R
ryan330i
Guest
Half LIfe 2 vs. Far Cry vs. Doom 3
The top three shooters available all bring something different to the table, and some will protest that comparisons can't be made, that the goals of each are too different. While all three are different, they are certainly not different enough to avoid comparisons. All three are pure first person shooters, all three represent the latest and greatest in graphics and technology, and all three put emphasis on telling an exciting story where you are the hero.
I will cover three salient aspects of these titles: Graphics/technical innovation, story/design execution, and most importantly, gameplay
Graphics
As the GPUs and CPUs advance, the opportunites to present an immersive experience grow. For all that Doom 3 provides, it excels at this best. Rather than bore with details about the technology at play, suffice to say Doom looks great. Far Cry, on the other hand, applies technical innovation in some other specific areas. For one, organic outdoor areas look amazing, with draw distances better than anything before (at least that looked this good). The foilage at higher details levels is also quite satisfying. For a game player, which is more important? I will argue that standing in the middle of a forest with the sense that there is gameplay in all directions for miles is more satisfying than staring at a stainless steel exam table with a nice reflective sheen of condensation. Some will disagree and that is their right, but FPS innovations that improve the simulation of thre real world are more important to me than the latest pixel shader. So where does Half Life 2 rank in this category? My opinion is that it trumps both Far Cry and Doom. It packs in most, if not all, of the visual goodness of Doom and also provides great innovation with the physics engine. It certainly doesn't seem shabby on distance drawing either. Maybe most important, it takes a huge leap in the technology to display character conversation and emotion. It is simply amazing talking to the AI characters and watching them interact and listen to eachtoher. That's right. It's worth it to go through the conversation segments just to watch the characters not talking. At one point Alyx said "He's coming with me" and I caught a quick, small, sideways grimace from Barney. I think he may have a small crush on Alyx... This type of detail is unprecented. and highly appreciated by me.
Ranking:
HL2
FarCry
Doom3
Story/design execution
Here is where FarCry stumbles badly. With this great engine rendering this great chain of islands, the best FarCry can do is thow a lame character into a lamer story. Isn't the whole Terminator/Rambo one-liner hero-type over? The intro was effective at telling almost nothing about the people and events leading up to me taking control, and that story-telling was probably the most entertaing and informative of the entire game. While some of the grunt bad guys had some good lines, the bosses all were annoyingly over-the-top. The story and hero were about on-par with the SOF games. Abysmal. Doom3, on the other hand, had a very serviceable story. I should say it was aware of its mediocracy and avoiding celebrating it. I was plenty satisfied learning about the plot through the PDA entries and cut scenes. The early part of the game, before the apocolypse, was the most entertaining for me, moving around and experiencing a working Mars space station. If only Id had allowed the plot to develop more as the space marine observed weird goings-ons, rather than just flipping the switch (literally, the light switch) and saying "OK, go kill demons". Overall though, the station is a great design, lots of interesting machines to oogle, and I felt invested enough to try and escape or eliminiate the baddies (I was never sure whether the marine was trying to get out of there, or was trying to get to the bottom of things. I know I was trying to get the hell out of there). HL2? Well, this is the easiest one. HL2 hands down delivers the most amazing world to inhibit. While the influences are varied (Sand thumpers-Dune, Ant Lions-Space Ship Troopers, Resistance-V, Combine-Every Dystopian movie ever made, Alyx-Matrix, Striders-War of the Worlds, G-man-X-Files, the list goes on...) in entirety, the story and design work well. The levels are simply amazing. Almost every inch of the game world offers a beautiful photographic composition. The setting of an aging eastern block country was genius. The density is perfect fot the technology, and there are plenty of urban vs. rual opportunites.
Ranking:
HL2
Doom3
FarCry
Gameplay
While all three categories are important for a game, it usually boils down to gameplay. It may seem easy, as they are all FPS games, but gameplay is where most of the people will decide they like or don't like some of these titles. Doom 3 fails horribly here. The warning signs were all there early, so I don't know why I was so dissapointed. When Id was spinning Doom3 as an homage to earlier titles and focusing on the scare factor, I should have known it wasn't for me. I don't think many people who play these types of games are easily scared, so what are they really saying gameplay will be like? Well, I guess it's an homage to earlier days, but the gameplay is highly repetitive, thus predictable, and lacks any creativity. In the early days, due to technoogy not being good enough to provide the first two categories I've listed, games simply tried to be creative by spawning enemies to suprise in places you didn't expect it, and that's about all you get in Doom. At one point, one of the storage lockers was numbered 666 and marked do-not-open, and of course at that point I wasn't paying much attention to the game being cute, and sure enough a big baddie jumped out at me. WOOH BOY, you got me there. Way to be creative Id. Throw a couple false-floor drops into dark areas with lots of baddies? Check. Enemies spawning behind me as I fight someone ahead of me? Check? Seemingly dead bodies jumping up to chew on me?(HL2 suffers from this too) Check. And the best: Out of the way nook holding bad guy, with false wall behind that holding another bad guy? Check check. Looks like we got ourselves some gameplay now... If you couldn't tell, I don't like the Doom gameplay.
