FC2 in comparison to FC5 is a much less fun game that is an agony to play at it's absolute worst.
While i appreciate some of the stuff that FC2 did and the risks it took in terms of design, it still doesn't change that the core gameplay experience is far superior in FC5.
More attention to detail does not equal more fun or an inherently better product all around.
Though Far Cry story always sucks for the most part, so that's about the only equal point between the two.
I think it's also attention to detail where it matters. Yes the fire spreading system was more detailed in FC2 but you had more weapons that utilized it. In FC5 you don't, and the terrain and climate don't use it as much (lot's of dirt and rocks) but in FC5 there's a lot more detail in the ballistics and weapon animations which makes for more satisfying combat in general and also matters more at the kind of ranges you tend to be fighting at.
I would counter the 'more fun' combat in FC5 considering the guns in several ways, act identically to eachother.
but you have a ton of tools at your disposal to mix it up, like the multi take down and sidearm take down, tons of grenade types, an massively overhauled buddy system, planes/helicopters, wingsuit/parachute, sabotaging vehicles, the list goes on and on.
Okay, ya'know what.
And all the guns feel the god damn same unless some severe difference is accounted for. The Rifles are literally just AK, Lever, AR and M14. 3/4ths of which are full on re-skins with no additional value on top of them. The SMGs are almost entirely made up of the MP5 and for some reason there's an MP40. The most varied group in the entire thing is fucking pistols which have one handed SMGs included, for some reason. And that's not included the fucking .44 Reskins inside that group as well.
The grenade types? Dynamite == Normal Grenade. Molotov is a fucking molotov.
And the buddies? Holy fuck, 3/4ths of them are useless or functionally just don't work and one of which can't even get you off the ground nor can you back him up if he gets attacked. And don't get me started about sneaking in FarCry, it has progressively since 3, gotten simpler and dumber alongside the fact that perks inherently just make the game easy.
They don't add anything, hell the buddy 'perks' are just faster respawns after going down.
FarCry 5 is shallow, incredibly more so than its predecessors.
I def understand the gun variety complaints, I feel the same way. I still think the enhanced ballistic models and sound assets/animations make the guns that are there feel great since that's what you are using most of the time, but yeah there need to be way more of them.
I wouldn't even say there's a 'enhanced' ballistic models. Especially when most of the guns have scopes so low that you may as well get in people's faces.
Fuck ubisoft.
I noticed that, I like to snipe in these games and even the longest range scopes weren't exactly "sit on a far-away mountainside and pick off the outpost one-by-one" material. It's odd. The recoil and bullet drop on even the handguns and SMGs feels really solid and modeled well for the longer ranges you are getting into combat in on the new map, but just plopping the same scopes on everything seems like an oversight to me, they don't seem to fit as well with everything.
Even the irons on pistols can get you surprisingly solid feeling longer range hits than some of those optics.
Its actually incredibly frustrating when you want like a midrange lever action sniper; and like fucking you can't even use it because its max zoom is 0.5 from 0.0.
I think that in the whole process of creating a video game nowadays that they get so hung up on creating a backdrop that they forget about little details. Little details make games satisfying and interesting.
Is there any reason we can't have weapon degradation, dynamic environments and ridiculous healing animations? Ok FC2 wasn't good, but these concepts could be refined to work without throwing them out entirely!
Zelda BotW and Dying Light have weapon degradation and are well executed to not feel tedious. I didn't like it in FC2, but it could solve the problem of unlocking a powerful weapon and basicly never using anything else, which is exactly what the series has been since FC3.
As for healing animations, ever since FC2 it's my dream that they will iterate on it with more convincing animations. It's a shame it got toned way down since 3.
I'm just kinda tired of seeing "FC2 bad, new FC good" (we get it) when they basicly don't even try anymore to do anything remotely interesting with what they had before.
The thing about both of those games is that they implement them into a world that is very refined and interesting to begin with. Dying Light is a great game, and not because of those gimmicks, its something that's built in addition to the gameplay, not purely around it. Yes, those things add to the experience, no, those things are not the experience itself.
