How to make looting fun.

Tinkering with tidbits

Looting is one of those facts of life by this point- wait, no actually I'm going to have to think about that statement a little harder now aren't I? Looting is a video game fact of life; since the time that RPGs became something of a mainstay genre that every other style of game under the sun decided to borrow from we eventually reached the point where the pilfering of one's enemies, of various boxes and of the earth herself, became a cliché of game design. Perhaps it's a little gauche to turn around and blame Ubisoft for this one too, but they're so often the faceless monocrop responsible for proliferation other people's ideas that they then proceed to plaster all over every single property they have in an unending march towards turning every franchise into clones of one another. Besides, when I think back I do remember seeing this aspect of looting crates in Far Cry 3 and thinking how novel that was...

But where was I? Oh yeah, the practice kind of sucks and is boring. Not that the actual act of getting items is boring- I think the hoarder in all of us can appreciate the muted thrill of filling up our bags with goodies- but with so many different games playing up the 'looting' of area chests for boring crafting materials and 'valuables' that you slap together for ridiculous crafted items: it's just all the same! The idea of crafting something homemade and valuable out of junk you find in the game world sounds crafty and resourceful on paper- but so many of these modern open world cookie-cutter games resort to implementing these ideas in the most boring way possible. You'll pick up plants in the world, or auto-loot corpses or rummage through ancient chests and be afforded items that exists only as notaries. Empty Lighters, Tin cans, cigarette packets? Doesn't matter what the item is, because to you it's just mulch to be shoved together into... a pipe bomb? Yeah, doesn't matter if that makes any sense, those containers are now a pipe bomb- deal with it. Nothing in these systems are at all important for what they are but for what they can make. At least a scant few games do away with the lip services of trying to make varied loot and just label pilfered goods under the catch-all label 'crafting materials'.

And every modern open world title feeds into the 'looting to craft' gameplay 'system' by some basic degree to the point where crafting systems are becoming something of an industry-wide cliché. It bothers me so much because the idea of clutter and what that brings to the world of your game is worth so much more than these companies allow it be. Bethesda's open world series', The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have both featured worlds full of interactable loot and junk, sometimes with crafting systems to take advantage of- but the simple difference here is that every item in those worlds are tangible. That is to say, they have 3d models and can be placed into the world. They populate the shelves of blown out post apocalyptic Super Duper Mart or the fantastical medieval kitchens of Castle Dour. That simple step, of making these items real set-dressing props for the world, allows them to mean so much more when you pilfer a few and turn your home into a shrine from Giddyup Buttercup or whatever other insanity takes you.

Even when Fallout 4 came around with it's catch-all crafting systems that allowed these items to be mulched into their 'raw components' in the crafting of stupidly advanced nonsense like fusion generators and explosive turrets- the fact that each item existed outside of loot menus made the collecting of those resources more interesting. You wouldn't just thumb through a menu, but dig up and down shelves, turn over wooden crates- searching for that extra bit of adhesive or copper. Just this extra touch of interactable tangibility turned what was otherwise a tacked on and forgettable side system into an active activity that players engaged with. Having it all be optional is just another boon of a game like Fallout, where your play style is largely your own choice. 

A recent new contender to the pantheon of open worlds has opened up a whole new potential avenue in crafting that I simply have to talk about right quick, because Tears of the Kingdom really has rewritten the rules with this sort of thing. In Tears pretty much every object in the game world can be manipulated and fused with anything else, which turns the entire game world into something of a tool kit to be played around with. Everything from planks of wood to rocks on the road to ferns in the bushes can be attached to your weapon to some unique effect, which has the consequence of making the very art of exploration itself the fun draw of what we can charitably call 'looting', but which might be better classified as 'world crafting'. I get my kicks out of seeing what combinations work best, and that is the childlike joy a system as robust as Tears of the Kingdom's can bring.

But if we can't commit to the large-scale clutter filled world of Fallout or the totally revolutionary 'combine anything' world of Tears of the Kingdom, there's still some measures that the every day open world can take to ensure that crafting doesn't get stale quite so quickly. In fact, I think one of the Assassin's Creed games pulled this off decently well. Moderation is the word of the day. Simply by toning back on the number of crafting items you need to get or can get from the world, and making the sources for getting these materials more interesting activities- that can infer more value to the process. When upgrading your ship in 'Assassin's Creed: Black Flag' required the player to engage with the whaling side activity to get the whale hides, that was whole 'worlds' more engaging than the 'loot chests for random nicks nacks and hope you get something good' system that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood employed before it.

