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Birthday Presents

Today's my birthday!

To celebrate, Wizards of the Coast were kind enough to release the all new 2024 edition of the Player's Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons. But what's even cooler is that today also marks the 40th Anniversary of the day I first played D&D.

Way back in 1984, I didn't really know what Dungeons & Dragons was, but I'd seen the Basic Set in the red box on store shelves a few times and I thought it looked awesome. I kept asking my mom for it but we didn't have a lot of money back then, so I had to wait with my fingers crossed for my birthday to come around. When it finally did, I was bouncing with joy as I flipped through the Player's Manual and started to figure out how this cool game worked.

I played (or mostly just read) the Start adventure (poor Aleena). Then I played the solo adventure probably three or four times until I got the hang of it. But after that, I kind of ran out of road. My mother was not interested in this strange game (I think she preferred Backgammon back then), and with no siblings or even any family in town, I didn't have anyone to play with. I asked some friends at school, but sitting around inside writing stuff down and doing math was not a great pitch back in the early '80s. So aside from trying the solo adventure a couple more times with characters I made myself (a dwarf and then a thief), I didn't get much more mileage out the Basic Set.

The next year I started highschool, and to my great excitement, there was a D&D club, which I joined immediately. The club was organized by a friend named Sathi who put us all into gaming groups (the city of Sathirajan from the Mythmaster World Guide is named in his memory.) That's how me and my friend Dave (who I would go on to play Ultima IV with) met John, Jason and Paul, and the five of us started playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

John agreed to be the Dungeon Master and the rest of us made our first characters; I was an elf fighter named Dangor (what a terrible name), Dave was a Paladin named Paladon (equally terrible) Paul was an elf cleric named Crow (myeh) who used a long sword (sacrilege!), and Jason was a thief whose character name I forget (but almost for certain was the best named of the bunch). Over the course of that campaign we confronted the threats and challenges thrown at us by our wily nemesis The Antipaladin - an evil undead paladin who sought to conquer the world from his magical, plane-shifting castle.

We played AD&D for a couple of years until John, Jason and Paul all graduated ahead of me and Dave, and our group fragmented. Fortunately, though, I was able to drift into another group with John and Jason who were playing a different game called EXP. EXP is an absurd science-fiction RPG created by a friend of ours named Hugh (you can play it here!). There were probably twenty different people in and out of the EXP group over the years. I think I must have played EXP from '88 until '93. At the same time, I also started another gaming group with Paul - and we played a few different games; AD&D of course, but we also tried Gamma World, Paranoia and others.

From the many people I met and played with in these different groups, I got exposed to a wide range of different games - many of which I only played a few times. Some of them included Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Car Wars, Top Secret, Traveller, Champions, Shadow Run, Warhammer, and Rune Quest - and certainly others I have forgotten. My favorites, and some of the strongest influences on Mythmaster were Paranoia (for factions) Rune Quest (for progression) and Traveller (for character creation). In fact, when I started learning to code so I could build the Mythmaster character generator tool, I relied heavily on a javascript character creator for Traveller that helped me understand some of the basic architecture in order to get started.

Sometime around '93 a new core group formed with myself and Jason, along with another Jason, Greg and Pat. The five of us (and many others who would drift in and out over the years) mostly played GURPS. We played Cyberpunk, Espionage, Martial Arts, Supers, Psionics, Victorian Era, Imperial Rome, and a bunch of different universes and campaigns using the many GURPS source books. GURPS was great, because making characters was fast and flexible, and progression was thin and de-emphasized, which made it easy for us to play one-shots or mini-campaigns, taking turns as GM to suit our schedules and our wide range of interests.

I was playing with that group frequently before I left it all behind in 2001 to move from Vancouver to Montreal to start working in the game industry. Sadly, I never really got into a new gaming group in Montreal, and I largely left the TTRPG world behind for 10+ years before I started working on Mythmaster - the history of which I detailed in my previous post. Looking back on it over the last ten years that I have been working on the game, I realize I missed something of a renaissance. Hundreds of small TTRPGs have been released, and in the last few years I picked a few of them up (mostly to study). It's awesome how many systems and universes there are out there for players to dive into.

