I love this writeup please do share more! The weed burning mission in Far Cry 3 was one of my favorite gaming moments ever!! That mission and the one in Far Cry 4 called Advanced Chemistry bring up a smile on my face I didn't wear a lot this year.
Though they don't share the same mechanics I love them. Thanks for bringing this up, it made my night. So looking forward to the new Far cry :)
I don't know if my memory is correct, but I recall as soon as I lit the weed field on fire the game played "Make It Bun Dem" (by Skrillex and Damian Marley). Maybe my memory is bad, or maybe it just played randomly at the right time for me but regardless that level was an epic experience.
This was definitely one of the most iconic moments in any video game I've played, I don't think anyone who's been through the game will forget that song/mission combo.
I just watched it on YouTube and, at the risk of sounding like a fuddy duddy, I don't get it. Looks like you just point a flamethrower at the weed or blow something up near it, and watch it burn. I mean it looks cool but what makes it stand out as an all-time great gaming moment?
What makes it stand out is that in game this is the mission where the transformation of the protagonist from the normal person to killing machine begins. If you ever play the game, the contrast in dialogues from the opening scene and this scene can be actually felt by the player. The player themselves feel empowered after finishing this mission. Also the soundtrack in this particular mission hightens that feeling.
TL;DR: Play the game and you will definitely like it.
The fire in Far Cry 2 is easily some of the most immersive and fun in any game even to date. It was a shame they toned down the systemic nature of the games after Far Cry 2. They are still very fun and exciting games, just fewer auxiliary systems to play with like this.
Star Citizen are doing some cool things with fire propagation too, with precomputed windflow variables to make the simulations consistent but still systemic and dynamic in a multiplayer environment.
I feel like everything after FC2 has felt progressively less organic and more scripted. I'm playing through New Dawn right now and it doesn't feel like an open world anymore, it feels like a bunch of mini games stitched together and your control system is on training wheels.
The outpost capture system introduced in FC3 just feels formulaic and bland by FC:ND, you can choose to replay it at a harder difficulty and it just moves around alarms or adds higher level enemies. The enemies all use the same AI and just have more hit points and better aim. The Elite enemies are just tanks that can't be tracked.
The controls are borked, there's now a delay and short window to engage the wingsuit where as in FC4 you just belly flop yourself on the ground whenever. This prevents you from using the wingsuit in a lot of scenarios that it was previously accessible and results in a lot of death falls until you just give up on using the wingsuit entirely.
Enemy repawn and reclaiming is ridiculous and kills immersion. You can attack a machine gun nest kiling a squad then move less than 100 yards away and it will be repopulated when you turn your back with new elements.
Each new version feels less open world and more like a level of Super Mario Bros.
I enjoyed the open air sections of Far Cry 2, but definitely found the later games to be repetitive and formulaic to the extent that I never finished 3 or 4, and just never bothered buying 5. It being made by Ubisoft made that decision a bit easier though.
I am obsessed with games or toys that replicate chaos or spreading disasters, like fire spreading in Far Cry 2 or water flooding in Cities: Skylines or collapsing buildings in the newer Battlefield games. I wish there were more games with unscripted chaos.
I recommend you get Noita on Steam. It's a falling sand style game where you are a little wizard whose wands are built from a little Programmingesque component system.
Teardown is probably the state of the art in unscripted destruction. Frankly, there hasn't been a lot of innovation in deep environmental interaction in AAA games for some time. Far Cry 2 still remains a highlight 12 years later.
Teardown is amazing, I for sure thought it would be another tech demo that never released but they made a fully playable game with gameplay loops and story out of it.
Here's a wildfire simulator, that uses standard models for how fires spread through a landscape, using cellular automata: http://wildfire.concord.org/
(It's designed to be embedded in a curriculum, so it doesn't have a lot of explanatory text, but it's pretty straightforward. Click the Spark button and add a spark to the landscape, and hit Play to start. For more fun, press the Terrain button and add a strong wind.)
Thanks for bringing back fond memories of playing Far Cry 2 LAN multiplayer in run-down internet cafes back in middle/high school. :)
In case you haven't played Far Cry 2 before, here's [1] a great video that showcases the aesthetic choices and art direction behind the game, and how they all fit together. Also [2] showcases the amount of detail that went into making FC2, that isn't always found in more modern games.
To make it more realistic, the fumes of the burning weed could influence the character's behaviour. Anyone remember the BBC reporter standing next to a pile of burning narcotics?
I had forgotten just how much I enjoyed FC2. Just goes to show you properly done mechanics can stand the test of time better than any amount of awesome graphics.
Not sure if the author of the article is reading this, but apparent emergent behaviour and complex mechanics are my favorite things in the gaming universe. You may stand on the shoulders of giants, but without the way the fire was coded, most of the enjoyment of the game wouldnt exist there for me.
