_Far Cry 2_ Among the Plebians

To start with, my apologies -- I'm currently brewing a Call of Duty 3 post to be titled War Among the Plebians, so punning on that title was natural for this post.

I discovered something tonight: yesterday and the day before, I stumbled into some very good games of Far Cry 2 multiplayer. The ordinary player, and the ordinary player-made map, is much less great. Tonight, I spent a substantial amount of time with a workable, if imbalanced, player group -- there were a number of players on the server, not inexperienced so much as, strangely enough, scrubs, who kept the all-players chat channel busy with complaining about weapons they didn't like (ironically by calling them "noob" ones). First grenade launchers, then the SAW, and finally they settled on griping, unanimously, about snipers (a misnomer, of course -- a sniper is someone who takes extreme-range aimed shots on his own, while a sharpshooter is one who takes such shots in support of other forces).

The thing is, they only complained about snipers because they play the game like Doom. I commented that I don't mind a lot of snipers at all, because hunting them is an enjoyable challenge (although there are user-made maps -- with no ground cover and only one path across the battlefield -- that make the task much harder than it really should be). I advised other players to use cover, by typing "try the grass," and the only responses I got were "I don't do drugs" and ensuing incomprehension when I tried to clarify, still wittily. A few players understood that Far Cry 2 is about stealth, not cartoonish-FPS frontal charges, but clearly not all of them by any means.

There's another issue as well. Most of these people were playing to win. There was one player in particular, who was extremely good; I managed to catch him on the flank once and kill him -- once, you understand, and I think this was the first time he had come under attack in the entire map. I was just about to type in that while my team was clearly losing, I considered this a victory, because I'd managed to kill the best player on the server (I really hope that would have come across as a compliment rather than a taunt...) -- but I didn't have the chance, because he quit the game as soon as he died, 17 killed to 1 death score or not.

The host for this series of games had to quit, and I moved on to a different game (Far Cry 2 likes to select the game you join for you); but the rules on this server were very strange ones (no starting upgrades whatsoever? infinite ammunition?), and either different players were allowed to choose how much life they had, or most of the people on the server were cheating up the wazoo, because it took me 2-3 hits with one-hit-kill weapons (the compressed-air neurotoxin dart rifle and the M1905) to actually kill anyone. Now that I think of it, perhaps damage from scoped weapons had just been set very low on that server... but that doesn't explain why the same weapon took one shot to kill some players, two for others, and in one case three or four. (If you're wondering how I got four shots at him with a magazineless neurotoxin-dart rifle: he was standing at full height in the middle of a bridge, looking intensely down towards combat occurring underneath him, disregarding the tower that was at one end of the bridge. The first two times I shot him, he didn't even react. Somebody needs to be whacked over the head with The Tiger's Way until he absorbs a little of it by osmosis...)

I wish I could figure out how the heck to get PunkBuster working, so that I could join the rated games and be free of the cheating part. (One invincible enemy ruins your whole game.) Or better yet, I wish I could send every Far Cry 2 player the complete works of H. John Poole (apart from the one book that's only sold to soldiers), or at least the axioms that I mentioned in my previous post, with the message that they're supposed to play like this...

Update: Oh, I just needed to run the PunkBuster install that was on the Far Cry 2 CD, not the one I downloaded from the link on the PunkBuster website that said "install." How silly of me. On to yet testier and more hypercompetitive players, but at least there won't be cheaters this time...

Far Cry 2: Online Play

Paul Graham spoke of the dangers of energy without discipline -- that instead of determination and concomitantly good results, one would end up "on a local maximum like drug addiction." My latest local maximum has been Far Cry 2 online play... It's an extremely different style of game from the main version of it, and I find myself getting significantly better at it -- I've gotten the hang of it quickly, but then, I have completed the main game and the original Far Cry (though only on Normal difficulty)...