FC2 feels like it's all built around all these interesting ideas but none of them really seem to add up to anything. It's exactly the reverse of what makes BotW and DL good games, in regards to the same features.
You can refine those ideas to death, but not before you have an actual game.
How can a game, which experimented with mechanics and took risks be souless?
Experimenting and taking risks is cool, but it doesn't mean you're going to have anything revolutionary or new. You could probably find billions of cool ideas that have been cut from both amazing and shitty games.
I'm not saying you should play it safe either, because that's the ticket to making a truly soulless game. But you can't experiment too much, or else you'll end up missing a lot of details on other parts of the project and potentially spoil it. FC2 ended up doing exactly that.
When the game is nothing but blind experimenting you end up with something that doesn't really paint a picture.
Honestly, the more homogenized franchises become, the more likely they "trim the fat" and save budget by leaving details like these out. From a cynical perspective, it's ultimately more business efficient to cut corners and just go full arcade style like they have with FC5.
But I will argue against FC2's weapon degradation in that the jam animations were drawn out and practically exist to get you utterly fucked in the middle of a gunfight. Funny enough since there's only a handful of weapons altogether, FC5 would've actually made sense given that slaughtering your way through cultists already gives you plenty of extra weapons to nab. But then it'd make less sense than FC2 as well since you're in far less harsh conditions for gun upkeep than the arid and shitty African plains. Plus I think that aside from RPG-like games that accentuate those kinds of things, weapon degradation as a game mechanic trend is slowly on its way out now, and it was absolutely loathed by a great many people with Breath of the Wild.
Weapon degradation has been and always will be an insanely stupid feature unless you ABSOLUTELY get the balance perfect.
In DS1 and 3 it basically doesn't exist unless you totally cheese it. In DS2 it's a frustrating nightmare to deal with that constantly fucks you over for no reason and basically exists to annoy you.
I haven't played DL in a while, but as far as I recall I felt it had a pretty good balance between needing to care for weapons and not having to worry every second.
When you strike the right balance with weapon repairing, it's actually an amazing feature to have. It can totally add to a game to have a moment of feeling totally helpless while you scramble to swap to an alt gun or fix the current one.
You guys are focusing way too hard on weapon degradation just because I think it could be done better to serve the intent and leave out the frustration.
In Dying Light weapons get progressively more durable as a whole and can be repaired several times, with the later ones having more times they can be repaired. And they hold up for a tremendous duration even within a single repair. Further in the late game you can also find survivors who can repair a weapon and entirely restore all the times it can be repaired, meaning a weapon is literally as good as new. Further this only applies to the melee weapons, with none of the ranged weapons using the durability system.
Breath of the wild had multiple weapons and types and used a tiered system for weapons and had unique traits that otherwise identical weapons could have. As well it also pours weapons on to you, to the point that you will typically be severely lacking space for all of the different weapons it tries to give you.
Furthermore, both of these have their durability systems ultimately make sense. A stick in Breath of the Wild doesn't last more than a few swings, but a long sword will go quite a distance before breaking. The numerous weapons, types, and qualities all work, and when repaired you actually can see the effect of the repair as it will be taped up or nailed back together and braced with metal reinforcement to keep it sturdy going forward. But guns in Far Cry 2 corrode at absurdly fast rates and can be rendered completely useless from brand new within the course of a single engagement. It stops being an interesting mechanic when it proves to instead simply frustrate players repeatedly.
I never ever found my weapon degrading in FC2 a problem at all. Any time I passed a weapons store, I'd just stock up on fresh guns and ammo since I'm there anyway. The only time the mechanic ever came into play for me was when shit was hitting the fan and I had to salvage weapons off the ground, and in those cases, I feel like it added a lot to the experience of already being fucked.
Just because it adds to an experience doesn't make it good. Getting pelted with someone else's vomit while riding a tilt-a-whirl technically adds to the experience, but it sucks and is disgusting as an experience.
I'm more arguing over your post really, and not directly at it
I'd love to see more games experiment with cool ideas, it's just that it's really important that they don't make those ideas the game itself and end up worse off because of it.