So in honour of the release of the latest edition of the D&D Player's Handbook, and to celebrate exactly 40 years of D&D for me, I decided to ship the DnD 2024 Celebration Update.

In version Beta 2.1.1 you'll find a new NPC; the Wizard Zovtecoste, and his familiar, the 1000-lb Gorilla 'Deendie'. Mythmaster is completely free for as long as it's in Beta, so feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. Maybe forty years from now, you'll be marking the anniversary of the first time you played my game (and hopefully I'll be turning 92).

Making Myths

I just so happens that I do a pretty good Ian-McKellen-as-Gandalf imitation. I also have a not-half-bad Sean Connery, an okay Marlon Brando, a passable Patrick Stewart, a poor but at least consistent Clint Eastwood, and a laughable attempt at a Harrison Ford. All of these amateur impressions were useful to me more than ten years ago when I was reading The Hobbit (for the third or fourth time) to my son every night before bed.

The problem, though, was that The Hobbit has one Gandalf, one Bilbo and at least nine too many fucking dwarves for me to have any hope in hell of voicing them all. Many a night of reading ended in disappointment for my having mixed up my Kili voice for my Fili voice or my Bifur for my Bofur. While I couldn't keep them all straight in my head, my son could, and it was pretty darn important that I got it straight, or what, really, was the point of reading stories at all?

After fumbling for many weeks trying to keep all these characters and voices straight in my head, I decided to make things easy for myself. Rather than reading stories, I would make them up. I dusted off my old GURPS rulebooks and flipped through them, determined to make characters with my son and invent our own fantasy universe to play in.

It turned out GURPS was too much for a three year old. So was D&D (I had 3.5 back then). Rather than try to teach him a complicated RPG, I decided to make a very simple one. And so, Mythmaster was born.

My first few iterations on the game got me to a set of core rules that was only seven pages long and used only standard six-sided dice. A character could be made in a few minutes, details about skills, spells, weapons and creatures were added on demand, and within a month of the initial idea we were playing. As we played, I would record the rules as we made them up; a rapier did this much damage, a heal spell restored that much health.

The rules started to grow and to accrete some complexity and I landed on a few patterns I really liked. The main one was the 3x3 stat matrix and skills based on attributes calculated from the averaged stats. It was the first formal structure in the game, and it is still the core of how characters work. I feel makes for a good, credible simulation, and that it has an inherent auto-balancing effect on a hybrid random/point-spend character creation system that softens the chaos of pure random, while preventing the degenerate build strategies that plague pure point-spend.

My young son's first character was a ranger-y sort of guy named Coyote, who was son to the Chief of the Road Runner Clan (it pays to expose them to the classics). The Road Runner Clan were a nomadic tribe in the Red Plains, between the cities of Red Road and Brinjevi... which exist in the World Guide to this day. Coyote had a friend; an NPC trader from a nearby village named Michael. Together, in one of their first encounters, they rescued a goblin who had been captured and was about to be eaten by some mean orc bandits. Improbably, they made a friend of him also. His name was Dodger, and his inclusion made me decide to add goblins (and orcs) to a growing list of playable species.

Coyote, Michael and Dodger had some fun adventures, eventually convincing Dodger's tribe - who had taken up residence in an abandoned stone quarry - to begin trading stone with the Road Runner Clan in exchange for useful goods from Michael's village. Acting as peacemakers, my son and his imaginary friends put new pressures on the game, creating a need for skills and abilities that would allow a four year old to roll dice to determine if his socially and politically savvy characters could negotiate treaties. Suddenly, the game started to become complex in ways I had not anticipated, and I was frankly glad I had not over-invested the small amount of free time I had in writing out and balancing stats for dozens of weapons and spells (though that would all come eventually).

At some point, my son got distracted by other interests, and we stopped playing as regularly, but I continued to chip away at the rules, and from time to time we would come back to it with updated versions of Coyote, Michael and Dodger. A few years later, and living back in Canada, we invited friends from my son's school - two brothers - to start a new campaign with us.