It plays hugely differently from the main game. You're part of a squad at long last (even if most of them are trying to fight cartoonishly, like this was Doom or Serious Sam, rather than fighting appropriately for the game); and you no longer automatically have the drop on your enemy. They know you're coming -- and they're coming as well, too.

Lurking in the shadows and the foilage works unrealistically well -- in particular, most foilage does not change at all when a player is moving through it; there are no trails of beaten grass, there's no movement of grass and leaves to catch a sharpshooter's eye, and thus it's relatively common for players to sneak all the way to the other side's starting location, through open areas with no overhead cover.

The players are weighted towards action, but I'm not sure the game is. It would be interesting to have a team, playing as a team, that concealed itself and waited for the enemy, perhaps throwing out a couple of high-skill players as infiltrators and/or flankers (flanking fire is devastating, especially against opponents foolish enough to stand out in the open when they shoot), rather than rushing the enemy as the enemy rushed them. The team that wins is the first that kills their enemies 50 times, regardless of how often they die, but I have a feeling that a team that relied on rear-facing fire (perhaps favoring the silent, flashless, bullet-track-less dart rifle instead of conventional sniper weapons) could fare pretty well. I hardly ever saw my teammates, but I achieved a lot most of the time. (Some environments, some maps, were just less friendly to this approach, though.)

Regardless, flanking fire is extremely useful in the game; an assault-rifle wielder can sometimes signal friendly snipers or other troops by his fire; coordinating artillery (Rebel class, plus the occasional emplaced mortar or mortar-equipped technical) with an infantry assault, preferably an assault from an unexpected location, would be great. And while I'm dreaming, I'd like an in-game pony. (Then again, maybe not. The only thing a vehicle is good for is making it obvious where you are...) One thing I can say is that it would play quite a bit more realistically if each player only had one life...

• Saboteur (infiltration and stealthy attacks -- silenced weapons or green-dot-sight AR-16, plus silenced pistol or unpatriotic, man-portable IEDs) is definitely my class -- I do a lot of infiltration, and the AR-16 is great for countersniper work -- it doesn't have the range of a sharpshooter's rifle, but it's more maneuverable, and it's an automatic, so there's less riding on single shots. It looks like the same dynamic as how bows beat musketry in the Total War games (and in the real world, if the musketeers are unarmored).


• Sharpshooter is always a useful specialty -- though I prefer hunting enemy sharpshooters over doing sniping of my own, and my preferred mode of action is infiltration and assault on an enemy's secure areas. I read a lot of Poole, after all... this is also why I find teamless Deathmatch games unplayable -- I never know where to sneak to! (Note, also, that you can't always predict which maps are going to favor a range of fighting styles, and which are going to be purely sniperfests; there was one, at least, that really caught me by surprise.)


• Commando, the standard infantry class, is also good at times. I'm not sure whether I prefer the AK-47 or the FN FAL -- the FAL has a longer range, but its sight is inconveniently large, and you're not really fighting at range with this class -- if you go up at long range against a sharpshooter, or a saboteur's AR-16, you'll lose. The M79 is great, though -- there was one level where I located two enemy snipers on an exposed, remote rock formation, and drove them off by shelling them, using my M79 as a mortar. I think I killed one, and the other (more skilled) one was beaten off (diving underwater). After that, and after we stopped the same more-skilled sniper when he was lurking in a treehouse (don't ask), the map ended in a sniper rush for our team, and victory in a combat that had started in our favor (with our storming their headquarters early in the game), but had turned in our enemies'.


• I haven't used the Gunner class (M249 or wire-guided Carl Gustav AT rifle, MAC-10) very much, but its loadout is great (most classes with a good main weapon have a terrible secondary -- the sniper gets his choice of the game's weakest pistol or a flare pistol for backup), and one player I was up against -- who was very good in general, in fairness -- dominated two maps with his M249 and movement at a crouch.


• I used the Guerilla class (video-gamey, very-high-spread shotguns, and the MAC-10 or the saboteur's IEDs) early on, but I think it was a mistake. You hardly ever fight at distances small enough that a shotgun gives an advantage over an assault rifle, and even if you do get to such close quarters at times, there will still be other times where you need to engage at longer ranges.


