt more rushed than any other part of the plot up to that point. I felt that was the weakest part of the game, easily, and the only region that felt like a chore to slog through.
Speaking of the final sequence, I can't say I'd ever want to watch mushroom clouds explode, but that's about as near a thing as I think we'd experience. I was terrified. Yes, you have to make to a checkpoint before a certain amount of minutes expire, but birds falling out of the sky on fire, wildlife helplessly scurrying about... it was all just so bleak. And then the muffled explosions in the bunker with creaks and moans in the earth, and you just know the outside world is dying... man, it was something to watch. I'm still thinking about it today.
If anything, I think the game suffers in the end because once regions are liberated and the outposts are cleared, there's just nothing to do. The random encounters on the road or in the air go away.
Thing is, even with the radio broadcasts abouyt hightening tensions, so what? Tensions are always going up and down, in some ways we are as close to the brink as ever, in other ways not. Should we allow crazy doomsday cultists kidnap, murder and torture people, just in case?
It's easy to see where the game was going, and that they did it badly.
The problem is that they tried to do something utterly stupid and horrible.
They argue in favor of letting murderers go on murdering, just in case. And that's stupid, and immoral.
That said, here's a quote of myself from steam:
The nuke, is irrelevant to any player actions before it falls.
You have no way to predict a nuclear war when you first try to arrest Joseph.
You have no means to affect wider world once you are fighting the Cult.
You have no reason to walk away once you have defeated Joseph.
The nuke, is just a poorly done twist, for no reasons other than to have a twist.
Without the nuke, arresting Joseph is the right action to take, and bullets are a solution the problems we are faced with.
The game destroys its own intended message.
Assuming the message is "violence does not work", instead of "Don't oppose murderous doomsday cults".
The story destroys itself, and has little mesage to begin with.
Jacob and Faith i found the pretty horrible, mainly because the leaned so heavily on the most ludicrous (apart from the ending itself) part of the game, Bliss.
A wonder drug that does anything the writer wants or needs, when writer wants it or needs it, to whomever writer wants or needs it done.
It's, quite frankly, magic. The whole story hinges on it.
Faith uses it to basicly give herself telepathy, being able to beam messages, orders and surprisingly coherent dreams straight into our nogging (yes, i'm certain we're supposed to just accept them as hallucinations, but they are way too convenient for Faith for me to do so).
Jacob uses it to brainwash us into obedient puppets in 4 session so short our allies have barely time to notice we are gone, but not enough time to get worried, in a region where insane nutcase is known to kidnap and brainwash people.
I was not terrified of the ending, i was annoyed.
The main thought going on in my brain could be summed up as "really? fuck you too", it's nonsensical, it is stupid, it utterly destroys any attempts for realism, and that game forces you to restart, over and over again, if you dare to shoot the writers golden boy, until you give up and safe the babykilling psychopath, only for him to somehow manage to get away from the car crash with no injury whatsoever (the helicopter at the beginning was already kinda stupid, but i accepted it as setup for the story).
I've not really found it in me to go play the game, the whole story has left such a bad taste in my mouth over it that i'd rather just forget it exists. Will probably eventually go back and do arcade, finish missions and cult strongholds. but for now, i'm out.
The message of the game is stupid and immoral, and i wish i had know of it before so i would not have bought it.
I had some misgivings about the game before launch, i should have listened to them.
+3
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
However, it isn't that hard to see where the writers were trying to go for there, and that was the prophet was right all along, and you, as a gung-ho guy, could have spared a lot of lives in the process if you had just walked away. The outcome would have been the same. Seeing the message for what it is, it's an admirable goal.
What?
I do not see that as the message. And if it was... it what way does that message make any sense or something to call admirable?
When a crazy lunatic says the world is ending you should always listen! - Nope that's not right
If the country is going to be nuked you should allow crazed lunatics to murder and torture people because hey, they'll probably die in the nuke anyway! - Uhhh... nope still doesn't make sense.
The point is he is still crazy and wrong and terrible whether a nuke drops or not. It doesn't forgive doing what he did to innocent people because a nuke actually drops. That is complete crazy talk.
You should not have listened to him. He thinks you should have because he's fucking insane. The problem with the ending is mostly that because your character is silent they don't get to express that the lunatic. They don't get to yell in his stupid face that the nuke actually hitting doesn't change anything.
If someone is terminal does that mean it doesn't matter what you do them because their about to die anyway? Obviously not, so why does listening to him make sense here?
Is just a rocks fall, everyone dies ending from D&D, or a Twilight Zone episode where the desperate search to find a way to save someones life fails because they immediately get hit by a car anyway. Nothing you did mattered, nothing you could have done would have mattered, and no options that you were ever given were good ones.
I felt like they played Spec Ops: The Line, but didn't really get it.
The 'choose to leave' ending kind of works as a downer ending, but it's an ending that says you were wrong to leave. The 'resist' ending says that you were wrong to resist. Taken together, both endings say you were wrong to play the game.
Nobody remembers the singer. The song remains.
+1
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DietarySupplementStill not approved by the FDADublin, OHRegistered Userregular
edited April 2018
Okay well wow that didn't go over well.
An attempt at clarification:
I didn't say "We should always listen to crazy people." I'm not saying it's right to walk away. I can't say I would have anyway. What I am trying to say, though, is that I think I see where the writers were attempting to go, and I think it's a neat concept. I wasn't trying to say that they did it well.
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
I didn't say "We should always listen to crazy people." I'm not saying it's right to walk away. I can't say I would have anyway. What I am trying to say, though, is that I think I see where the writers were attempting to go, and I think it's a neat concept. I wasn't trying to say that they did it well.
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
So what do you think was the concept of the game exactly?
Because seeing what i see as the intended concept, all i can do is go "Yes, and?", the idea of "neat" never even comes up.
The game does nothing with its concepts, the questions it asks are largely irrelevant because the answers are useless.
