FC2 was a gritty tale with deep litterary roots (Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'), set in the real world in war torn Africa with characters and the selection of player protagonists based on real world mercenaries, a near non-existant UI, good difficulty on Mercenary, ammo conservation, a story reflecting the meaninglessness of war, dynamic, to some degree player driven narrative in the buddy system etc. One of the very, very few shooters I've ever found interesting in SP (the others are System Shock and Biochock). It was green, brown, dirty and wet, travelling from A to B over long distances planning out your route in advance through valleys, mountains, jungles, deserts and waterways, was a central gameplay mechanic. Africa was beautiful and realistic and vibrant, your weapons felt real and solid and you had a big selection of period-accurate weaponry to choose from. Your map was held in your own two hands in real time and you looked down on it as you walked or drove.
In FC3, your map was like a GPS you accessed from the menu, it didn't even pretend to be a real map and you could quick travel from it's comic book like style icons, all unnaturally big to accomodate the current console generation. The graphics and setting was some kid movie set on a fantasy island with Disney color sky, land and sea, cartoon enemy 'pirates' in vivid red colors etc.. The interface had all these big primary color markers showing you everything from enemies to quests like the player character had some VR visor on, no reason straining human eyes looking for things in the artificial world themselves, superficial things like where to go by looking at the terrain or where to shoot enemies.. every other second the camera hand-holds the player or shows some cliché story sequence where there's a lot of falling or flying or jumping or explosions usually and the boy protagonist's shrill girlish screaming and no player interaction as if watching some really bad teen action movie, probably inspired by the COD series on rails narrative.
FC3 also gotta have the most sickeningly bad, two dimensional characters I've yet seen in a PC game. The teenage boy player character's incessantly whines and moans like some little drama queen, even when skinning his 1000th animal, or killing his 1000th enemy. And his little clique of friends are even worse and less imaginative, I take it you as a player are supposed to care for them just a bit to keep the narrative interesting, especially considering the ending's choice? Entirely disappointing.
It had added the wild animals we missed in FC2 but now everywhere some pirate is attacked and eaten completely numbing any sensation this could otherwise have incurred. Like the fucking ancient ruins and artifacts, you literally can't walk 20m without walking into some boring, half-assed 'temple' or 'catacomb' or whatever, which like the incredibly boring radio tower features lame jumping (which could be fun I guess but isn't) and no shooting.
The crafting was decent in some parts and so was parts of the skill system if it wasn't for the fact that some skill are just ridiculous, like having 1000 bullet magazines, as if the game wasn't braindead and utterly devoid of elegance, style, tactics or thought already.
The incessantly respawning checkpoints from FC2 are gone, that's besides the bow and some pretty good shooter mechanics truly the only positives I can see about the game.
In FC3 you play a spoiled, American rich kid, some random teenage boy on an expensive vacation. In FC2 you play any number of grizzled mercenaries from 90s real world African conflicts, like a forty-something former Serbian paratrooper veteran of the Yugoslav Wars, a former IRA Irishman and barfighter, a 38-year old Algerian ex-navy guy, or Xianyong Bai, a Chinese contraband smuggler and later informant for the Federal Intelligence Agency in Pakistan, all with their quirks, all with their history, all marred in some fashion. This difference alone is symbolical for the differences between the two games. At least FC1, which was pretty great, and Blood Dragon were
intentionally corny and cliché. Often it felt to me as if Blood Dragon was the vent through which the FC3 developers let off their steam about the toothlessness of the main game.
I'm afraid FC4 will be more like FC3 than FC2, so far it looks like it.