That campaign was set in Skyrim. I had the strategy guide for the game, and I found the ones for Oblivion and Morrowind on line. I can't image a more valuable set of source books for a Director. By this time, the Core Rules had grown to sixty pages, and I had the beginnings of a Bestiary with nearly 100 creatures. I was largely satisfied with the rules, but I wanted to be able to focus on designing my own campaign universe in my spare time without having to build the plane while I was flying it. Having half of the world of Tamriel and 200 years of its history took an enormous load off of prep work for our play sessions so that I could do that. Thanks Bethesda and Prima!

Anyway, with my son and his school friends, we started to play semi-regularly, and I got some really good testing in. Somewhere in there is where I made perhaps the biggest detour in the long history of the game; I added classes. Prior to then the game had always been class-free, and characters could invest in any skills they wanted. Classes added some direction and progression and a feeling of coherence and structure, and they would be a part of the game for four years or so, but ultimately, they proved too constraining. Many elements that were added to improve classes - such as Perks, and the structures for Skill and Spell Fields, and the progression that exists within them were born out of a need to diversify character builds that had been rendered too simplistic by the addition of classes. While classes themselves ultimately would be removed, the things I learned from having them in, and the improvements made to the game to compensate for the problems they created ended up being great additions. The path to understanding leads through the woods of stuff that doesn't work.

Sometime in 2018 or 2019 it started to dawn on me that I might actually be able to release Mythmaster as a product. I started giving some thought to that idea while continuing to play the game with my son and his friends and also attempting to start a campaign with colleagues from work. That campaign began with the assassination of the Imperial Governor Rufus Tritinnius at the wedding of Olfina Gray-Mane and Jon Battle-Born in Whiterun on 1 First Seed, 4E 201. Eight people made characters, and we played once before I got overwhelmingly busy with work itself, and life on top of that, and we never went further. I really wish we could have.

At this point I was managing the entire game as a series of .pages documents with embedded .numbers tables and placeholder art pulled from the internet. I would periodically push a new version of the game, format the entire thing as a set of PDFs and print out half a dozen copies of each book at Kinko's or Office Depot and staple-bind them. I still have old hardcopies of the Core Rules, the Bestiary, the World Guide and the NPC Guide across multiple versions.

Of course, in 2020, the pandemic happened. For a long time my son couldn't play with his friends. But because video conferencing and screen sharing tools were suddenly ubiquitous, and various digital whiteboards and shared online collaboration tools were easily accessible (and in many cases being made free for personal use), it occurred to me that I could play online.

I reached out to my gaming group from back in the late '90s, before I moved to Montreal, and we got the band back together. We had played many different games together all those years previously, and we were all still close friends, even though we rarely saw each other. So I sent them the PDFs and a few days later we were meeting online over Zoom to make characters and figure out how we'd set up our first play sessions. Within a month of the start of the pandemic, six of us were playing every Saturday night using Zoom, Miro, Rolz, and a several other tools.

Those first months were a meat grinder - not for their characters - for the game. The early play sessions were not level one encounters with kobolds; these were pitched battles against the frost giants of tabletop RPG playing. All the usability and design problems that were invisible to my son and his friends revealed themselves to be red-hot pokers for experienced players. I had just pushed alpha 1.6 when the pandemic started, and in two years we went through four major iterations - each one larger and more significant in scope than any previous iteration. The core mechanics of rolling Challenges were overhauled and simplified. The Stats & Attributes matrix was shuffled around and renamed. Derivatives were changed. Movement and Bulk were simplified and rebalanced. Classes were removed and skill and spell fields elaborated. Perks were added along with many new spells and skills. The game switched from being entirely d6 based to using all of the standard dice. An enormous suite of tools were built in spreadsheets to automate the tuning, balancing and updating of game content. Quickly, the game matured into something very close to the version you can play today.

It was only in 2022 that I decided I needed to stop messing around with spreadsheets and PDFs, and reconsider the idea of releasing the game in print format. I didn't see the point of trying to mount a Kickstarter to raise tens of thousands of dollars to spend hundreds of hours of my time on printed books. All print would do is fossilize the rules into the sediment of hubris, and wrap them in glossy art I would have to buy because I could not make it myself. A pretty but deprecated set of rules is useless. I did not want to disguise the remaining problems in the game in a glossy package - I wanted to fix them. I wanted the game to be responsive and easily updatable. I wanted it to be accessible to anyone. I wanted to be able to continue to tune and balance the game and to fix problems as I found them, as I had been doing for a decade already.