Perhaps the worst way these systems go wrong, and I see it often in the games I play from Ghost Recon Breakpoint to vanilla Cyberpunk, is when these materials are placed with so little care that they make no thematic sense within the world around them. Even just having these materials be listed loot items instead in 3d modelled clutter is disappointing enough, but refusing to manage loot tables so thatdildos start spawning in the middle of Arasaka bases? Or that you'll find caches of crypto currency in aboriginal native chests? Talk about a slap in the face to let everyone know how little you care about implementing these junk systems. I know they're mandated by the publisher and no one on the team cares enough to even brainstorm how these systems might fit in with their respective games anymore, but for the sake of everyone you need to at least feign an effort!

Looting is a fact of life just like crafting systems, online cosmetic stores for single player games and battle passes; but that doesn't mean we have to turn into automatons going through the motions when we implement them in our games. Innovation comes from tackling the same problems from a new angle, and if you've already given up in the face of cliché the moment you face it then you'll never get a chance to overcome it but rather just fumble and fall. Anyone who thought that looting is inherently overplayed and lacking in creative potential had their mouths shut tight when Tear of the Kingdom dropped, and Nintendo may be the best of the best but in my mind- exceptionalism is just a reminder for everyone that the world isn't brought and sold completely just yet.

Can someone explain to me why everyone seems to love 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon' so much?

 I guess I'm the one out of ten.

It has been nearly 9 years, we've had three full new Far Cry games and two spin-offs come out in that time, totally- well, I was about to say 'totally revolutionising the franchise', but let's be honest these are Ubisoft games and Far Cry in particular is egregious in recycling itself- yet even today I'm still hearing talk about Blood Dragon like it's some little known gem from a more civilised age. It's like all of those recommended Google articles you get where some website is playing interpretive guessing games with it's titles "Catch this unsung Sci-Fi sequel masterpiece, shunned from it's age, that is finally getting the foot traffic is was denied through a successful Netflix run, before it leaves the platform." and you've got to take that insubstantial word-salad and try to match it with the, always vague, picture to try and figure out what the hell they're talking about without feeding them a quick click. Then you give up and realise they were talking about bloody Bladerunner 2049. Yeah; really 'unsung', guys! But unlike the naked attempt to get a view out of me I see from those articles, for the love of me I cannot understand why Far Cry Blood Dragon is imbued with the incandescent fame that it is.

And just to be clear: I have played Blood Dragon. Heck, I've played every Ubisoft game up until Far Cry 5 when I decided that I couldn't do it anymore; there were so many truly brilliant games that weren't getting my attention because I was fumbling about with yearly multimillion dollar copy-paste series number 3 instead of going out there and spreading my attention. So I know what Blood Dragon is about, I've finished it on console, I've started it on PC about 3 times and there's no secrets in this game unexplored by me, which qualifies me enough to tell you about what it is. 'Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon' is a totally stand-alone DLC/New game to the Far Cry 3 framework that takes the first-person jungle-running exploits of that classic and drowns them in hyper-eighties funk. You have neon text menus, garish palette swaps of the sky and grass, and wink-and-a-nod references and jokes to the targeted era wrapped into every microfibre of the runtime. It's a joke concept stretched out to fit an entire self-contained non-canonical DLC.

That is what the game is and yet everytime I see another annual article dragging this game's name back on it's pedestal to praise it as one of the single greatest Ubisoft projects ever put to code: I begin to doubt my intimate understanding once more. Three separate times I have reinstalled Blood Dragon expecting some mind-blowing rip-roaring experience that blows me away and leaves me begging for just a little more from papa Ubisoft. Three times I've stopped playing after the intro mission only to uninstall at a later date because I remember: oh yeah, this sucks. Okay, that's entirely unfair; the game doesn't suck, but when compared next to monumental edifice of abject perfectionism that game journalists over the years seem to always construct for it: well yeah, then it does kinda suck. This isn't Baldur's Gate we're talking about here for games that stand the test of time, and in fact I've never seen a modern article recommending Baldur's Gate; yet just last week, another there was another "Blood Dragon is actually the last gift that god granted this world before he departed" propaganda piece, and for the life of me I just don't understand it.

