Is Far Cry 3 A Sign Of Change In Gaming?

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

Is Far Cry 3 A Sign Of Change In Gaming?

So I finally managed to settle in with a copy of Far Cry 3 over the weekend, and not surprisingly, that gave me a lot to think about. In fact, I began to wonder if one main point of the gaming world was about to fall over for good with Far Cry 3's release.

So what was that point I wondered about? Well, it occurred to me that, for some time now, games from Bethesda Software have been a very big deal. The Fallout series, the Elder Scrolls series...these have been big games pretty much every time there was a release. But what was unusual about these big releases is that there wasn't a rush to emulate them.

This was odd, as far as I was concerned. Fallout: New Vegas had huge sales. Skyrim was patently massive and hotly anticipated. So where was the flood of knockoffs who wanted a piece of that particular pie? Where were the imitators?

Naturally, I'd thought that maybe one of them would have finally made its appearance in the form of Far Cry 3. Sure, why not, I figured--after all, the marketing was calling it "Skyrim with guns"--it was high time that someone tried to pull a bit of thunder away from two extremely big franchises. As it turned out--as shouldn't be a surprise for long term gamers--the marketing overstated things a bit. This really wasn't a Skyrim with guns, so much as it was more like a particularly deep Saints Row 2 with first-person shooter capability.

It's certainly not a bad game, but Skyrim with guns it isn't. However, it's the closest thing I've seen yet, and it was a very good time. This is what we need more of: big worlds with lots of locations to explore, lots of smaller storylines comprising a larger storyline and also augmenting it, and plenty of variety. Granted, the endings aren't the happiest, but even those aren't without charm and variety. I haven't had quite so much fun as I have had in a long time behind the controls of that hang glider, and the boats were almost as much fun.

Hopefully, this isn't the last we'll see of first person shooters set in big worlds with plenty to do. In the short term, hopefully Far Cry 3 will bring out some interesting DLC that will step up the experience even more. But either way, this was some good stuff, and I certainly look forward to more of it.
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