So I abandoned my plans to release the game as a series of books, dusted off my web development skills from decades previous, and started porting the game over to HTML. I got myself set up with a domain and started converging toward a fully digital version. To my delight, and that of my players, the rules became far more accessible, the game became more playable, and iterations and improvements came faster and faster. They continue to come, faster than ever.

There is another entire post I'll have to write here about the process of learning javascript and making the game even more data-driven, accessible and updatable, but this post is already too long.

I was originally hoping to ship the game last summer or for the end of 2023, but I got sick a bunch in the back half of last year, and with work and life, it was just too much. Fortunately, I am well again. I am playing regularly with my group, and also with my son and his friends, and all of us are very excited to finally share the game with a wider audience. Today.

We hope you'll find the game as fun and engaging as we do, and we hope you'll stick around for the beta, and beyond. There is a lot of content still to come, and lot to learn about this game that continues to live and grow as we play.

Welcome to Mythmaster RPG.

Fifteen Years of Far Cry 2

Five years ago, for Far Cry 2's tenth anniversary, I wrote a whole series of blog posts reflecting on some of the great criticism the game had generated. Today marks the game's fifteenth anniversary, but rather than revisit that exercise, which was a lot of work, I'll leave it to the experts.

Lewis Gordon has written a great retrospective over at The Ringer. He dives into some of the discourse that has surrounded the game, and looks at some of the impact it's had. He also managed to somehow trick some very cool and smart people into saying some nice things about the game, which is very flattering.

Thanks to Lewis, and thanks again to everyone who has brought insight and criticism to the game. It still means a lot.

Dev Game Club Podcast Interview

A few nights ago I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim and Brett at Dev Game Club after they had just spent the past five episodes of their podcast playing and talking about Far Cry 2. The series starts here, and the interview is the last one.

I worked briefly alongside Tim at LucasArts, and have always had a ton of respect for both his and Brett's work, so it was a real pleasure to get to talk to them about mine. It's also interesting to get fresh takes on the game so long after it shipped, and to revisit with a more modern eye and in the context of current sensibilities.

Anyway, if you're looking for good, frank discussion about specific, important games, the podcast is great. They've provided many deep dives into some of my favorite games of all time, including X-Com, Civ III, System Shock 2, Bioshock, GTA III, Thief, Deus Ex, DOOM, and many more - including interviews with their creators in some cases, which is a special treat. If, like me, you're looking for thoughtful discussion about engaging media to listen to while you're making dinner or walking to work or whatever, I can't recommend this podcast highly enough.

Now that I type out that list (which is only a subset of their content) I realize how profoundly humbling it is to have Far Cry 2 added to that list. So thanks Tim and Brett!

Wonder and Madness

Back in the summer I mentioned that I had submitted an entry to the One Page Dungeon Contest, which challenges creators to make a table top RPG adventure or dungeon entirely contained to a single page. Of course, I thought 'one page?, pffff... that sounds easy.' Turns out, not so much. On top of that, this year's theme was 'Wonder', so I needed to come up with something that was more than just a map and a list of monsters - I needed something that would make people go wide-eyed, and give them an 'a-ha' moment.

I wracked my brains for a week or so, before finally asking myself the right question; 'what is a design that can ONLY work on a single sheet of paper?' That's when the idea for "The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad!" popped into my head.

Inspired by the work of cartoonist Al Jaffee of Mad Magazine fame, my One Page Dungeon works like a 'fold-in'; you need to fold the paper in different ways in order to access different parts of the dungeon. That made it extradimensional, and inspired the story of a wizard driven mad by his magical study of all things extradimensional, eventually drawing him into conflict with the Infernal God of Madness, Awhout-rout-yuth (pronounced in the way hyenas would howl it).

From there, it was easy (not really). All I had to do was figure out a progression in the story and challenges that would allow the dungeon to be folded and unfolded in a way that would lead players through it. As they figure out how the dungeon works, they confront Jaffee's pets, inspirations, failed experiments, and the three servants of Awhout-rout-yuth - all imprisoned in the dungeon. - before finally facing Jaffee himself - now possessed by the Mad God, who they can defeat in different ways.