Now again, I don't want anyone coming from this saying "This guy says Blood Dragon is awful and anyone who likes it is an ass", because I'm not. I'm all for people liking what they like and in fact it's my express-most wish to identify that appeal so that I might resonate with it too. If I hadn't taken the effort to try Borderlands 2 again and see it from the point-of-view of people who loved that game, I would never have seen past the humour to realise that there was an incredibly replayable experience tucked in there too. I want to be able to do the same for as many other games out there that I can, because falling in love with something is so much fun, and seeing a new light in a game I'd not yet fully explored it one of coolest experiences a fan can go through. (I literally just discovered a new vanilla dungeon in my latest Skyrim playthrough; Wild.) So that is why I am being utterly sincere with my article header: Please explain your love of this game to me, anyone who can; I would be so very happy to share in that love too.

Because Far Cry Blood Dragon is a decent game and all, but man did it leave such a minor impression on me. I think something which taints my potentially fond recollections more than anything is the visual design, both what they were going for and what they achieved. And I'm not talking about the strips of neon everywhere from the skirting of concrete buildings to the bodies of the titular Blood Dragon's themselves, (although that does get to be monotonous stand-out design consistency in the late hours of the game) but just the general palette. All the grass in this game is some sort of deep burgundy or black, the sky is various shades of dark purple or red, the world is forever set at night. Now for a brief mission or two this suits perfectly, you're in a world lit exclusively in neon and neon shines best at night, but for an entire mini-campaign is just start to feel dull and oppressive. When every bright colour in your game is blinding glaring flashes of pulsation, and all else is various shades of moody, the general aesthetic begins to feel aggressive and dour, like what you'd expect from a Cyberpunk dystopia, not a rip-roaring eighties-themed cheese fest.

Then there is the gameplay loop itself, and do I really need to say anything about how this game plays out if you've played literally any other Far Cry game before in your life? It's all about going to outposts and seizing them from the enemy by killing them in your typical ways, shooting, melee takedowns, bad stealth or, if you're really feeling like hobbling yourself, using the enemy animal AI to your 'advantage'. (Not sure how much on an advantage it is watching a lumbering animal get shot to pieces, but there you are.) The only difference is that Blood Dragon has less guns so there's less illusion of choice. To be fair, the team added a minigun to the line-up, alongside a slew of weapons that are mostly all references in some way or another, (Robocop's pistol, the shotgun Arnie uses during the viaduct chase in Terminator 2, etc.) but, and I accept this is matter of deep opinion, I just don't find shooting lasers as satisfying as shooting bullets. Firing thousands of bullets a second and watching them rip vehicles like a hundred tiny fists is adrenaline pumping in games like GTA, but seeing rotating lasers zap someone to death- it just lacks punch to it. And most of the weapons in this game shoot lasers too, so the gameplay is completely familiar to what you know, lacking in the variety you know and, in my opinion, not as fun as know from other Far Cry games.

Then there is the writing and narrative, and for this Blood Dragon has the lucky excuse of "this is all a joke, don't take anything too seriously." Through it's length Blood Dragon display nothing but irrelevance and eighties cheese so that the player is never in the slightest danger of taking a single second seriously, and with minute-a-mile quips every mission you're expected to be at least chuckling from start to finish. So I hope you like jokes about the eighties, because that's what a lot of them are. And if you find the whole '80's nostalgia' thing a bit pastiche and played-out, tough luck because this game is relentless. Of course that's not all the humour, and as a fan of sixth-wall breaking there are some fun jabs to game design to smile at here and there, but I wouldn't call this a timeless comedy force of nature. It's alright. Which kind of sums up my feelings of everything in Blood Dragon. It's not great, not terrible, it's just alright. So what am I missing?

Seriously, the way you see people beg for sequels in their articles you'd have thought this game was a Knights of the Old Republic level masterpiece, totally sweeping players away and leaving them thirsty for anything more, but then you play it and realise that it's just a high budget joke vehicle. I can honestly say that if I were to see a Ubisoft announcement for Blood Dragon 2 in the near future I wouldn't be excited. I would have flashbacks to the 'nothing' side quests, the monotonous-looking world, the increasingly insubstantial main missions as you drive further through the story ('defend the point' central) and I'd just stay the hell away. Not to mention the CRT bars over the screen; there's a design idea that never should have left it past the boardroom right next to 'motion blur'. Clearly I missed the secret 'make this into a masterpiece' button in all of my previous playthroughs and if someone could point that out to me, maybe with a comprehensive guide, I would be so very grateful. Thanks in advance!