The lessons it tries to teach are so basic that anyone hearing them should go "well duh" and then ignore who ever said them, and it utterly fails to actually teach them.
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DietarySupplementStill not approved by the FDADublin, OHRegistered Userregular
I didn't say "We should always listen to crazy people." I'm not saying it's right to walk away. I can't say I would have anyway. What I am trying to say, though, is that I think I see where the writers were attempting to go, and I think it's a neat concept. I wasn't trying to say that they did it well.
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
So what do you think was the concept of the game exactly?
Because seeing what i see as the intended concept, all i can do is go "Yes, and?", the idea of "neat" never even comes up.
The game does nothing with its concepts, the questions it asks are largely irrelevant because the answers are useless.
The lessons it tries to teach are so basic that anyone hearing them should go "well duh" and then ignore who ever said them, and it utterly fails to actually teach them.
The concept? Same as you do, I expect: "Here's a crazy cult leader who's postaliing the end of the world hahahaha so crazy right so let's go kill everyone and liberate the town! We're a hero! Yay us! Except no one's a hero in the end. Game over!"
Again, didn't say it was done well or that I even liked it, I just see where they attempted to go.
I guess maybe I'm not as jaded about my video games? I still had fun. I guess that makes me a bad person™
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DemonStaceyTTODewback's DaughterIn love with the TaySwayRegistered Userregular
I didn't say "We should always listen to crazy people." I'm not saying it's right to walk away. I can't say I would have anyway. What I am trying to say, though, is that I think I see where the writers were attempting to go, and I think it's a neat concept. I wasn't trying to say that they did it well.
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
What I was saying is that if that's what they WERE trying to do that is awful. No matter how they would have done it that particular message is just awful. But again, that's not even the takeaway I got because I don't believe they would actually try to have that particular brand of awful message. It really just seemed like they were going for the crazy awful villain who gets his way in the end. But again due to the silent protag it just kinda sucks and can also end up easily taken as a much worse actual message. But no matter how it's written if the message was "It's better to walk away" that is abso-fucking-lutely terrible in this particular instance.
I don't really see any message there just the old shock bad guy is awful and wins thing. Which yea, that certainly could have been written much better to have hit properly instead of falling so flat. But that's not any brand of neat message.
And yea not sure where you got that bad person idea from.
Plenty of people here enjoyed the game. Me included.
I don't think anyone here thinks of you as a bad person for having that opinion. I think the issue with the story, for me, is that it starts off so perfectly. Seriously the first few hours of the game are golden. It just falls off the rails and tumbles down a mountain the further you get with it. I wonder if they ended up rushing everything towards the end because it sorta felt like it. Or it's almost like a set piece was removed from the game so the player doesn't gain that knowledge before the ending.
The game was fun (non-solo) though. Removing the radio towers is the best thing they did in this game.
I didn't say "We should always listen to crazy people." I'm not saying it's right to walk away. I can't say I would have anyway. What I am trying to say, though, is that I think I see where the writers were attempting to go, and I think it's a neat concept. I wasn't trying to say that they did it well.
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
So what do you think was the concept of the game exactly?
Because seeing what i see as the intended concept, all i can do is go "Yes, and?", the idea of "neat" never even comes up.
The game does nothing with its concepts, the questions it asks are largely irrelevant because the answers are useless.
The lessons it tries to teach are so basic that anyone hearing them should go "well duh" and then ignore who ever said them, and it utterly fails to actually teach them.
The concept? Same as you do, I expect: "Here's a crazy cult leader who's postaliing the end of the world hahahaha so crazy right so let's go kill everyone and liberate the town! We're a hero! Yay us! Except no one's a hero in the end. Game over!"
Again, didn't say it was done well or that I even liked it, I just see where they attempted to go.
I guess maybe I'm not as jaded about my video games? I still had fun. I guess that makes me a bad person™
You are fighting pure black psychopaths who murder, torture and kindap people for brainwashing.
You absolutely are the hero of this story, and any attempt at saying otherwise considering everything in game shows either horrible failure of intelligence, or morals, if not both.
I'm not jaded about video games, i am tired of stupid.
Saints Row is among my favorite games for drivey shooty fun.
And in them you absolutely are not a hero, you are a monstrous psycopath, murderer, drug traficker, insurance fraud, human traficking being just a short list of your crimes, on screen, and game never pretends otherwise.
Where as this game spends a movies worth of cutscenes preaching at you how you are horrible person for not letting baby killing psychopath go about his business of torture, murder and kidnappings.
I'm glad you had fun, i did too, until the end, after which my previous fun was tainted by pure white hot burning hatred for the morons who wrote this piece of crap.[/quote]
I've only beaten John's and Faith's regions at the moment, and I do agree that the writing in the game isn't great. And the getting captured mechanics, while I kind of understand what they were going for, are not implemented well. However, the game play is a lot of fun, so I can handle the rough writing. Here are some of my thoughts from playing the game (in spoilers, just in case):
-Even though the writing is pretty weak, there are some themes that I noticed and appreciated. From dealing with John and Faith I noticed a theme of hypocrisy coming from the Seeds. John was physically abused by his parents which had a major impact on how he is now, but he resorts to physical torture (i.e. abuse) in order to convert new members for the cult. And Faith makes reference to turning to drugs after being abused and ostracized, but she brainwashes people with drugs. I assume there'll be something similar with Jacob, but I haven't gotten very far in his region yet. So I've noticed a theme of the Seeds inflicting their own traumas on other people. This is where the silent protagonist is a weak point in the game. Having someone able to point out the Seeds' hypocrisy would help, I think.
-Getting captured by the Seeds, as a story telling aspect, is not a bad idea, it just could've been implemented a lot better. Not a fan of it interrupting game play and taking away the player's agency. All the confrontations with the Seeds should've been handled like the last one with John, as the player is the one that instigates the mission by entering the church. Should've just had them as story missions where you wind up getting captured, for example maybe you're going to rescue hostages, but it turns out that it's a cult ambush, you get captured, cue cut scene with bad guy. Maintains player agency and lets them use getting captured as a story telling device.
