My initial enthusiasm about this game appearing on my PS-Plus Extra membership has quickly faded and today I am going to delete it from the hard drive, most likely never to return to it. At least in my mind this game had seriously big shoes to fill because Far Cry 5 was one of my favorite games I have ever played on any console. While there are a lot of people out there that would disagree, I really enjoyed the fact that the Far Cry saga went a little "off road" and decided to make the baddies a group that was just trying to take over a small area of USA rather than a fictional island somewhere, which seems to be their forte.
In the end I guess Far Cry 6 was always destined to be a disappointment to me since I loved the prior game so much, but here are the reasons why I decided that the game is not for me and I am going to move on.
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Number 1: It's basically just the same thing over and over
I don't want to blame this too much on the devs because they have managed to sell a ton of FC games based largely upon the fact that the DID NOT change the way the game works. No matter how you try to adjust a game to make it new and fresh, there are going to be people that complain about it. For example, a lot of people rate Zelda: The Wind Waker as a great game but for me, who was really looking forward to basically an extension of Ocarina of Time but perhaps a bit darker, was treated to a rather whimsical tale with debuffed graphics despite the fact that it was on a superior machine. A lot of other people hated this change as well and it remains one of the only Zelda games pre 2010 that I didn't complete and enjoy all of.
Far Cry 6 is essentially the same game as Far Cry 5 but in the tropics. There are only so many times that I can face the same scenarios over and over again before I get seriously bored. Maybe it isn't even Ubisoft's fault here but it is rather a case of me and many other users getting burned out on playing the same effing game but with different scenery.
Reason number 2: Game glitches and framerate issues
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Even though generally speaking I am not a fan of cutscenes I was looking forward to the ones in FC6 because of the presence of a famous and rather fantastic actor, Giancarlo Esposito. Like most people I wasn't very familiar with him prior to seeing "Breaking Bad" and was really looking forward to what he could do in voice work for a famous videogame franchise.
He does a good job delivering his lines and is perfect for the role. However, it's almost as though they didn't care very much when making the cutscenes because more often than not there is a lag and the dialogue doesn't actually match up with his mouth. I am playing on a PS4 but my friend who has a PS5 says that the performance is the same. It's almost as though Ubisoft was aware of the problem but it was going to be too complicated, expensive, and time consuming to fix it so they just said "fuck it" and shipped it out anyway. They have not corrected any of this nor is there any indication that they intend to.
I have skipped a lot of the cutscenes because this bothers me a lot.
Reason number 3: "Amigos going rogue"
Amigos are your companions in the game and they are meant to help out during battles. They are cute and fun but a lot of the time they actually critically screw up a situation unless you give them specific commands to stay behind.
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Guapo is the first "amigo" that you get and it doesn't take very long before you will find out that he is going to screw up a lot of things if you take him with you at all. In an encounter just one scene after I got Guapo, I was meant to approach a guard and bribe him into giving me some information and Guapo, without my command, immediately attacked this guard. This screwed up the scenario and now I had to help kill the guard and all the other backup guards that somehow immediately became aware of the escalating situation.
This will continue to happen in ALL of these encounters if you do not tell the pet to stay behind. It would have been nice if they had let you know this about the pets. Because of this auto-attack attribute, you have to constantly be monitoring your amigos positions, particularly in stealth missions.
Also, sometimes an NPC will engage you in conversation and your amigo will just be raising hell in the background destroying buildings and knocking things over especially if you ever move the camera. This isn't a big deal most of the time but in one of these situations he destroyed a gasoline drum right next to where we were talking and set us both on fire. It was cute, but also annoying because I had to go back a ways in my progress.
and this brings me to my next point
Number 4: There is ONLY auto-save
As far as I know this has not been a part of Far Cry games up to this point. Look, I like that auto-save exists because like many players I sometimes can't be asked to save on my own at all times but to completely eliminate any other option other than auto-save is just annoying. Think back to my situation where Guapo set me and the NPC (as well as himself) on fire by screwing around with a gas tank while I was stuck in dialogue - I had to go back to well before that encounter after I burned alive and redo a bunch of rather tedious shit in order to just have a chance at talking to this mandatory NPC again.
If I had the option, I would always save periodically especially if I just went through a rather difficult section of the game. In Far Cry 6, if the auto-save gods have not determined you deserve a restart point, you don't get one and that's that.
There are other things I could point out like bad physics such as a horse and a car colliding results in the car flying 100 feet into the distance. I could also talk about driving is only possible in first-person. This isn't that big of a deal on a horse but in a lot of the cars and other vehicles you can barely see outside of the vehicle. I could also talk about how the auto-drive (which I find essential in games with unnecessarily long drives) will often result in you auto-driving your ass off of a cliff because the AI tried to take a 90 degree turn at 60mph in a delivery truck.
There are a lot of things wrong with this game and I can be quite forgiving when it comes to these things. However, when you find yourself being more frustrated with the mechanics of a game than you are enjoying them the story better be pretty damn awesome. Unfortunately for Far Cry 6, the story just isn't really good either.
So we'll see you not later, 6. I have no intention of returning or having any enthusiasm for any follow up Far Cry games.