Dark Souls and shovel knight for example, they aren't good games because they have really long winded save points and force you to go to your death spot just to level up, those things just serve to enhance the experience as a whole. It's the game itself that makes these things work as effectively as they do. Probably a bad example though, because I don't expect many games can fuck that idea up.
What I find interesting about FC2 vs the later iterations, was that when I first played FC2, I had all the same complaints about the weapon degredation, the respawning enemies, the tedium, etc. I even wrote an entire critique on its design as my college entry essay.
When I first started to play FC3, I thought "Wow! They fixed all the things I hated in FC2!" but after I beat it, I found the game to be completely unmemorable. Pretty much the same went for FC4.
I replayed FC2 recently, and realized that a lot of things that I initially disliked about the game were also the things that gave it character. Its unforgivingness was a breath of fresh air compared to how trite and formulaic the later games became. I respect FC2 more than the later games because it strove to deliver a genuinely immersive experience. Without detection indicators or enemy markers, I actually have to be aware of where enemies are if I want to try and sneak around them. I need to keep stock of my health syringes because getting stuck in a healing animation during a firefight is a death sentence. When my buddy, who's helped me out time and time again, gets killed because I screwed up, I feel awful.
The newer Far Cry games certainly have more thought provoking stories, but they seem to have forgotten the storytelling potential of the gameplay itself. FC2's gameplay made me feel emotions other than mindless entertainment, which seems to be all that the later entries are interested in providing.
Barely anything other than survival games does degradation because its fucking boring and just becomes a chore more than a feature
And while healing animations were neat they got repetitive incredibly quickly and were barely relevant to the injury you took most of the time, they would have to make like 20 different specific healing animations just so you haven't already seen them all multiple times within the first hour
Not without reason, just look at Battlefield. If you compare the environment destruction in Bad Company 2 to Battlefield 3 or 4 BC2 has significantly more environment destruction, but this comes at the downside of the map deteriorating into a flat plain as the match goes on. Being able to destroy environments is cool, but playing on said environments after they've been destroyed is a chore.
Yeah I get it. But at the same time you have things like dynamic weather and day/night cycle or destruction which don't exactly require experimentation. Heck, I think those things were present in FC3 too. The series has been stagnating hard.
I disagree with that last point. Far Cry 2 has a more mature and restrained story than it's sequels and the gameplay actually supports the narrative, hell the weapon upgrade system is you trading blood diamonds for weapons to further the conflict. Far Cry 3, 4 and 5 are very cartoony and over the top and Far Cry 3 in particular feels like it's trying too hard to be mature and thought provoking without really saying anything of substance.
you say all this, but FC2 was a snorefest of every single mission being "drive to here, kill baddies, go back to base" with the waypoint being miles away from each other and nothing to do but drive in between them. FC5 on the other hand gives you tons of opportunities to do other things while going to said missions, and the missions don't take 10 minutes of mindless driving to get to. Guns are cool yeah, but if the base game is so assblastingly boring it doesn't matter. Even so, the guns in FC2 were pretty much tiered just like all the other games, just FC5 has less tiers which isn't a big deal. Buddies are hardly useless and can save your ass plenty of times, plus they are really diverse in the specialist. like having a spotter, a plane with bombs and a minigun, helicopter support, sniper who can spook enemies, all kinds of stuff at your disposal to choose how you want to play. Also like how you said sneaking is getting easier and easier, but then also say its easier to go in guns a blazing. FC2 was a neat game with cool advanced mechanics, but the core gameplay was absolute ass.
To a certain degree yes environmental interaction and destruction can be good. It's just worth keeping in mind that there's a difference between what's impressive to look at and what's fun to play. Similarly the fire system in Far Cry 2 is rather over aggressive, fires can be started accidentally and can completely lock you out of a certain area while you wait for them to clear, while it's cool looking, it's not fun to just sit there or try to run from it. Similarly we could also look at one of Battlefield 4's most visually impressive maps: Paracel Storm, which is also the worst map in the game in terms of gameplay and level design.
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