FarCary and HL2 offer some great gameplay. It's really tight which I rank higher. For all the complaints I hear about FarCry AI, I had a great time working against it. We would skirmish along treelines and they would quickly flank me if I wasn't good about backpedaling. Every area had different approaches that would work, from driving a jeep into the middle of the camp, to sniping from afar, or something inbetween. There were also some big negatives to FarCry gameplay. Indoors, AI was omnicent, sensing you around corners and on floors above and below. In just a plain moronic move, they offered stealth gameplay alternatives without save-anywhere functionality. You would waste 30 minutes being quiet and then be discovered while you were laying prone, with the wrong gun in hand. The vehicles also really added to gameplay options. Do I make multiple passes along the beach with the .30 cal on the boat, or do I troll up to the shore down aways and sneak up? All viable options in this game...
HL2 offers a more linear gameplay, but is highly satisfying nonetheless. It is always clear when you should be driving, and when you should be on foot, but the levels are so amazing, as every step encounters some amazing gameplay options availble due to the excellently designed environement. In Doom3, a demon will attack you in a room. There is only one way this will ever play out. In FarCry, a squad will attack you in a forest, and there are many ways it could play out, depending on which gun you use, and which tree you hide behind. In HL2, a squad will attack you at a farmstead along the beach. You have a gravity gun, a dunebuggy with a gun mounted, and various weapons. There are multiple entries into the house. You can blockade the door with the physics engine, lob grenades outside, wait for them inside, simply get in the dune buggy and run, or throw some bug bait out there and go hide until the bugs finish them off. In summary, everything comes together. The gameplay is both linear and non-linear in that your actual options are more varied than you might initially think. The linear aspects lets Valve tell the story they want while the environment lets me play the game I want.
Ranking:
HL2
FarCry
Doom3
So the overall ranking is Half Life 2, FarCry, and Doom3. While not many will doubt the #1 choice of HL2, many may disagree with #2 and #3, but I feel FarCry offers more engaging gameplay, in a more dynamic world.
The top three shooters available all bring something different to the table, and some will protest that comparisons can't be made, that the goals of each are too different. While all three are different, they are certainly not different enough to avoid comparisons. All three are pure first person shooters, all three represent the latest and greatest in graphics and technology, and all three put emphasis on telling an exciting story where you are the hero.
I will cover three salient aspects of these titles: Graphics/technical innovation, story/design execution, and most importantly, gameplay
Graphics
As the GPUs and CPUs advance, the opportunites to present an immersive experience grow. For all that Doom 3 provides, it excels at this best. Rather than bore with details about the technology at play, suffice to say Doom looks great. Far Cry, on the other hand, applies technical innovation in some other specific areas. For one, organic outdoor areas look amazing, with draw distances better than anything before (at least that looked this good). The foilage at higher details levels is also quite satisfying. For a game player, which is more important? I will argue that standing in the middle of a forest with the sense that there is gameplay in all directions for miles is more satisfying than staring at a stainless steel exam table with a nice reflective sheen of condensation. Some will disagree and that is their right, but FPS innovations that improve the simulation of thre real world are more important to me than the latest pixel shader. So where does Half Life 2 rank in this category? My opinion is that it trumps both Far Cry and Doom. It packs in most, if not all, of the visual goodness of Doom and also provides great innovation with the physics engine. It certainly doesn't seem shabby on distance drawing either. Maybe most important, it takes a huge leap in the technology to display character conversation and emotion. It is simply amazing talking to the AI characters and watching them interact and listen to eachtoher. That's right. It's worth it to go through the conversation segments just to watch the characters not talking. At one point Alyx said "He's coming with me" and I caught a quick, small, sideways grimace from Barney. I think he may have a small crush on Alyx... This type of detail is unprecented. and highly appreciated by me.
