Far Cry Primal: Goodbye Oros...for now
Warning: Spoilers
Before I tackled the
final missions, I decided to tame the SnowBlood Wolf. It’s nice to
have an effective wolf at my side again. At least his growls mean
something beyond “I think I might be voraciously hungry”.
Unfortunately he’s not quite as strong or as fast as the demented
BloodFang so the sabre tooth got recruited for the fight with top
Udam, Ull. This mission was more involved than I expected but I still
felt well prepared to face down Ull. Tough doesn’t describe this
guy. I could barely put a dent in him and his minions kept appearing.
My second effort succeeded by playing frantic healer to my beast and
BloodFang eventually subdued the big man. My reward for this was a
plot twist and more villagers. I was so exhausted that I quit for the
day.
The following day I
decided to go after Great Scar Bear before rushing off to the Izila
homeland. I had a difficult time finding my way to his region and
managed to die a couple of times in the process. The journey was
still fun in it’s own right thanks to numerous distractions.
I returned to the
village with Scar Bear in tow and noticed a new quest marker. I’m
not sure when he showed up but Urki has taken up residence. True to
form, he believes that he discovered the village and graciously
invited me to join him. He had no new nonsense projects for me
though. Just when I thought I had seen the last of him.
Taking down Batari
the evil sun priestess was quite satisfying but the only rewards were
some cut scenes, end game credits and an invitation to continue
playing. I’m tempted.
I think it’s clear
by now that I really enjoyed this game. This is my first Far Cry game
so I don’t know if some of the things I describe are typical of the
series but there are some features that alleviate the resource and
upgrade grind and the repetitiousness. XP points ramp up instead of
slowing down. All 3D open world games should do this and limit skill
upgrades some other way. Of course, you are not role playing here and
Takkar needs every skill he can get but I developed a distinct play
style and didn’t use a lot of the available skills and weapons. My
play style was pretty wimpy. I relied a lot on my animal friends and
mostly used stealth to avoid danger. I never mastered throwing any
kind of weapon besides the spear. And traps? What are those? I played
on normal difficulty and shudder at the thought of a survival or a
perma death play through. There’s a lot of freedom to use any
style you want.
Even free roam play
is fun thanks to never ending random events and encounters. The beast
you travel with can influence how these encounters play out. The area
around the village became a safe zone because it’s the most
predictable but the farther out you go the crazier things can get. I
was laughing because it took me 86 hours to reach just over 50
percent completion but that’s how distracted I got by the
environment. This is the ideal game for someone who loves 3D worlds
but doesn’t have a lot of time to play. You can invest an hour or
two and leave it for a while without fear of losing track of the plot
or progression.
I’ve been using
the Far Cry wiki as a reference and they uncovered a much deeper
story line than I ever did. I don’t know if it’s because I missed
half the content or wasn’t paying enough attention to major
conversations and missions. All I got was that humanoids were
encroaching on each other and some were more advanced than others.
The Neanderthal faction was kind of ridiculous considering the era
and despite their despicable practices they somehow became
sympathetic near the end unlike those ambitious Izila. Whatever
skepticism I held towards some of the game’s elements, they were
all in service of an entertaining experience so it’s hard to
criticize.
I did wish the
characters were a little deeper. Everyone has a back story that
doesn’t get explored much unless I missed it. NPCs talk at Takkar.
Takkar reacts in a “me Tarzan you Jane” sort of way. He’s a
beast master. Surely he has some kind of deep spiritual connection
with the natural world. Outside of some vague vision quests, he
doesn’t seem to. I bought the game partly because of the
constructed language. It did lend some authenticity but the
vocabulary is quite limited and unfortunately the characters came
off as limited as well.
I enjoyed it enough
that I am tempted to keep playing but I want to move on to other
things. I’m still working on my Farkle clone. I finally have an
acceptable scoring method. I have spent major time modifying and
testing it. The next hurdle is the computer player’s logic. I do
have a rudimentary UI in place but it’s going to take a while to
get it all connected so Primal and any other games are going on the
shelf for a bit. I’m sure I have the discipline. Right?
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