Anyway - here is my One Page Dungeon for you to download and play with your group. Note - because you need to be able to fold the page, you will need to print it out to use it (or photoshop up the different configurations). The adventure is game-system agnostic (one of the rules of the contest), though it should be pretty easy to adapt it at run time if you play DnD or Pathfinder, or pretty much any fantasy RPG. I have also uploaded four characters that I used to test the adventure with my different gaming groups. The characters are made using a game system I have been developing for the past 10 years... COMING SOON!). While you won't be able to use these characters without my TTRPG rules, you should be able to roughly understand how they could translate your favourite system if you want to use them. Also, they include a little bit of individual backstory that connects them to the plot and gives more context to the story.

If you like this format, you can PWYW for the Compendium of all the 2022 One Page Dungeon contest entries (there were 84!). Even if you played one a week with your group, they will last you easily until next year's contest, so that's a good deal. I've only had a chance to skim through the book, but there are several in there that look really cool. My own entry made it into the Winners Circle, which, after looking at the competition, I must say I am proud of. You can see the list of the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions here.

Also worth noting, this would not have been possible without Dungeon Scrawl by @ProbableTrain. This is just a fantastic tool for making quick and easy underground dungeon maps to a high level of quality. In general, I don't make dungeon crawl style adventures, but that was what The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! needed to be, and I couldn't have done it without a tool that allowed me to make and test a lot of different iterations quickly... even working on graph paper was tricky as I went through about 40 iterations before I even figured out the basics of how the dungeon needed to fold - so the digital tool really made that more efficient and less wasteful.

Perhaps I'll post more another time about some of the many online tools I've been using to build up my RPG game rules and content.

A final thanks also to my own playtesters... you know who you are. I couldn't have gotten this dungeon together with your skill and passion.

Anyway, hope you enjoy playing, and feel inspired to submit next year!

Out of the shadows...

For those wondering what I've been up to for the past while, here's the news; a year or so ago I moved back to Montreal, and have been working on an upcoming Assassin's Creed game.

Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe was revealed with a teaser in the AC Showcase that aired as par to Ubisoft Forward over the weekend. While it is only a teaser / logo reveal, it's always exciting to share the news: so here it is in all it's ~20ish seconds of glory.

 

One Page Dungeon Contest 2022

Years ago, I used to do a lot of tabletop RPG gaming. I played almost every weekend for probably about 15 years from the time I joined my first real D&D group as part of a high school club in 1986 (yes, exactly like in Stranger Things), until I moved to Montreal in 2001 to become a professional videogame developer and was separated from my longtime gaming groups.

Over the years we tried many different games and systems. Starting from the original red box D&D basic set that I learned on, then moving to AD&D, Top Secret, Gamma World, Paranoia, Traveller, GURPS, and a weird but delightful science-fiction game made by a friend called EXP, and certainly some others that I have since forgotten.

This story gets a lot more complex and interesting in ways I'll discuss soon, but to get to the point - when COVID landed, I reached back out to my old gaming group, and we started playing again online. Over the course of the last 2+ years we've played most weekends using Zoom and Miro and other online tools to facilitate play. It's been a blast, and honestly, in some ways the pandemic has probably been a net positive for me thanks to that.

Recently, in looking for adventure materials, I started to come across of a lot of one page dungeons - which I find interesting and convenient. Soon, a search for one page dungeons led me to the One Page Dungeon Contest website, where they have been running an annual contest for the past 13 years! So I decided to enter.

I designed a dungeon, playtested it a couple of times, and submitted it a couple weeks ago. Since the contest is still open, I'm not going to share my dungeon yet - but you can at least read the blurb on the submission page. Mine is titled The Fantastical Folding Fortress of Jaffee the Mad! Also - you still have a few days before the contest closes, and there is no better way to get your hands on a pile of new content for your players than submitting an entry - as I understand it, all entrants will receive a copy of compendium that includes all the submissions - which I am very much looking forward to.

Once the contest is finished, I'll share my dungeon here as well, and I'll probably also include the pre-generated characters I made for my playtesters to use while testing it for me. Perhaps along with a few other surprises...

