Far Cry 4: Where the hell are you supposed to go?

After playing Far Cry 5, which I absolutely loved and is one of my favorite games of the past few years and possibly in my list of favorite open-world RPG's of all time I moved on to Far Cry 4 because it was also for free on the PS-Plus subscription.

This is still a pretty great game but nowhere near as good as FC5. There are a lot of reasons for this and I am still enjoying the game but have some beefs with it that make it not the best. I think I am playing it just because I don't have a better alternative at the moment and am still waiting for a better alternative to pop up.

One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that it isn't very clear where the hell you are meant to be going or even what your mission is. It is obvious that there is some sort of overlord that will eventually need to be defeated but unlike it other games, including the other Far Cry games that I have seen, it isn't very evident where it is that you are supposed to be going next.

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We are gunning for this guy, this much is known. But as opposed to FC5, it isn't very evident what his involvement is in the entire thing other than the fact that he talks to you on the radio every now and then. We also don't really know where he is or how it is that we are supposed to get there.

The map is relatively huge in this game and there is a ton of things to go and do which, as I had feared, all kind of have similar ways in which they operate.

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When looking at the map there are honestly too many things that you could use as waypoints and at many points in the game it is just so confusing as to where it is that your primary objectives actually are. I have been told it is represented by the letters on the map, but they don't always appear until you trigger something else to make them appear there. For the most part, I just end up heading towards some city-looking something or other on the map and then see what happens when I get there. Most of the things that i do end up doing don't actually advance the story but rather just opens up more of the map and more animal hunting areas so that I can get the necessary skins in order to upgrade my gear - which in itself is a bit silly because why would collecting the skins of 5 fish allow me to carry more heavy ammunition?

Loot boxes are plentiful but for the most part they contain garbage like comic books, a VHS cassette, or a bottle of cologne or something like that which is meant only to be sold for Rupees so that you can purchase more weapons, most of which are pretty damn useless.

In other games they will have your primary objectives listed and then the other ones are very clearly marked as being optional. Not in this game though. Your primary objectives and why you even need to do them are not coherently spelled out for you and I think this leads to a very real drop in immersion - which I do not like.

I see no real reason to ever really go after the loot boxes because they mostly contain crap, and money is not very important in the game unless you are trying to unlock the signature weapons which unfortunately are not really even that much better than the standard ones that cost 1/10 the price.

I enjoy a big map I guess, but not when it just starts to seem like aimless wandering with something interesting occasionally happening.

I suppose if there is an upside to this aimless wandering I would have to say that it results in a very real lack of cutscenes, which I hate anyway. In the meantime though, I don't feel terribly compelled to continue playing since it is mostly me wandering aimlessly in the hopes of encountering something that actually matters in the course of the overall progress of the game.

Another thing that I am going to complain about later is the autodrive feature on cars, which absolutely sucks. I don't know how many times I have gone wildly off course from the shortest way of getting to an objective or just had a head on collision with an oncoming vehicle. It seems to me like this is something that they could have coded a lot better.

Overall I still think this game is worth playing and there is always the very real opportunity that I am just doing something terribly wrong and am just an idiot. If you have any information that could possibly help me to do this better, I would appreciate it.