4. Compelling Variation of Gameplay and Mission Types
So Im going to choose a game at random to compare this with. Lets see Battlefield 3. Made a boat load of cash for EA ($79m in its first quarter) and sold about 8 million copies after a month. 12 missions; every single one involving killing a wave of enemies, an ambush or defending of some type against mass enemies. In comparison Far Cry 3. Made a hefty profit back and sold 4.5 million units in its first 3 months. 38 missions in just the main quest line alone of which only half of them involve surviving a round of bullets to the temple. Even then its not the entire set piece. Obviously, I am leading a biased example there as thousands of games come out a year that all boast varied experiences and optional ways to tackle objectives, but none in recent memory have done it quite as successfully as Far Cry 3 has. One mission in particular, where you have to scope the meeting of some soldiers planning a mutiny on a bridge needs you to silently photograph their meeting, eventually pick some off the key bastards before dragging your snitching ass back to Hoyt. Or so youd think. I completely ballsed this up, fell in a river, RPGd the bridge and skipped off merrily with my evidence to receive my pat on the back. This angered my significant other who spent a long time pain stakingly zip-wiring around to avoid detection and eventually cost him a lot of bloodshed and wasted ammunition, not to mention some failed attempts. He loathed the fact I could approach the mission from such a half arsed and idiotic way and in fact gain a faster result he did, but thats the way of the Rakyat somehow. Its not scripted. Its not written in the stone what you have to do. There are no invisible walls. JUST PLAY IT you hear Ubisoft cry, PLAY IT HOW YOU WANT. Hell, some of the missions you dont even know WHAT youre doing. Anything involving a trip or downwards drug spiral resulted in a haunting dream sequence of events leaving you waking up somehow having done something worthwhile whilst giving your brain some playtime. Its exciting and exhilarating. Its the reason the game was glued to my disk tray until it was finished, all 100% completed and abused by my anxious and enthusiastic thumbs. At no point was I begging the game to just let me roam around and do my own thing those were the missions too.