I've only beaten John's and Faith's regions at the moment, and I do agree that the writing in the game isn't great. And the getting captured mechanics, while I kind of understand what they were going for, are not implemented well. However, the game play is a lot of fun, so I can handle the rough writing. Here are some of my thoughts from playing the game (in spoilers, just in case):
-Even though the writing is pretty weak, there are some themes that I noticed and appreciated. From dealing with John and Faith I noticed a theme of hypocrisy coming from the Seeds. John was physically abused by his parents which had a major impact on how he is now, but he resorts to physical torture (i.e. abuse) in order to convert new members for the cult. And Faith makes reference to turning to drugs after being abused and ostracized, but she brainwashes people with drugs. I assume there'll be something similar with Jacob, but I haven't gotten very far in his region yet. So I've noticed a theme of the Seeds inflicting their own traumas on other people. This is where the silent protagonist is a weak point in the game. Having someone able to point out the Seeds' hypocrisy would help, I think.
-Getting captured by the Seeds, as a story telling aspect, is not a bad idea, it just could've been implemented a lot better. Not a fan of it interrupting game play and taking away the player's agency. All the confrontations with the Seeds should've been handled like the last one with John, as the player is the one that instigates the mission by entering the church. Should've just had them as story missions where you wind up getting captured, for example maybe you're going to rescue hostages, but it turns out that it's a cult ambush, you get captured, cue cut scene with bad guy. Maintains player agency and lets them use getting captured as a story telling device.
-I am unconvinced that the game has a (intentional) theme of hypocricy, it's more that the characters just happen to be hypocrites, and whether or not writer noticed is anyones guess.
-The Church mission is not all that great either.
Am i supposed to, even for a second, to believe that my character is stupid enough to go through the main door?
I have fucking lockpicks and a blowtorch.
And constant amubushes are bad themselves. Because player will be expecting them, and that the character is not, just makes them seem like an idiot.
One or two captures might work, but after that questions of "why don't they just shoot him/her?" come out at full force.
We really should not be interacting with the Seeds, at all, for most of the game.
Give us radio broadcasts, recordings on tv, stuff that let's the game show them off at their best, without forcing either them, or the player, be morons for not just getting it over with.
We should not have this many seeds, period, none of them get but the tiniest bit of development.
Show their brand of crazy, give us a sob story to make us sympathize with them, have them eat a baby make it clear they are irredeeemable, kill them, force player to listen to a monologue how we are the true monster.
That's, just not interesting.
Just, get rid of everyone but John, just, throw them away and forget they ever existed.
Change the beginning to a nice, clean, enclave without the "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS" motif everywhere, and when we try to arrest him, make him just refuse, and then all hell breaks loose as all these nice clean people suddenly pull out guns and force us to run away, while we listen to John preach about the power of YES over the loudspeakers.
Then, after we get separated, we can move on with the actual mission, fighting the cult, saving our comrades from different cult strongholds where they have been going through conditioning.
Drop the missions involving Seeds, instead have us infiltrate revivals where we have to stay unnoticed and get our hands on evidence of Johns sins, to reveal him as a hypocrite to make key memebers turn (don't even have to have us succeed all of the time), and do some actual exploration of how cults operate (there are hints of that, in notes, messages, stuff that you need to go out of your way to find), maybe culmitate each region on a mission where John manages to, barely, escape as we storm a cult gathering with our allies.
[/quote]
Where as this game spends a movies worth of cutscenes preaching at you how you are horrible person for not letting baby killing psychopath go about his business of torture, murder and kidnappings.
I'm glad you had fun, i did too, until the end, after which my previous fun was tainted by pure white hot burning hatred for the morons who wrote this piece of crap.
[/quote]
That doesn't happen at all in the game...
Your burning hatred for the "morons who wrote this piece of crap" seems kinda harsh when you're inventing the reasons you hate it.
Skull2185 on
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
I'm not done with the story yet as I only have 2/3 areas complete but I do agree that the whole getting captured conceit gets tired after the first time it happens. It happening 6-9 (nice) times over the course of the game is just patently ridiculous. By the time you're through one whole region there's no reason the Seeds wouldn't just up and kill you in lieu of capturing you (unless there's a story reason for it I don't know about yet).
What I would rather them do is have moments where maybe you infiltrate the HQ of a given sibling and witness something that gives the same impact. John torturing people while doing a monologue, Faith discussing turning people into drug-zombies, etc. Essentially show their "public" persona over the radio broadcasts and the "private" persona through sneaking missions/other means.
The way it's done now really hurts the pacing and the story, which is in turn the weakest part of an otherwise pretty great game.
Where as this game spends a movies worth of cutscenes preaching at you how you are horrible person for not letting baby killing psychopath go about his business of torture, murder and kidnappings.
I'm glad you had fun, i did too, until the end, after which my previous fun was tainted by pure white hot burning hatred for the morons who wrote this piece of crap.
That doesn't happen at all in the game...
Your burning hatred for the "morons who wrote this piece of crap" seems kinda harsh when you're inventing the reasons you hate it.
I may be hyperbolic in my statement.
But i am not merely inventing things.
The game tries to paint a false equivalency between you and the Seeds, and tries to claim that you should have walked away amd left Joseph to his doomsday cult.
Joseph Seed does that, because of course he would. All the Seeds think they're doing the right thing, because that's what makes for good villains. Mustache twirling "we're evil just because" would've been actual crap writing. Not that Far Cry 5 has amazing writing or anything, but it certainly isn't crap written by morons.