• The Rebel class is man-portable artillery -- RPGs or semi-automatic grenade launchers, plus an Uzi and real grenades (all other classes but the sharpshooter have to use Molotov cocktails). I don't think my temperment is right for it -- though having someone else providing RPG or grenade fire is always a good thing.

Tactical lessons learned from this experience:

• Move behind optical cover as far as possible -- catching a glimpse of someone is almost as good as killing him.
  • Remember that movement attracts the eye.


• If you know that an enemy's in a room, grenade him if at all possible.


• If you're looking for a target for a long-ranged weapon while you're visible from actually or potentially hostile-occupied locations, you're the target. Do your target acquisition either behind cover, or from a position well above your enemy, since people tend to look out and down, not up.
  
  
  
  • When watching for hostile forces, look up.
  
  
  • And clear out as soon as you're done shooting. Once you've opened fire, it's only a matter of time until you're spotted.


• Wounding an enemy and waiting for another to arrive to help him is effective. In real-world combat, it would obviously not be something to use -- but it would be something to watch out for.


• The Persian "combined-arms squad" -- six riflemen, sharpshooter, and one or two RPG teams -- makes a lot of sense.


• Teams of troops can cover less ground, but are more survivable than individuals. It's harder to get cover from two lines of fire than from one.


• If you have a choice between fighting from behind sandbags and fighting concealed, fight concealed.


• One enemy in your rear is more dangerous than five or six coming from a direction you anticipate.
  
  • There is such a thing as initiative on the battlefield. Take it.


• Become comfortable with all weaponry, and use the tactics best for the environment rather than shoehorning your favorite weapon into all circumstances.
  
  • But there is such a thing as an environment best suited for jack-of-all-trades weapons.


• The enemy is harder to scare than he looks. Trying to scare him may just give away your position.
  
  • Giving away the wrong position works, and works best against skillful adversaries. Just don't get seen as you move away, and don't bet too much on the trick working.


• Small-arms fire on the other side of hard cover is about as scary as the pitter-patter of rain on a tin roof.


• The good news about artillery fire is that it only works in massive quantities. The bad news is that that's how people use it.


• Fire the longest bursts you can.

The spooky thing about it: you can find every one of these lessons in H. John Poole's Phantom Soldier -- and in the hands of the armies he discusses there...

I need to avoid _The Escapist_...

Well, I happened to notice this fairly Escapist-standard theory article, and got irritated enough to rip it apart in detail. For the tl;dr version: professional human-factors engineers (the book to read is The Design of Everyday Things) understand that interfaces with a large number of inputs that do exactly one thing are much easier to use than interfaces in which one input does a large number of things. Smaller numbers of more modal inputs do not equal simplicity; remember those hotel telephones with just a keypad and a "Mode" button, where most people (myself included) couldn't even figure out how to put someone on Hold?

A game genre cannot exist without an adequate range of inputs. In the process of boiling Far Cry 2 down to the point of being playable on an Atari 2600 controller (input space: one joystick and one button), he changes its genre from "tactical FPS" to "cartoonish FPS" -- from something like Operation Flashpoint to something like Resistance: Fall of Man. Moreover, he doesn't even notice that he makes this change, which is probably what infuriated the Escapist commentariat and is certainly what infuriated me.

His proposals, to render Far Cry 2 playable on an Atari 2600 controller and thus, ostensibly, more accessible to new gamers, are as follows:

• Have the "Fire" button automatically fire, reload, and unjam a weapon. This makes some superficial sense, but it masks a bad idea -- in a game which doesn't track the capacity of individual magazines, you always want to reload to a full magazine after firing anything at all. On the other hand, it's not realistic to allow this behavior; it would make more sense to have different magazines with their remaining number of rounds tracked. It's embarrassing that Halo is more realistic this way than the Far Cry games... (Weapon jamming is another case where holding down the fire button -- heck, who holds down the fire button anyways, rather than firing in controllable bursts? -- is a bad idea; it's appropriate that the player as well as the character should have a couple of seconds of shocked realization before he sets out to clear the breech. Assuming he wants to do that at all, that is -- if a Far Cry 2 weapon has jammed, you should probably give up on it.)


