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."
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