Be Excellent To Each Other

Didn't come. Cocking Amazon. I need to stop preordering with it.

WOW is an MMORPG, you know? I think you severed the acronym in the wrong place. I would define those things are RPG elements, rather than MMO.

Point taken, although all games have online modes these days, be they co-op or competitive or whatever, which is leaning towards the MMO side of things. (Borderlands 2 for example, in co-op mode, is very much like the WoW experience in that you have a team of people working together against computer controlled opponents.)

But yes, MMORPG infusions into all games seems to be where it's at. I just felt that the 'WoW element' is very strong

And by 'WoW' you actually mean 'RPG'. I know Pod made the point already but it's worth underlining: it's nothing to do with massive or multiplayer or online; it's just a game that has the idea of levelling up certain skills (which goes back so far that I challenge anyone to even trace it properly as a concept). I'm happy to accept that WoW is very good at what it does, and one of the things it does is levelling of skills, but that doesn't make every game with that mechanic is WoW. Seriously dude.

Yeah but WoW has been around for so long now, it's persisted for so long, that you could argue it starts to define some of these things now in the specific way that it does it.

I was never really a big fan of RPGs back in the day so WoW has been my main exposure to the genre, so rightly or wrongly I tend to think of these things as 'WoW-like' rather than 'RPG-like'.

Plus I think the 'grindy' aspect of a lot of games is far more WoW-esque than RPG-esque.

Grindy stuff just reminds me of Final Fantasy, where there is often a need to run around fighting things to up your stats and talent trees and whatnot.

I only started at #7 of those, and it still predates WOW by the best part of a decade!

Eurogamer face-off:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... 3-face-off

Possibly worth a read before you commit to a purchase as by the sounds of it both consoles are really pushed to the limit, and arguably past it, by the game engine. (Screen tearing appears to be the biggest issue.)

I reckon it'll be £15 on Steam before too long, so I'm gonna hang on. (I've lost count of the number of games I've lashed out £30-£35 on, only for them to be half price or less inside of three months.) Probably won't hurt it to get a couple of patches under its belt either.

So you're arguing that it's like WoW rather than like an RPG just despite having played very few RPGs and so have nothing to base your argument on.

Right...

I know, how do you think I feel? I have to actually live with this brain, you just get to point and laugh.

I'm not laughing, I'm jus pointing out that your argument is flawed, with implications that you may want to try out a few more RPGs.

Anyway, back to the game: I can confirm the stealth works!

Is that works, or works in comparison to FC2?

I'm an hour in, and so far it's great!

It's glorious.

I'll be getting it for the PC in about 6 minutes and 35 seconds.

Can you play for half hour and put it diwn again, or is it pne of those where you need a time commitment?

Where are you getting it from Grim...?

As far as I can see Uplay is the only option since Ubisoft are being annoying bastards as usual?

Unless there is a special version?

I'll let you know how special in a minute.

So special it wants to run on my PS3

Start again!

lol!! Good work!

Man, I'd be really pissed off if I had to return a game to a shop at this hour on a Saturday night...

It honestly didn't occur to me to play it on my PS3.

Understandable.

Did you manage any better second time around Grim...?

I've already got fucking Origin and Steam installed, I'm loathed to install another fucking digital distribution platform just for one fucking game. Plus uPlay had that dreadful security hole in it with the bullshit browser integration.

It is awesome, isn't it?

Yes. It's pretty much everything I hoped it would be. The AI can be fairly bizarre, though. I left my car parked in the road and went of into the jungle to get some animals and then it flashed up "Do not kill innocent civilians", when I got back to my car there was three more cars there all unable to pass and a dead person who I guess got squished between one of the other cars and mine. I watched for a bit and the gathered crowd seemed to alternate between states of terror and blind panic one moment and polite chit chat the next.

Are you sure you're not in Wolverhampton city centre?

The lack of saving (on the PC) is pissing me off

This isn't just a game, it's a full-on anecdote generator.

Like the time I was stalking around the edges of a pirate camp, planning my approach, recurve bow in hand, the perfect predator. A low growl from my left was the too-late warning of a lion that was stalking me... I didn't make it.

Or the time I was stalking a pirate camp and saw a bear run into it. In the frantic melee that ensued betwixt pirate and Yogi, I contributed just a single bullet to free a second bear held captive in the pirate camp. With two bears on the loose, my victory seemed to be assured... until Yogi came barelling out of the camp, howling in pain, and decided to take a chunk out of my arm. I desperately tried to shotgun him to death but alerted the remaining guards in the process, who finished me off with ease.

I am greatly enjoying sniping, too. I had a Wanted Dead mission where my target was on a small island. I stood from afar and picked his (increasingly panicked) mates off with my rifle, before swimming to the far side of the island, circling around, and treating my target to a machete to the chest.

Attacking yet another pirate camp, I had it go south when the second guy I sniped alerted everyone else. The guards came running out and started beating the bush looking for me. Two of them stopped in a small grove of trees just short of my position, so I emptied a clip into the pair of them from my silenced sub machine gun. The other two ran off at right angles and paused long enough for me to circle up close behind them, and kill the guy on my right with my bow before dashing the last few feet and doing some throat stabbing to the one on my left.

And the lovely, lovely incidental details! Like the dawn glinting through the tree cover, or the dirt on the inside of the cars. For some reason that last one really tickles me. I'm about ten hours in and it's already done enough to knock everything but XCOM out of my GOTY list. I didn't play FC2, but the complaints I heard leveled at it like psychic enemies seem to be completely fixed here.