• Climbing ladders and otherwise changing movement styles would be handled by walking forward against the feature in question. I wouldn't think this would be a good idea outside of the one-button constraint, but within that constraint I think it's defensible. (I'm left wondering whether he played Far Cry 2 at all, though, since he keeps mentioning ventilation shafts here.)


• Cut jumping entirely, apart from a contextual jump like Ocarina of Time. Far Cry 2 abounds in small terrain obstacles and in platforms that are inaccessible to the player except by jumping, but that's not how someone would get onto such a platform in the real world. I would propose adding an "auto-climb" -- which I know I've seen before. Possibly in Ocarina again? Or perhaps the game could just treat rock platforms in the same way it already treats ladders. ("Bunnyhopping" is a semi-viable strategy in Far Cry 2 online multiplayer; its removal would be a good thing... although Rex Applegate, Fairbairn's major protege and author of his own book on combatives, did recommend attacking a sentry by sneaking up to a few yards behind him and then leaping the rest of the distance to avoid triggering his sixth sense. Now that I think of it, adding a sixth sense to FPSes would be a good idea; the player is looking at the world through a game monitor, after all, while his enemies generally have slightly better awareness.)


• A Perfect Dark-style radial menu for relatively rare actions. Remember Perfect Dark and its nearly unusable radial menus? As a hint: if it confused me, it would probably confuse Grandma. (Actually, why would Grandma want to play Far Cry 2 in the first place?)


• Put all movement controls on one joystick, removing strafing and looking up and down. Speaking of Perfect Dark, remember that it and Goldeneye used the C-buttons to handle direction of looking, the central joystick to handle movement, and the right mouse button to switch to aimed-shot mode (about which more later). He claims, in defense of this, that Far Cry 2's " terrain tends to be pretty flat," and the game "isn't especially about verticality." He has apparently never sniped, never been sniped, and never taken on the southern airport with a start-of-game assault rifle from the top of the sniper tower to its east on Hard mode (an easy victory). He also thinks aimed shots are unimportant enough that replacing them with "automatically point at the enemy's torso" is adequate.


• Have the player automatically start running, if he keeps moving forward for three seconds at a time. This worked in Okami, but Amaterasu didn't throw many grenades, and she never had to worry about sniper fire.


• Remove crouching and iron sights. These two elements are, between them, everything that makes Far Cry 2 what it is -- unless you've only played it on Easy, solely using automatic weapons and having the auto-aim reticule (off on all higher difficulty levels) switched on. As to having all cover be man-high, I'm sure there are plenty of bulletproof retaining walls and traffic barriers in the wilderness and villages of Unspecified African Country.

His proposal to split the game's interface into three interaction modes of "in combat," "behind cover," and "not fighting" deserves to be discussed in greater depth.

In the in-combat mode, the following fundamental parts of the Far Cry 2 experience would be inaccessible:

• Changing weapons (for example, when a weapon has jammed or has degraded into unreliability; or when wanting to use the machete or a pistol for close-quarters fighting or for entering a building).


• Healing.


• Changing from grenades to Molotov cocktails, or back.


• Run-and-grenade attacks (sprint forward, look up, hurl grenade as far as it goes).


• Run-and-dive maneuvers (sprint forward, hit crouch to dive forward quickly).

In the behind-cover mode, the following fundamental part of the Far Cry 2 experience would be inaccessible:

• Shooting.