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
Really either way it's an unsatisfying end to another meandering half assed, uninvolving story. Ultimately you just don't invest in anyone, you come close, but the game hedges all it's bets, just like other far cry stories. And with about 30% joke missions/characters, most of the people in the game don't seem all that involved in their fates either. Nothing ever feels grounded or genuine. It's not that the writing is bad, it's that it's unfocused, disconnected, unambitious and doesn't explore itself. You really know everything there is to know about every character after one cutscene with them. The closest I came to be interested was with Faiths story, briefly.
I also just didn't really like the structure of most of the main missions, there's a few standout highlights, but overall nothing we haven't seen and done before a thousand times
Bizzarely though the prepper stash gameplay felt the most satisfying for me, it made me have dangerous, heretical thoughts of a halflife open world game
Joseph Seed does that, because of course he would. All the Seeds think they're doing the right thing, because that's what makes for good villains. Mustache twirling "we're evil just because" would've been actual crap writing. Not that Far Cry 5 has amazing writing or anything, but it certainly isn't crap written by morons.
There's a third ending.
It's summarized as "the only winning move is not to play"
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
played through the whole thing with @Belasco32 and it just robs you of all fun at the end doesn't it. Nothing you did matters, no choices are good, there's no catharsis and no payoff. All your work in-game is pointless, all your time as a player was disrespected.
What a letdown for a game that was so much fun to play through. Co-op titles this tight are so rare, it's a crying shame that the ending was so cheap and so dedicated to invalidating all your success. It's one of the worst instincts of game devs, to let their story ruin your fun and try to !!surprise twist!! you into feeling something when what they actually did was just cancel all the stuff you did before.
I mean, I murdered the most competent civilian leader in the area, a guy who lived in a nuclear-proof bunker and would have been able to help and for what?
Nothing. For nothing. The sniveling prick I saved kept on fucking sniveling right until the moment he died. The rest of my friends? All dead. Dutch, who was right all along and frankly should be considered the true protagonist of the game for all the heavy lifting he had done in Hope County before I showed up (and holy shit that dude was effective)? Fucking dead. For what! We'd have been better off just chilling in Fall's End and waiting for the cavalry after literally taking back the whole county.
Robbing you of mechanical agency is bad enough and wears thin as fuck by the 9th time it happens, but anytime a game's writers rob you of thematic agency in service to their tale, you know they were high on their own supply.
tl;dr: this is a game made for the people who made it, not for us.
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TTODewbackPuts the drawl in ya'llI think I'm in HellRegistered Userregular
its the exact same as the last game though so its not unexpected
its the exact same as the last game though so its not unexpected
It was my understanding that
you could kill or release Pagan Min, pick which of the assholes in golden path end up in charge, and kill the one you picked leaving everyone dead.
Which is far better than FC5, where you either do nothing to stop a psychopath, let the psychopath go in the end and kill your friends (because drugs), try to stop the psyochopath except nukes instantly fall, and then you end up handcuffed in a bunker where the psychopath preaches at you and calls you his new "family".
I had a dream that Dethklok ran a cult in a medieval Keep, but in modern times. There was a gated entrance, and when you entered, you would walk up some steps. At the top of the steps, you would see human skulls and bones strewn about. Completely horrified, you would start running only to hear Nathan Explosion say "THE HUNT IS ON!". When trying to escape, you would get tranquilized, captured, and released after they scared the shit out of you. They told you that if you came back, they would kill you.
The name of the cult in my dream was Eden's Gate. Fuck you FarCry 5. It took me an hour this morning to calm down from the nightmare.
Though, Nathan Explosion would be a vast improvement for a cult leader.
So I finished the game. Extremely mixed feelings overall. Really fun playground, fun taking forts, but that story feels like a huge missed opportunity.
I don't have a lot to add about the ending. This is my first Far Cry game, so I can't speak to how it fits the series. I will say that, on its own, the ending was incredible as a mission. the initial reaction to the Nuke and then the frantic drive to the bunker while everything burns? Amazing. Have never played anything like that.
That said, I agree with everyone who feels like it makes most of what came before pointless. It seems to be written for the developer's enjoyment, not ours. I wish it had been a mid-point? Pre-nuke world, fight cult, take outposts, take ground, don't kill the heralds but drive them off. Then you got your big church confrontation and nuke event, but more in the distance, outside the valley. They valley itself doesn't burn. Cutscene of everyone huddling in bunkers. Then phase two is back out into the valley with new fallout problems. Forest still there but parts are burning, parts are dying. Cult has risen strong from the ashes as they were intending to do, now your job is to take it back from them in kind of the post-nuke setting, while embodying a healthier version of christianity and american knowhow or whatever (albeit one with hyper violence). Hope Valley is where the American dream will live, as long as it can, once those lunatics from the cult have been dealt with. That would give the actual opportunity to put the lie to the cult's methods and philosophy if not their prognostication skills.
I'm not a rah rah America guy, but if I wanted to demonstrate the difference between american idealism and the extremism of american cult militias, that's how I'd do it. I agree with the above comments that seeming to conflate the merits of the cults methods with their correct assessment of the imminent end of society is sloppy writing. Also, they needed to telegraph the "world outside is deteriorating rapidly" stuff so much better for that ending to even kind of work.
I think I've got a few more side missions left and then I'm done. Not feeling too much urge to collect lighters and whatnot though. Although I do like the prepper stashes.
Loved the fishing, loved taking forts and random encounters with cultists, loved my best animal friends, wish the story wasn't so masturbatory and wish it had all tied together better.
Are they all set in the same world? Is there character continuity between games?
Yeah, there's a cia agent involved with both far cry 3 and 4, and he makes direct references to the happenings on rook island from fc3 in his missions in 4. I haven't played 5 yet, so I can't comment on that.
So I jumped into a plane and decided to fly to the eastmost mountain called Peak Raptor or Mount Raptor because if it has a name, there must be something there, right?
Parachuted near the top, and yes, there were grappling spots.