Oh, and the final thing I did last night was finally found some boars to craft the first ammo upgrade pouch. And it then turned out I had enough skins in stock to jump all the way up to the biggest ammo pouch in one go (I'd already killed the rare animal). So I'm now toting an enormous amount of bullets.

It's very nice to play a stealth game that doesn't let me save after each perfect takedown. Which isn't to say I didn't like the puzzle-solving aspect to figuring out a perfect run in Dishonored, but with no save games to fall back on in Far Cry 3 a missed shot is inevitably going to cause a mad, improvised scramble to stay alive -- and that tension makes everything more fun (and more frustrating sometimes, to be fair).

I've done the 'lining up the perfect shot, then heard a growl' thing. Except it was more of a 'squawk'.

I need to go shark hunting. That will end badly.

Weapons of choice currently: recurve bow with graduated sight, suppressed F1 with reflex sight, and 1887 with extended mag.

I got away with it! Swum out to a rock, took them down with the sniper rifle, swum out to the body without getting eaten. Most dangerous was when I downed one in deep water and almost drowned getting the skin off. I love the way the screen blacks out as you run out of air.

Someone on rllmuk suggests using one of the big gunboats with the HMG on the back for shark hunting, which sounds nifty.

I'm favouring the bow (absurdly satisfying) with the long-range sight, a silenced whatever-the-second-SMG-is (for close up work when I get rushed), the 1887 (for animals, mostly... I need to try the extended mag on that actually) and the second tier sniper rifle with long-range sight and silencer.

So, just to be clear: Guard's aren't psychic nor psychotic?

They're certainly keen to shoot you. And they do hang on to you quite tenaciously -- if you start popping heads from afar with a sniper rifle, they're going to run out of their base and look for you, and if they glimpse you then lose you they're going to keep looking for quite a while, rather than the typical video game response of a shrug as they resume patrolling next to the dead bodies of their mates. In ten hours of play, it's never yet felt unfair to me, though. I've had guards run up to six feet away from me, but be on the other side of a big tree, then stand there looking around, clueless that I'm right next to them.

I've got to say Doc, You've made this sound brilliant!

Agreed. Think I'll pick a copy of this up.

Something that has gone wrong for me a few times is when I'm driving up towards a base I want to take over and I pass a patrol, who then start chasing me, and then I accidentally blaze right past the base I was planning on sneaking into, who raise the alarm, which dispatches another jeep or two full of An Bad Men, which all usually ends quite badly for me.

You mentioned save games (or a lack thereof in dangerous situations).

How does saving work? Do you have to get to a designated area?

It's like GTA, Saints Row, and most other open world games. Outside of a mission, you can save at any point, but when you reload or die you are spawned back at the nearest safehouse (with the inventory contents you had just before you died) rather than exactly where you were, and enemies are reset too. It prevents cheap rush tactics where you repeatedly thin out the herd at a base, die, respawn, and come back around for another go. Within missions, you have fixed checkpoint saving, a la (say) Gears of War.

The guards are definitely psychotic. But not psychic.

My favourite moment so far. Wanted Dead mission. Target standing at the back of a small camp in front of a shack, four guards, two normal guys and two of the crazies with shotgun, all pretty close to the mark. The two crazies start practicing CQC techniques on each other. The other two guards hang around, idly watching. I circle the camp and end up behind the small shack. I wait for a while, hoping for some separation to happen. Nope. I dart round the corner of the shack, stab the target in the neck, and as his body slides to the floor, blast the two CQC lovers, taking them both out with one 12 gauge round, then turn and pop the other two in two shots. It took 3 seconds max.

I must bring balance to the force with some (very minor) gripes.

There's no separate volume sliders for music and speech, and I couldn't hear what Vaas was saying in the intro until I turned the music off.

Every three minutes or so, there's a popup appear at the top left with a reminder of your current (main story) mission. It plays a little ding too. This is annoying in an open world game. I'm murdering tapirs for fun and profit, game, so leave me alone. Also, the game keeps prompting me to read the same tutorial screens over and over again. This is also annoying. Shut up, game!

The weather transitions are disconcertingly fast. It goes from blue skies to chucking it down in ~5 seconds. Apparently, FC2 did this better.

The menus for buying gun upgrades and crafting stuff are a bit clunky.

A little of the incidental side-quest voice sounds weird and crap, like it's 32 kbps mp3 or something. I suspect it's cram-it-all-on-one-DVD issues. Stupid Microsoft.

Uhhh... that's it. None of this matters one jot once you're headshotting Bad Men with a high-tech compound bow, I just thought I'd mention it.

Well I don't know about you, but that's me put off.

yeah, I'm out.

Where the fuck are the goats?!

I went to where the goats are on the map and looked everywhere - I even used my magic hunter drugs, but I couldn't find any. STUPID GOATS!

I want to be able to carry more than one gun

I'm sick of this game already, just from seeing that twat's face on the dashboard. GET MALARIA AND DIE YOU DICK.

They apparently don't sell this in my nearby HMV.

He's actually scaring my kids. Is there no way of making it go away?

I have to say this saving problem could be a big deal for me, it kind of breaks what can be so fun about an open-world game, which is to save, then GO OFF ON A MAD BENDER OF DOING REALLY STUPID SHITE, and then going back to the save and carrying on properly.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12 ... far-cry-3/

That guy should NEVER play Dark Souls.