He seems not to understand that firing from behind partial or soft cover is an extremely valuable course of action (although he does propose that turning away from facing the cover would allow the player to go back to combat mode). He even has the audacity to say that "[i]n the real world, slinging your rifle over your shoulder and getting your shotgun out and ready isn't necessarily something you really want to do while running for your life, after all." In the real world, that isn't a realistic course of action, but only because you don't carry a shotgun. Switching to a pistol or a fighting knife may be distinctly useful, though... and besides, in the real world, you fight from behind cover, soft cover if no hard cover is available, and you don't fight standing up and ignoring your iron sights. Realism is dead with this input scheme and the constraints he specified above.

In the out-of-combat mode, once again, you can't shoot. This is completely un-Far Cry 2 -- apparently the player is expected to cozy up to knife-fighting range with his enemies before opening fire, completely ignoring the long ranges of his armaments. This, in a game where the biggest advantage you have is that you almost always have the drop on your enemies...

I'm left seriously wondering whether he has played Far Cry 2 at all. He admits that this game would handle very differently from Far Cry 2 as we know it, but he seems to think that all this streamlining and stylization would not degrade the core gameplay of the game. But it would -- Far Cry 2 is in the tradition of Operation Flashpoint, Ghost Recon, and the original Far Cry, the realistic, high-damage, stealthy, tactical-minded subgenre of FPS, as opposed to the cartoonish style of Halo, Resistance: Fall of Man, Prey, or Serious Sam -- the style where being in easy weapons range of fully alerted enemies is not necessarily instant death.

As to useful reforms of control space: I think that the "SNES controller plus analog sticks," or the "mouse plus left-hand keyboard inputs" model on the PC, is all we need; I had talked about the idea of a "latch controller" with buttons on the underside rather than on the surface, to allow the player to use both control sticks while taking actions more complex than firing, but I don't think these are necessary after all, and the learning curve would be formidable. What I would like to see, though, is a deliberate effort to standardize FPS inputs -- movement and firing are always the same, running is coming to be standardized on the Shift key, but reloading, firing, crouching, lying prone, etc. are much less predictable. At the very least, allow the remapping of keyboard inputs -- which Far Cry 2 doesn't do... (No, correction, it does. I was confusing it with Europa Universalis III, of all games...)

Someone in his defense, in the comments section, thinks that most commenters concerned about this are missing the point -- this kind of control style would develop as an alternative to the mainstream one, and no one's going to break into their houses at night and pry the buttons off the controllers. I agree completely; just as game developers followed through on their promise that with the development of 3D graphics, we would have both 3D and 2D games, they would be sure to follow through on a hypothetical promise that we would have both complex and simplified-inputs first-person shooters! I love having a game-development industry which sticks to proven technologies which make possible distinctive types of gameplay, as opposed to perpetually chasing after the latest fad or shiny thing!

(Speaking of which, Yahtzee -- who, in fairness, is the only author on The Escapist who is really worth one's time to read, or watch -- increasingly suspects that 3D graphics are going to prove to have been a long, expensive mistake. The article is worth reading in its entirity; I remember I pointed out once, though obviously not in print, that 2D games set their own standard of the realistic or the graphically acceptable, while 3D games are always going to be compared with the real world.)

Another commentor observes that this solution removes buttons, but not inputs -- again, meaning (per Design of Everyday Things) that the game is made more complex, not less -- and imagines the following conversation with the kind of new gamer that Tynes imagines this would attract:

Wife: "How do I throw grenades again?"
Me: "Oh, well you have to go find some cover and stand behind it for a second, then you hit the button for the menu and select grenades. Try that."
Wife: "Hey, he's climbing on the cover!"
Me: "I guess that wasn't cover, must have been a climbable thing. Try something else."
Wife: "Ok, this looks like cover. But the button is still firing the gun!"
Me: "Because you faced the cover for more than 1 second, you are now in 'combat while in cover mode'."
Wife: "How do I stop that?"
Me: "I don't know, walk out and back in?"
Wife: "Now I am dead! We took too long. Fuck this game, who designed this shit?"
Me: "Let's play something else."