Almost near the top I heard the familiar “Eagle!” from Far Cry 4. There was a hunter and two dead ones shotgunning at 5 or 6 eagles which were VERY aggressive. And there was a prepper stash, so yay, perk points and the 3 skinned eagles for the hunting challenge :biggrin:
I have to admit that the guns/fangs for hireremind me a lot of playing Ghost Recon Wildlands solo, and I teally have to think hard what I remember is from Far Cry 4 or Ghost Recon Wildlands.... This game feels very similar to the GR:W one....
PSN (PS4-Europe): Carolus-Billius
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
I wish there were more bow options. I bought the slingshot but never actually used it because I already had a bow and didn’t see a use for the slingshot
Also the one bow attachment claims it has a range finder but I could never figure out how to get it to work. It has markings for different distances but that only helps if you know the range to your target in the first place.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Had exact same opinion on bows. You really just had to guess and hope you'd eye-balled the range correctly. Would have been nice just to know that though.
Big DookieSmells great!Houston, TXRegistered Userregular
Finished the game last night and just caught up on the thread. At first I had kind of a sour reaction to the ending like many here have, but the more I think about it, the more it’s growing on me. I’m gonna come back a little later after gathering my thoughts and post a more extensive analysis, but for now I actually think it works for me.
In terms of straight gameplay though, this is a fantastic Far Cry game. Just about everything I could have hoped for.
Big DookieSmells great!Houston, TXRegistered Userregular
edited May 2018
Okay, I'll try to stay as brief as possible, but here are my thoughts on why FC5 actually has a really good ending.
(Long thoughts on end-game spoilers below)
Many have interpreted the ending to mean that nothing you do in the game matters, and that we are supposed to take away from the game that Joseph Seed was actually right all along. While these are both technically correct statements, neither is actually right. Let's break each one down.
Nothing you do in the game matters because everyone dies in nuclear holocaust anyway.
Far Cry 5 will always end in nuclear war and devastation, regardless of which ending you go with. Even the secret ending and the "walk away" ending can be assumed to end there as well, we just don't quite get there. While I admit that the indications of this coming are too sparse in the game, the hints are there, that this is an unstoppable train rolling down the track and is going to smash into us no matter what. Nothing we can do in the game can change the fact that most of the people we save, befriend, and sacrifice for will end up dead.
And this is exactly how life has always played out for as long as life has existed.
We are all going to die one day. That's a verifiable fact until someone can provide a good counter-example. Every living thing eventually dies, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. Not only will you die, but everyone you love will die, and all that will be left are a few memories. Until eventually those left after you die as well, and even those memories fade away, until nothing at all is left of you. As if you never existed in the first place. In the face of this knowledge, the reality is that nothing that any of us do will ever really matter in the grand scheme of things. Even those lucky enough to be recorded in the history books will eventually be forgotten as the human race dies out or as the sun consumes the solar system or in the eventual heat-death of the universe. Nothing we do matters in the long run.
Except that isn't true, is it? What we do does matter, because it matters to us, and it matters right now while we are here. It's the reason we continue to struggle forward in the face of overwhelming insignificance of our short lives. In Far Cry 5 nothing you can do through the course of the game will ultimately change the fact that they're all going to die, just like nothing we do in our life changes the same fact about our own lives. But for a short moment, you make their lives better. You allow a pilot to enjoy his life with his wife and new daughter in peace for a few days, free from the oppressive cult trying to take advantage of him. You rescue a celebrity bear from being killed, allowing him a final romp to enjoy himself. You provide closure to a woman who has been mentally and physically abused as she watches you take vengeance on the man who horrifically murdered her loved ones. These stories play out again and again over the course of the game as you beat back the cult through sheer force of will, returning some sense of normalcy to a once proud and free county. Why though? You know you're going to die along with the rest of these people eventually, if not minutes or days, then maybe months or decades. Why bother?
The point is not, "Nothing you do in this game matters." The point is, "Nothing you do in this game matters, but you do it anyway because it's the right thing to do."
Joseph Seed was actually right all along.
Yup, that's true. And my response to that is, so what? Based on the state of the world in the game (and not a huge stretch from the actual state of the world now), this apocalypse was coming whether Seed and his cult were there or not. He can claim that he was given divine signs of its coming, but so have hundreds of other cult leaders over the centuries. Eventually one of them might turn out to be right. In this case, Seed interpreted world events well enough to see what was coming and prepare for it. He's not a prophet, and he doesn't talk to God, but he does at least know how to prepare for the worst.
So sure, that makes him correct. But it doesn't make him right.
Obviously the way in which he prepared for the collapse was awful in every way possible. Murdering people, involuntarily forcing them into a doomsday cult, and using drugs, fear, and eschatological rhetoric to ensure compliance is completely immoral. You as the deputy are right to fight against it, and I can't entertain any serious argument that tries to justify not fighting him as the right thing to do. Even if the claim is that Joseph's tactics, left unchecked, would maximize the number of survivors when the end does come, what is the price they have to pay in order to do so? And as we already established, they're all going to die eventually anyway. All of us are constantly fighting for just a little more time. That's all life is, scratching and clawing to get just a few more minutes before we succumb to that unending darkness. But sometimes the price we pay to earn that tiny bit of extra time isn't worth it. This is one of those cases. I would wager most of the people in Hope County, if given the option, would prefer to die in a nuclear apocalypse as free people than to ride it out for a few more years in fear under a madman's oppression. I know I would.
So then what is the message of this game?
To me, it's pretty simple. While you're still here, while you still have the opportunity, you do what's right. Even though nothing you do will ultimately matter, you do it anyway. There's actually a clarity and optimism to that that I haven't seen from any of the other Far Cry games, or many other games in general. The Deputy sees what's happening, and even in the end when you're locked in a bunker with a madman, nuclear bombs still literally exploding in the world above, you can look back on what you did with a clear conscience. You brought hope to the people of Hope County. Even if it was only for a little while. But in the grand scheme of things, a little while is all we're ever going to get.
