![]() ![]() But here was Far Cry 2, whose propensity to provoke its audience aligned it more with the arthouse than the mainstream. “We really bound into the triple-A space discursively,” stresses Walker. This is 2008: Indie games were only just blowing up, and so any questioning of blockbusters was still mostly coming from the inside. For him, Far Cry 2 was a watershed moment, imparting the “sense that you could do real thematic work in the first-person shooter that wasn’t just, ‘Rah, rah-I’m the guy with the gun.’” For Austin Walker, former editor-in-chief at Vice Media’s gaming vertical, Waypoint, and now IP director at game studio Possibility Space, it was an “affirming” game-not only for him, he opines via video call, but for a cohort of “young critics and developers.” At the time of its release, Walker was 23 years old, living in New York, and working as a trademark researcher while attempting to make his way into games media. You’re caught in this maelstrom, just trying to survive.įar Cry 2 boldly pointed toward an alternative future for the first-person shooter, a path that diverged from the jingoistic, popcorn spectacle of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that had taken the world by storm a year before. It’s as if every system in the game, including the story, is in a feedback loop with everything else. Just as significantly, Far Cry 2 seeks to disempower the player rather than offer a soothing war hero fantasy, a point reinforced by the game’s grim, morally murky story. It can be slow and tedious before then-cutting-edge fire technology, an AI friendship system, and reactive environments cause it to crackle into capricious life. In fact, very little is straightforward about Far Cry 2, a game whose simulationist mechanics paired with its hostile open world caused it to feel like a particularly intense fever dream upon arrival in 2008. Neither is it a straightforwardly “good time,” but a brutal, sparse experience in which you’re suffering from the effects of malaria. Its sub-Saharan setting burns with deep orange hues while also sinking into a swampy morass of muted greens and browns-evocative, if not straightforwardly beautiful. Released 15 years ago Saturday, Far Cry 2 is not an easy game to love. The only way out is to turn a weapon on yourself-to engage in an act of self-annihilation. The world that Far Cry 2 presents, an unnamed African country ripped apart by civil war, is one in which violence seems to have its own libidinal energy. Destroy an entire encampment, and another will simply take its place, respawning because so little-least of all conflict-can be solved with a gun. Instead, they’ll convincingly writhe in agony before pulling their sidearm on you. Down an enemy in this open-world, first-person shooter, and they may not actually go down. Not so in Far Cry 2, which depicts the repercussions of killing on both micro and macro scales. You must destroy that idea, show them what a messy, horrible thing it is to kill a man.”įor all the gruesome, wince-inducing ways that virtual bodies have been designed to meet their demise, the idea that violence can create a bigger kind of mess is one strangely lacking in video games. We need it to endure the bloody horror of murder. ![]() “Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that there’s a proper way to kill someone,” says the arms dealer known as the Jackal, the central antagonist of Far Cry 2. He speaks with a familiar, unnerving sureness. ![]()
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