Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Far Cry 2. We talk about the tutorial some more, the perils and pleasures of an open world game, and avoiding being a map game despite having a map. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Issues covered: casual colonialism, doling out tutorial bits at the right pace, feeling equipped with skills for the game and for the open world, remembering the location, being a game with a map that doesn't feel like a map game, driving feeling dangerous, lack of radar, forcing level design to accommodate lack of map, tangent: how to get money into your PS wallet, having a moment of either terror or excitement over the open world, we've taught you everything you know, having hooks, not knowing what the next story mission, balancing the power level for later, escalating power levels, not knowing how to pursue particular goals, missions equaling upgrades of different types, being able to strategically plan, sanding down the friction of making choices like these, repetitive combat, a good player story generator, a comedy of errors trying to blow up a truck, an ammo cache that killed its guard, fire propagation, hang gliding straight into the ground, getting a new map, having to hunt the needle in the haystack, revisiting SimTown, skeuomorphisms, how to do onboarding with sim games, personification of goals, focusing scale.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher (series), Kingdom Hearts (series), Unreal (series), GTA III, Halo, PS3, Xbox 360, STALKER, UbiSoft, Assassin's Creed (series), Lord of the Rings (obliquely), Star Wars (obliquely), Splinter Cell (series), Ghost Recon (series), Tom Clancy, The Hunt for Red October, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, SimTown, mysterydip, Civ 3, Calamity Nolan, Biostats, Johnny Pockets, Total War, X-COM 2, Old World, Jurassic World Evolution 2, Jeff Goldblum, Frontier Developments, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Thrillville, Zoo Tycoon, Elite: Dangerous, David Braben, Afterlife, Michael Stemmle, Dark Souls, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time: More Far Cry 2!

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