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So I loaded up Watch_Dogs which I abandoned a long time ago. I still think Aiden Pearce is one of the worst "pro"tagonists I've ever encountered in a game, but I'm having a lot more fun with the game now than I did before.
These minigames are still a bunch of garbage, though.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
tl;dr I really enjoyed the game. Whether it was stalking trough the woods with Jess and Peaches silently taking people down, or cruising with Sharky and Hurk and causing mayhem, it helped offset some of the repetitiveness. I also thought the guns and fangs for hire were really cool and well implemented, and the characters were funny and memorable, too. My favorite pairing was Jess and Sharky, just for the banter alone.
I didn't spring for any DLC, but I'm going to strongly consider it eventually if I can snag it in a sale. I'm probably going to tool around a bit in the arcade before I uninstall, but yeah, I thought this was a totally enjoyable game that I'd recommend over Far Cry 4 and Primal. 3 is still my favorite, and 2 was good (but I played it at launch when it had a bunch of problems, or at least I did) but yeah, solid game.
It's easy to see where the game was going, and that they did it badly.
The problem is that they tried to do something utterly stupid and horrible.
They argue in favor of letting murderers go on murdering, just in case. And that's stupid, and immoral.
That said, here's a quote of myself from steam: The story destroys itself, and has little mesage to begin with.
A wonder drug that does anything the writer wants or needs, when writer wants it or needs it, to whomever writer wants or needs it done.
It's, quite frankly, magic. The whole story hinges on it.
Faith uses it to basicly give herself telepathy, being able to beam messages, orders and surprisingly coherent dreams straight into our nogging (yes, i'm certain we're supposed to just accept them as hallucinations, but they are way too convenient for Faith for me to do so).
Jacob uses it to brainwash us into obedient puppets in 4 session so short our allies have barely time to notice we are gone, but not enough time to get worried, in a region where insane nutcase is known to kidnap and brainwash people.
The main thought going on in my brain could be summed up as "really? fuck you too", it's nonsensical, it is stupid, it utterly destroys any attempts for realism, and that game forces you to restart, over and over again, if you dare to shoot the writers golden boy, until you give up and safe the babykilling psychopath, only for him to somehow manage to get away from the car crash with no injury whatsoever (the helicopter at the beginning was already kinda stupid, but i accepted it as setup for the story).
The message of the game is stupid and immoral, and i wish i had know of it before so i would not have bought it.
I had some misgivings about the game before launch, i should have listened to them.
What?
I do not see that as the message. And if it was... it what way does that message make any sense or something to call admirable?
When a crazy lunatic says the world is ending you should always listen! - Nope that's not right
If the country is going to be nuked you should allow crazed lunatics to murder and torture people because hey, they'll probably die in the nuke anyway! - Uhhh... nope still doesn't make sense.
The point is he is still crazy and wrong and terrible whether a nuke drops or not. It doesn't forgive doing what he did to innocent people because a nuke actually drops. That is complete crazy talk.
You should not have listened to him. He thinks you should have because he's fucking insane. The problem with the ending is mostly that because your character is silent they don't get to express that the lunatic. They don't get to yell in his stupid face that the nuke actually hitting doesn't change anything.
If someone is terminal does that mean it doesn't matter what you do them because their about to die anyway? Obviously not, so why does listening to him make sense here?
I felt like they played Spec Ops: The Line, but didn't really get it.
The 'choose to leave' ending kind of works as a downer ending, but it's an ending that says you were wrong to leave. The 'resist' ending says that you were wrong to resist. Taken together, both endings say you were wrong to play the game.
An attempt at clarification:
Also, it's never clear what the ending is, so if you had played it without knowing what's going to happen in the end, does that shape your perspective?
I'm not saying the ending is good. It's dumb. I'm just saying, I think I know what they were *trying* to do.
Plot aside, I still had a lot of fun with the game. The actual gameplay is fun. Heck I even had fun fishing, and I *hate* everything about fishing and every other game that has to do with fishing.
Because seeing what i see as the intended concept, all i can do is go "Yes, and?", the idea of "neat" never even comes up.
The game does nothing with its concepts, the questions it asks are largely irrelevant because the answers are useless.
The lessons it tries to teach are so basic that anyone hearing them should go "well duh" and then ignore who ever said them, and it utterly fails to actually teach them.
Again, didn't say it was done well or that I even liked it, I just see where they attempted to go.
I guess maybe I'm not as jaded about my video games? I still had fun. I guess that makes me a bad person™
I don't really see any message there just the old shock bad guy is awful and wins thing. Which yea, that certainly could have been written much better to have hit properly instead of falling so flat. But that's not any brand of neat message.
And yea not sure where you got that bad person idea from.
Plenty of people here enjoyed the game. Me included.
The game was fun (non-solo) though. Removing the radio towers is the best thing they did in this game.
You absolutely are the hero of this story, and any attempt at saying otherwise considering everything in game shows either horrible failure of intelligence, or morals, if not both.
I'm not jaded about video games, i am tired of stupid.
Saints Row is among my favorite games for drivey shooty fun.
And in them you absolutely are not a hero, you are a monstrous psycopath, murderer, drug traficker, insurance fraud, human traficking being just a short list of your crimes, on screen, and game never pretends otherwise.
Where as this game spends a movies worth of cutscenes preaching at you how you are horrible person for not letting baby killing psychopath go about his business of torture, murder and kidnappings.
I'm glad you had fun, i did too, until the end, after which my previous fun was tainted by pure white hot burning hatred for the morons who wrote this piece of crap.[/quote]
-Getting captured by the Seeds, as a story telling aspect, is not a bad idea, it just could've been implemented a lot better. Not a fan of it interrupting game play and taking away the player's agency. All the confrontations with the Seeds should've been handled like the last one with John, as the player is the one that instigates the mission by entering the church. Should've just had them as story missions where you wind up getting captured, for example maybe you're going to rescue hostages, but it turns out that it's a cult ambush, you get captured, cue cut scene with bad guy. Maintains player agency and lets them use getting captured as a story telling device.
