Chores
Eye for Eye
Assassinations
Survival Hunt
Hunt supplies
Fashion week
Hostage rescue
Armed escorts
Supply drop
Bomb defusing
Propaganda center
Pagan's Wrath
Royal Cargo
1000 posters
And of course Random encounters
All of these provide you with some cash, and some karma, but other than that it's all just busy work that doesn't effect the game.
The solution? These kinds of missions and side quests have a more in-depth story and also effect your gameplay.
Choices
- Eye for an Eye & Assassinations, much like killing Noore or Paul, weaken the outposts and reinforcements. You have an OPPORTUNITY to kill the officer. You do not fail if they escape. Choices.... and consequences. You will have to deal with them later.
- Hostage Rescue, and propaganda. Broadcasts, posters, and rescuing hostages ACTUALLY recruit people to your cause.
- Supplies. Supply drops, cargo, and protecting them from being blown up. Doesn't matter if they are. But it SHOULD. Supplies are used for trading and upgrading your equipment, and your groups equipment.
Now, how to tie all of this together, so that every thing you do matters, and your choices have more consequences than being yelled at.
First off you need a reason to do all of these things other than to get 100% game completion because honestly, I don't think most care about busy work for the sake of an achievement. Why should I rescue hostages and destroy propaganda?? Because you only have 30 fighters that can and will die. You need a stream of recruits and replacements. As you capture more outposts, and reach more people, you can support more troops.
Why sit in the back of a truck for 5 minutes defendng it? Or track down yellow bags of goods? Or chase down a cargo truck and bring it back to an outpost? Or defend them from being blown up when all you have to do is just walk away from them and there will literarly be no consequences?? But as your supplies are depleted as you upgrade, you will need a source of new supplies. Enter these events.
Drugs. Should I burn this poppy field along with the stacks of heroine? Or capture them. DOESN'T MATTER! If you burn the fields, they are still there the next time you go back, if you burn the drugs they too will be there when you go back. Turning these into interactable objects that can be "Claimed" or "burned" would provide you with reputation, which effects recruitment. Get extra cash and lose reputation?? Your choice!
I neat feature was seeing 3 different locations when you capture a tower. These were just locations with a chest or maybe a karma event. Instead the 3 events should be the following: Hostage Rescue, Assassination, or Supplies.
Depending on your needs you can choose between troops, supplies, or weaken an outpost. Another choice added for the player, with consequences of missing out on the other 2.
Now instead of random busy work and filler activities, that most would just ignore, they are a source of goods that can be used in the game in a number of ways. Choices! Not Chores!
I agree, it would be nice if those side activities had more depth & meaning to them. I never did more than was required to unlock skills on subsequent playthroughs because they were pointless for the most part and offered very little in terms of meaningful reward. I'd be more willing to do them if they had more narrative justification and tangible benefits for sure, but 100xp and 200 rupees was hardly incentive when all you gotta do is tear down or burn a couple posters to earn just as much...
Yeah honestly I could care less about getting high with Yogi and Reggie! IMO a huge waste of 10 minute cutscenes. Loginus had a more personal story but felt like there wasn't enough to it. The first one when you track down the helicopter was great, but after that you just follow the same truck to the same cave and drop off at same location. But there was more of a story than "smoke??".
Don't get me wrong I think some of the simple one off quests that just have you go here, shoot this repeat have their place and they can be fun to do when you want something to do thats not narrative heavy, but I think they should put a bit more effort into some really meaty side-quests to flesh out some characters more and their motivations. Longinus could've had a cooler side story that they could've delved deeper into. Honestly the side-quests are just so disjointed from everything else it makes no sense most of the time and they never really tell you why you're doing them in any meaningful way, thats something that could be fixed, and there should be tangible benefits for doing them.
Right and if they aren't narrative heavy, than make them valuable in their own sense with supplies, etc.
Honestly I felt like some of the convoy sidequests had more story than Loginus "i had to wait 5 days before i could return to bury my father mother and sister in secret" like dang! It's a good way to get multiple persepectives on different parts of the war, without being too indepth. But definitely need more incentive to do them in the first place.
If i'm transporting rifle parts, than I would expect supplies or ammo to send troops on missions. If i'm transporting artifacts to a seller, than expect money or reputation ya know?? If i'm transporting spy equipment, I want some intelligence. Something more than $11,000 that i'll spend on ammo i just wasted xD
Originally Posted by FossilCookie43 Go to original post
Totally, because the economy of the game is bonkers anyway, I'd rather get gameplay or narrative incentive than economic incentive for sure, and you've made some great examples that are contextually relevant to the task you're doing. Things like that are way more interesting than in-game currency for sure.
If there is one thing I don't like in FC it's the sheer amount of ***-bleedingly boring busy work sidequests,that make no to little sense,and have no ral impact on the story or world.Originally Posted by HorTyS Go to original post
Another thing is the "random events" they stop being fun when they happen every f**king 5 minutes.
I can't count the number of times when I was scouting an outpost and 2+ karma events and a couple of animal attacks happened.In the end I simply ignored them and took to zipping around in the gyrocopter to avoid all of the "fun content" the game had to offer.IMO quiet time is an important part of most games,sadly it is something that Ubisoft don't think should be in their games,I'm a grown man they don't have to dangle a shiny in front of me.Give me a decent plot and a believable world and I promise I will not trade in the game within 5 days.
IMO random events should feel kind of special and I hope for the people who get Primal is not bogged down by this mechanic.
While i agree they sort of went overboard on the random events, they're not something that are meant to be mandatory at all. I ignored half of them from the outset because I could tell they were going to be something that happened constantly. I engaged in the first few and thought to myself, "these are happening all the time and don't really mean anything" so I just stopped doing all of them. The karma system was next to meaningless, only reason i did any karma related stuff was to unlock the skills.
I do think Ubi should look at how the witcher 3 handled sidequests. those were as well thought out narrative-wise as the main campaign's story, with complex characters and meaningful motivations for what you were doing. I really think I'd enjoy the side quests more if i felt like there was legitimate reasons for doing it. I'd be more inclined to do it for narrative reward than for 2,000 rupees....
Originally Posted by HorTyS Go to original postCould not agree more.
If you have truely cool side content the main story is not that important (and TW3 has set the bar for open world games soooo high),then it is only really there to very lightly guide the player through the game.
I ended up ignoring sooo much of the game,I got to se most of Kyrat from the air because I could not be bothered to deal with the meaningless events and collectables.
It might sound like I did not like the game,but that's not the case,I really had fun.But a good chunk of the game was meaningless filler.It's just that I know that Far Cry has the potential to be more than good,it could be truely great
agreed. I think FC4 was too big for it's own good. I'd have rather had just the southern region of the map but much more fleshed out and detailed with more to do. When the maps get so big they lose the care they need to be truly interesting worlds. Witcher 3's map was huge, but it was still super detailed and had a real sense of place. The Witcher's forests actually felt like forests. You could just wander through the woods with the wind blowing through the leaves and just get lost there. Everything felt like there was a story to it and it all felt very believable as a place those people & creatures inhabited, whereas FC4, it looks like they just use the game's editor and brush in a bunch of trees & grass over a region, throw in a rock and shrub and call it good...