Ranking:
HL2
FarCry
Doom3
Story/design execution
Here is where FarCry stumbles badly. With this great engine rendering this great chain of islands, the best FarCry can do is thow a lame character into a lamer story. Isn't the whole Terminator/Rambo one-liner hero-type over? The intro was effective at telling almost nothing about the people and events leading up to me taking control, and that story-telling was probably the most entertaing and informative of the entire game. While some of the grunt bad guys had some good lines, the bosses all were annoyingly over-the-top. The story and hero were about on-par with the SOF games. Abysmal. Doom3, on the other hand, had a very serviceable story. I should say it was aware of its mediocracy and avoiding celebrating it. I was plenty satisfied learning about the plot through the PDA entries and cut scenes. The early part of the game, before the apocolypse, was the most entertaining for me, moving around and experiencing a working Mars space station. If only Id had allowed the plot to develop more as the space marine observed weird goings-ons, rather than just flipping the switch (literally, the light switch) and saying "OK, go kill demons". Overall though, the station is a great design, lots of interesting machines to oogle, and I felt invested enough to try and escape or eliminiate the baddies (I was never sure whether the marine was trying to get out of there, or was trying to get to the bottom of things. I know I was trying to get the hell out of there). HL2? Well, this is the easiest one. HL2 hands down delivers the most amazing world to inhibit. While the influences are varied (Sand thumpers-Dune, Ant Lions-Space Ship Troopers, Resistance-V, Combine-Every Dystopian movie ever made, Alyx-Matrix, Striders-War of the Worlds, G-man-X-Files, the list goes on...) in entirety, the story and design work well. The levels are simply amazing. Almost every inch of the game world offers a beautiful photographic composition. The setting of an aging eastern block country was genius. The density is perfect fot the technology, and there are plenty of urban vs. rual opportunites.
Ranking:
HL2
Doom3
FarCry
Gameplay
While all three categories are important for a game, it usually boils down to gameplay. It may seem easy, as they are all FPS games, but gameplay is where most of the people will decide they like or don't like some of these titles. Doom 3 fails horribly here. The warning signs were all there early, so I don't know why I was so dissapointed. When Id was spinning Doom3 as an homage to earlier titles and focusing on the scare factor, I should have known it wasn't for me. I don't think many people who play these types of games are easily scared, so what are they really saying gameplay will be like? Well, I guess it's an homage to earlier days, but the gameplay is highly repetitive, thus predictable, and lacks any creativity. In the early days, due to technoogy not being good enough to provide the first two categories I've listed, games simply tried to be creative by spawning enemies to suprise in places you didn't expect it, and that's about all you get in Doom. At one point, one of the storage lockers was numbered 666 and marked do-not-open, and of course at that point I wasn't paying much attention to the game being cute, and sure enough a big baddie jumped out at me. WOOH BOY, you got me there. Way to be creative Id. Throw a couple false-floor drops into dark areas with lots of baddies? Check. Enemies spawning behind me as I fight someone ahead of me? Check? Seemingly dead bodies jumping up to chew on me?(HL2 suffers from this too) Check. And the best: Out of the way nook holding bad guy, with false wall behind that holding another bad guy? Check check. Looks like we got ourselves some gameplay now... If you couldn't tell, I don't like the Doom gameplay.
FarCary and HL2 offer some great gameplay. It's really tight which I rank higher. For all the complaints I hear about FarCry AI, I had a great time working against it. We would skirmish along treelines and they would quickly flank me if I wasn't good about backpedaling. Every area had different approaches that would work, from driving a jeep into the middle of the camp, to sniping from afar, or something inbetween. There were also some big negatives to FarCry gameplay. Indoors, AI was omnicent, sensing you around corners and on floors above and below. In just a plain moronic move, they offered stealth gameplay alternatives without save-anywhere functionality. You would waste 30 minutes being quiet and then be discovered while you were laying prone, with the wrong gun in hand. The vehicles also really added to gameplay options. Do I make multiple passes along the beach with the .30 cal on the boat, or do I troll up to the shore down aways and sneak up? All viable options in this game...
HL2 offers a more linear gameplay, but is highly satisfying nonetheless. It is always clear when you should be driving, and when you should be on foot, but the levels are so amazing, as every step encounters some amazing gameplay options availble due to the excellently designed environement. In Doom3, a demon will attack you in a room. There is only one way this will ever play out. In FarCry, a squad will attack you in a forest, and there are many ways it could play out, depending on which gun you use, and which tree you hide behind. In HL2, a squad will attack you at a farmstead along the beach. You have a gravity gun, a dunebuggy with a gun mounted, and various weapons. There are multiple entries into the house. You can blockade the door with the physics engine, lob grenades outside, wait for them inside, simply get in the dune buggy and run, or throw some bug bait out there and go hide until the bugs finish them off. In summary, everything comes together. The gameplay is both linear and non-linear in that your actual options are more varied than you might initially think. The linear aspects lets Valve tell the story they want while the environment lets me play the game I want.
Ranking:
HL2
FarCry
Doom3
So the overall ranking is Half Life 2, FarCry, and Doom3. While not many will doubt the #1 choice of HL2, many may disagree with #2 and #3, but I feel FarCry offers more engaging gameplay, in a more dynamic world.