-The Church mission is not all that great either.
Am i supposed to, even for a second, to believe that my character is stupid enough to go through the main door?
I have fucking lockpicks and a blowtorch.
And constant amubushes are bad themselves. Because player will be expecting them, and that the character is not, just makes them seem like an idiot.
One or two captures might work, but after that questions of "why don't they just shoot him/her?" come out at full force.
We really should not be interacting with the Seeds, at all, for most of the game.
Give us radio broadcasts, recordings on tv, stuff that let's the game show them off at their best, without forcing either them, or the player, be morons for not just getting it over with.
We should not have this many seeds, period, none of them get but the tiniest bit of development.
Show their brand of crazy, give us a sob story to make us sympathize with them, have them eat a baby make it clear they are irredeeemable, kill them, force player to listen to a monologue how we are the true monster.
That's, just not interesting.
Just, get rid of everyone but John, just, throw them away and forget they ever existed.
Change the beginning to a nice, clean, enclave without the "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS" motif everywhere, and when we try to arrest him, make him just refuse, and then all hell breaks loose as all these nice clean people suddenly pull out guns and force us to run away, while we listen to John preach about the power of YES over the loudspeakers.
Then, after we get separated, we can move on with the actual mission, fighting the cult, saving our comrades from different cult strongholds where they have been going through conditioning.
Drop the missions involving Seeds, instead have us infiltrate revivals where we have to stay unnoticed and get our hands on evidence of Johns sins, to reveal him as a hypocrite to make key memebers turn (don't even have to have us succeed all of the time), and do some actual exploration of how cults operate (there are hints of that, in notes, messages, stuff that you need to go out of your way to find), maybe culmitate each region on a mission where John manages to, barely, escape as we storm a cult gathering with our allies.
[/quote]
That doesn't happen at all in the game...
Your burning hatred for the "morons who wrote this piece of crap" seems kinda harsh when you're inventing the reasons you hate it.
What I would rather them do is have moments where maybe you infiltrate the HQ of a given sibling and witness something that gives the same impact. John torturing people while doing a monologue, Faith discussing turning people into drug-zombies, etc. Essentially show their "public" persona over the radio broadcasts and the "private" persona through sneaking missions/other means.
The way it's done now really hurts the pacing and the story, which is in turn the weakest part of an otherwise pretty great game.
But i am not merely inventing things.
Joseph Seed does that, because of course he would. All the Seeds think they're doing the right thing, because that's what makes for good villains. Mustache twirling "we're evil just because" would've been actual crap writing. Not that Far Cry 5 has amazing writing or anything, but it certainly isn't crap written by morons.
I also just didn't really like the structure of most of the main missions, there's a few standout highlights, but overall nothing we haven't seen and done before a thousand times
Bizzarely though the prepper stash gameplay felt the most satisfying for me, it made me have dangerous, heretical thoughts of a halflife open world game
It's summarized as "the only winning move is not to play"
What a letdown for a game that was so much fun to play through. Co-op titles this tight are so rare, it's a crying shame that the ending was so cheap and so dedicated to invalidating all your success. It's one of the worst instincts of game devs, to let their story ruin your fun and try to !!surprise twist!! you into feeling something when what they actually did was just cancel all the stuff you did before.
I mean, I murdered the most competent civilian leader in the area, a guy who lived in a nuclear-proof bunker and would have been able to help and for what?
Nothing. For nothing. The sniveling prick I saved kept on fucking sniveling right until the moment he died. The rest of my friends? All dead. Dutch, who was right all along and frankly should be considered the true protagonist of the game for all the heavy lifting he had done in Hope County before I showed up (and holy shit that dude was effective)? Fucking dead. For what! We'd have been better off just chilling in Fall's End and waiting for the cavalry after literally taking back the whole county.
Robbing you of mechanical agency is bad enough and wears thin as fuck by the 9th time it happens, but anytime a game's writers rob you of thematic agency in service to their tale, you know they were high on their own supply.
tl;dr: this is a game made for the people who made it, not for us.
Which is far better than FC5, where you either do nothing to stop a psychopath, let the psychopath go in the end and kill your friends (because drugs), try to stop the psyochopath except nukes instantly fall, and then you end up handcuffed in a bunker where the psychopath preaches at you and calls you his new "family".
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
The name of the cult in my dream was Eden's Gate. Fuck you FarCry 5. It took me an hour this morning to calm down from the nightmare.
Though, Nathan Explosion would be a vast improvement for a cult leader.
That said, I agree with everyone who feels like it makes most of what came before pointless. It seems to be written for the developer's enjoyment, not ours. I wish it had been a mid-point? Pre-nuke world, fight cult, take outposts, take ground, don't kill the heralds but drive them off. Then you got your big church confrontation and nuke event, but more in the distance, outside the valley. They valley itself doesn't burn. Cutscene of everyone huddling in bunkers. Then phase two is back out into the valley with new fallout problems. Forest still there but parts are burning, parts are dying. Cult has risen strong from the ashes as they were intending to do, now your job is to take it back from them in kind of the post-nuke setting, while embodying a healthier version of christianity and american knowhow or whatever (albeit one with hyper violence). Hope Valley is where the American dream will live, as long as it can, once those lunatics from the cult have been dealt with. That would give the actual opportunity to put the lie to the cult's methods and philosophy if not their prognostication skills.
I'm not a rah rah America guy, but if I wanted to demonstrate the difference between american idealism and the extremism of american cult militias, that's how I'd do it. I agree with the above comments that seeming to conflate the merits of the cults methods with their correct assessment of the imminent end of society is sloppy writing. Also, they needed to telegraph the "world outside is deteriorating rapidly" stuff so much better for that ending to even kind of work.
I think I've got a few more side missions left and then I'm done. Not feeling too much urge to collect lighters and whatnot though. Although I do like the prepper stashes.
