Now that the game's been out for a while and we've all had time to play around with its features, I feel like offering some feedback on the FC5 multiplayer experience, and the myriad of poor design decisions that hamstrung it right out of the gate. This game could have been a classic, but it feels like Ubi really dropped the ball and is quickly killing any hope of this game's longevity.
- Complete lack of co-op matchmaking for single player and Arcade: Who approved this? Co-op in singleplayer is easily the most hilarious and fun experience you can have while playing FC5, but the developers seem to have gone out of their way to make finding a partner as convoluted and difficult as possible, good luck finding someone to play with outside of looking for randoms on message boards. Why make this design decision? This is easily the worst thing about the game, in my opinion.
- Tying player perks and progression to Arcade: This has been rectified with new game+ somewhat (although beginning a NG+ still resets your Arcade level), but before it was available, players would lose all of their perks in arcade if they wanted to start a new single player campaign: which the game pretty much forced you to by virtually depopulating Hope County after the game has been cleared. This was a huge disincentive to keep playing anything but Arcade, or keep playing the game at all. This brings me to my next points:
- No lobby browser on launch: "Let's take a standard feature of FC multiplayer since the series' beginning and just throw it in the garbage in favour of random matchmaking only! What could go wrong?" What were they thinking!?
- Lack of competitive multiplayer modes Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch only? What happened to the game modes that have been in FC for years? Where's CTF? Uprising? The game modes available are so bland and uninspired, which is heartbreaking considering the flexibility given to content creators with the excellent mapmaking tools, it severely limits your creativity. Hell, the devs could easily have thrown a battle royale mode in, but chose to do the absolute bare minimum.
- Voice chat is still broken: Come on, fix this already! I can barely understand my co-op partner most of the time and have to use a third party service instead.
I hope someone takes these points into consideration.
You forgot to mention the complete lack of typing chat (beyond the Uplay overlay BS).
Most people I've played with don't mic. And Uplay type-chat is a pain in the a**.
Ubisoft clearly don't want us to enjoy their game with random people. This is the lesson I've learned from FC5.
Personally, I never really liked the multi-player arcade aspect of FC5. Co-op in main campaign is fun but the arcade is meh. But to my mind, there is MUCH in this game that seems to be designed to fail. Everything from the story that preaches that the best thing is to NOT play the game, to crappy AI, lack of story choices, lack of polish in multiplayer aspects, lack of weapons at launch, and the all important added "masks" that make SO MUCH SENSE, if you are playing a halfway realistic shooter.....seems they wanted to compete with Fortenite without the battle royale.
Far Cry today is not about realism! Far Cry today is about FUN! RDR2 will be about realism (judging by the last information, after the 20th of September). It reminds me two Rockstar games - GTA5 - game was about "fun" and RDR2 game will be about realism. GTA 5 brought so much money because it was about fun! RDR2 will never bring so much money becuase it will be about realism! Games about realism bring less income. So.....to bring more income Far Cry should be more and more about FUN! But as Far Cry, without immitating GTA5. Why GTA 5 is so popular? Not only because of freedom but more because of permissiveness! Do whatever you like, behave outrageously! So Far Cry game should be. Behave outrageously in Far Cry world! Have fun!
Yeah, it seems like the game was designed from the get-go to funnel players into Arcade in order to prolong the life of the community, but they dropped the ball when it came to retaining players. Just two competitive game modes is far from being enough needed to compete in the AAA shooter game market.
It's a shame because I really like Arcade and especially the co-op features, but they've gone out of their way to make it almost impossible to find new people to play with. The map editor is one of the best I've used in any game (barring a few remaining terrain bugs and the lack of ability to customize enemy loadouts), but relying on players themselves to generate the content to keep them engaged is a tough sell when Ubi limits the type of gameplay scenarios available, and the ability for players to find one another.
This is pretty clear just from looking at the club stats page. Around half of the recorded stats (or so) pertain to arcade. Which sucks for all the FC5 players who don't play arcade much and thus get ranked down because of it.Originally Posted by Loaf_Of_Dread Go to original post
Also nobody has mentioned the obvious thing about "arcade"... In that it's largely about fan-made maps and online multiplayer.
I've been playing arcade games since the mid-eighties, and that doesn't sound like any freaking ARCADE game I've ever heard of...
Remember the time you were in a public place, and there was a guy playing an arcade machine where he was creating levels and then playing them in online multiplayer?
No... me either.