Maybe it attacks you, in which case you swing at it wildly with a machete while it bites and slashes at you with rabid fury. You see a Malayan tapir, or a Bengal tiger, or a honey badger.
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And then skin it.įar Cry 4 contains the most refined version yet of the hunting-skinning-crafting gameplay loop that has appeared in almost every big open-world game set in a natural environment since Red Dead. These are games that articulate freedom itself as the ability to chase down and kill whomever or whatever you want. And yet, in a lot of ways, it’s more conceptually essential than ever before. In games like Far Cry, Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed, and even Grand Theft Auto V, hunting is a lot less essential from a narrative point of view: the animal is the peripheral world-builder, thrown onto the map to make it feel uncharted. In Metal Gear Solid 3, the necessity of hunger was the pretext for the freedom to hunt at will you had to kill animals because you had to eat something, even if it was a parrot.
Now it’s become a key ingredient of the open-world action-adventure game, a genre that-like the novel-likes to consume other genres in its quest to simulate reality, or at least totality.
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In the 90s, hunting was a videogame genre unto itself it was the whole point of sims like the long-running Deer Hunter series and SEGA’s absurd Jambo! Safari, relics of a lost time of great simplicity that can still be found in the corners of old arcades and the bargain bin at Micro Center. But it’s notable nonetheless for the clarity of its genre influences, which force us to take a clear, hard look at where the animals in our open-world games come from, and why hunting them has become such an important thing to do.
The Yeti is the biggest and baddest one.Ī “wild” untouched by the taming hand of the West.Īlmost nothing is different or interesting about Valley of the Yetis it’s basically another solid, dependable chunk of Far Cry, from the outpost battles to the reliance on hallucinogens as an aesthetic weirdness delivery system. He is also, crucially, beset by animals: heightened, hyper-predatory animals that embody the destructive potential of a “wild” untouched by the taming hand of the West. In his quest to make sense of the place-because he, as always, is the level-headed exemplar of Western reason-the hero is beset by the psychotic disciples of an ancient cult, who seek to protect a legendary artifact that grants immortality. The narrative is a journey into the deep interior of a savage land: the center of the earth in Jules Verne the “lost world” in Arthur Conan Doyle here, an uncharted region of the Himalayas.
Few are the games that actually feel like latter-day artifacts of Victorian culture, but Far Cry 4 is one of them-especially as it descends into straight-up King Solomon’s Mines territory with its new DLC, Valley of the Yetis. Videogames love the Victorian era, but they tend to love it mostly as an aesthetic: steam, industrialism, mutton chops, dead prostitutes, fainting couches.
Tiger and elephant leap at each other in primal combat: offense and defense, orange and blue, with all the vibrancy of mascots and all the gravity of constellations. The lion’s head fell forward on the crocodile’s back, and with an awful groan he died, and the crocodile, after standing for a minute motionless, slowly rolled over on to his side, his jaws still fixed across the carcase of the lion, which, we afterwards found, he had bitten almost in halves.īoot up Ubisoft’s Far Cry 4 and the first thing you’ll see-after a litany of logos for the developer, the engine, and Nvidia-is something that feels like a digital reincarnation of Haggard’s vision. As the adventurers Horace Holly and Leo Vincey make their way into the center of Africa, they see the fight from their riverboat-the animals “struggling hideously,” tearing at each other with tooth and claw: Rider Haggard’s 1887 adventure novel She, the entrance into true wilderness is marked by a spectacle both natural and preposterous: a crocodile and a lion fighting each other to the death.