Loved the fishing, loved taking forts and random encounters with cultists, loved my best animal friends, wish the story wasn't so masturbatory and wish it had all tied together better.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Not really. Hurk's really been the only constant since Far Cry 3. He's even got boxes of stuff from his adventures in 3 and 4 sitting at Fort Drubman.
Would love a surprise story expansion, though. Just to expand on that ending.
Yeah, there's a cia agent involved with both far cry 3 and 4, and he makes direct references to the happenings on rook island from fc3 in his missions in 4. I haven't played 5 yet, so I can't comment on that.
Parachuted near the top, and yes, there were grappling spots.
Almost near the top I heard the familiar “Eagle!” from Far Cry 4. There was a hunter and two dead ones shotgunning at 5 or 6 eagles which were VERY aggressive. And there was a prepper stash, so yay, perk points and the 3 skinned eagles for the hunting challenge :biggrin:
I have to admit that the guns/fangs for hireremind me a lot of playing Ghost Recon Wildlands solo, and I teally have to think hard what I remember is from Far Cry 4 or Ghost Recon Wildlands.... This game feels very similar to the GR:W one....
Also the one bow attachment claims it has a range finder but I could never figure out how to get it to work. It has markings for different distances but that only helps if you know the range to your target in the first place.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Steam - NotoriusBEN | Uplay - notoriusben | Xbox,Windows Live - ThatBEN
In terms of straight gameplay though, this is a fantastic Far Cry game. Just about everything I could have hoped for.
Oculus: TheBigDookie | XBL: Dook | NNID: BigDookie
(Long thoughts on end-game spoilers below)
Nothing you do in the game matters because everyone dies in nuclear holocaust anyway.
Far Cry 5 will always end in nuclear war and devastation, regardless of which ending you go with. Even the secret ending and the "walk away" ending can be assumed to end there as well, we just don't quite get there. While I admit that the indications of this coming are too sparse in the game, the hints are there, that this is an unstoppable train rolling down the track and is going to smash into us no matter what. Nothing we can do in the game can change the fact that most of the people we save, befriend, and sacrifice for will end up dead.
And this is exactly how life has always played out for as long as life has existed.
We are all going to die one day. That's a verifiable fact until someone can provide a good counter-example. Every living thing eventually dies, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it. Not only will you die, but everyone you love will die, and all that will be left are a few memories. Until eventually those left after you die as well, and even those memories fade away, until nothing at all is left of you. As if you never existed in the first place. In the face of this knowledge, the reality is that nothing that any of us do will ever really matter in the grand scheme of things. Even those lucky enough to be recorded in the history books will eventually be forgotten as the human race dies out or as the sun consumes the solar system or in the eventual heat-death of the universe. Nothing we do matters in the long run.
Except that isn't true, is it? What we do does matter, because it matters to us, and it matters right now while we are here. It's the reason we continue to struggle forward in the face of overwhelming insignificance of our short lives. In Far Cry 5 nothing you can do through the course of the game will ultimately change the fact that they're all going to die, just like nothing we do in our life changes the same fact about our own lives. But for a short moment, you make their lives better. You allow a pilot to enjoy his life with his wife and new daughter in peace for a few days, free from the oppressive cult trying to take advantage of him. You rescue a celebrity bear from being killed, allowing him a final romp to enjoy himself. You provide closure to a woman who has been mentally and physically abused as she watches you take vengeance on the man who horrifically murdered her loved ones. These stories play out again and again over the course of the game as you beat back the cult through sheer force of will, returning some sense of normalcy to a once proud and free county. Why though? You know you're going to die along with the rest of these people eventually, if not minutes or days, then maybe months or decades. Why bother?
The point is not, "Nothing you do in this game matters." The point is, "Nothing you do in this game matters, but you do it anyway because it's the right thing to do."
Joseph Seed was actually right all along.
Yup, that's true. And my response to that is, so what? Based on the state of the world in the game (and not a huge stretch from the actual state of the world now), this apocalypse was coming whether Seed and his cult were there or not. He can claim that he was given divine signs of its coming, but so have hundreds of other cult leaders over the centuries. Eventually one of them might turn out to be right. In this case, Seed interpreted world events well enough to see what was coming and prepare for it. He's not a prophet, and he doesn't talk to God, but he does at least know how to prepare for the worst.
So sure, that makes him correct. But it doesn't make him right.
Obviously the way in which he prepared for the collapse was awful in every way possible. Murdering people, involuntarily forcing them into a doomsday cult, and using drugs, fear, and eschatological rhetoric to ensure compliance is completely immoral. You as the deputy are right to fight against it, and I can't entertain any serious argument that tries to justify not fighting him as the right thing to do. Even if the claim is that Joseph's tactics, left unchecked, would maximize the number of survivors when the end does come, what is the price they have to pay in order to do so? And as we already established, they're all going to die eventually anyway. All of us are constantly fighting for just a little more time. That's all life is, scratching and clawing to get just a few more minutes before we succumb to that unending darkness. But sometimes the price we pay to earn that tiny bit of extra time isn't worth it. This is one of those cases. I would wager most of the people in Hope County, if given the option, would prefer to die in a nuclear apocalypse as free people than to ride it out for a few more years in fear under a madman's oppression. I know I would.
So then what is the message of this game?
To me, it's pretty simple. While you're still here, while you still have the opportunity, you do what's right. Even though nothing you do will ultimately matter, you do it anyway. There's actually a clarity and optimism to that that I haven't seen from any of the other Far Cry games, or many other games in general. The Deputy sees what's happening, and even in the end when you're locked in a bunker with a madman, nuclear bombs still literally exploding in the world above, you can look back on what you did with a clear conscience. You brought hope to the people of Hope County. Even if it was only for a little while. But in the grand scheme of things, a little while is all we're ever going to get.
Oculus: TheBigDookie | XBL: Dook | NNID: BigDookie