The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 7

To conclude this series on my favorite pieces about Far Cry 2, I have chosen a handful of pieces that, for one reason or another, I felt did not ‘fit’ in the Top 10. I chose to keep there pieces separate from the Top 10 for a few different reasons.

For example, a couple of the pieces here are only available in print or for purchase as e-book, and it seemed pointless to blog about them without being able to link directly. I’ve included those here. Included also are a few pieces that were too contemporary to the game - something I largely tried to avoid in the Top 10. Also included is a YouTube clip that is more entertainment than analysis, and a piece of the Far Cry 2 discourse that was so unique that it simply didn’t belong with the rest.

Far Cry 2 and the Dirty Mirror - an essay in Shooter
Disclaimer: I was the author of the forward to this collection of essays edited by Reid McCarter and Patrick Lindsey.
While overall Lindsey’s analysis of Far Cry 2 was fairly standard, and didn’t stray too far from the critical consensus, it was of note that he leaned into the then-emerging discussion of the self-aware shooter. Lindsey discusses Far Cry 2 as an example of a game that uses it mechanics and dynamics, rather than its authored story or cinematics to invite the player to question their actions and their application of violence to achieve their goals. While I think Lindsey’s piece is worth reading on its own, I especially wanted to include it in this list because many of the other essays in the book are also worth reading. If you’re reading these blog posts, and you’re interested in the critical discussion of games in general, Shooter is worth reading.

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell (Chapter 8)
Like Shooter, Bissell’s book Extra Lives is not exclusively about Far Cry 2. Bissell discusses numerous games in the book, and each chapter is devoted largely to a different game. Bissell’s analysis is more personal and intimate that most other pieces written about the game, and the book as a whole reads almost as a travelogue of Bissell’s journey through the medium and his developing understanding of how games achieve their creative aims and (as the subtitle suggests) ‘why video games matter’. Bissell is an accomplished author coming from outside the industry and outside the critical circles of the speciality press, so his take is refreshing (though since the book, Bissell has gone on to write for over a dozen different games). Whether you want to read more about Far Cry 2 or not, I highly recommend Extra Lives.

Three pieces written contemporaneously with the game
One of my criteria in selecting pieces of the Top 10 was to steer clear of pieces written within the six months or so around when the game released. I made this decision for several reasons, but principally, I was more interested in focusing on criticism and analysis more than reviews. This was a tough razor to apply, and ultimately I did end up including a few pieces that were written close to the game’s release. Here are three more that I came across and among the last to get shuffled out of the Top 10.

Seeing Africa Down the Barrel of a Gun by Iroquois Pliskin
Heart of Dimness: Half-baked Nihilism in Far Cry 2 by Anthony Burch
Far Cry 2: The Heart of Darkness Game by L.B. Jeffries

Nick tries to Ambush Far Cry 2 while Chris Remo plays music
The Idle Thumbs gang were big supporters of the game, and I’ve always enjoyed reading their stuff, listening to their podcasts, and talking to them about the game. This two minutes of footage is pure Far Cry 2 gold; one tiny mistake and everything goes to shit. Also, while I absolutely love the games soundtrack by composer Marc Canham, I can only dream of one day playing the game with Chris Remo riding shotgun and providing a real time score.

Permadeath - by Ben Abraham
Finally, it should come as no surprise that Abraham’s permadeath experiment is on this list. Not only was Ben part of the early critical discussion surrounding the game, but his record of his permadeath playthrough inspired many others to play the game the same way. In hindsight, the PDF of his experience is a complete oddity, and utterly unique in video game criticism; it’s 400 pages of screenshots and descriptions of Abraham’s playthrough, culminating in his death (and then his choice to carry on anyway). This is Twitch before Twitch, and had Abraham undertaken this experiment 3 years later, it might have been seen by millions. I read through it again recently and was struck also by the introduction I had written for it at Abraham’s request. It’s interesting for me to re-read those words in consideration of my own mental state when I wrote them. Six months later, I would leave Ubisoft to walk ‘back into the terrible unknown’. Life imitates art, I guess.

Conclusion
So that concludes my celebration of some of the best writing about Far Cry 2. Now that I've done 10 year posts for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and for Far Cry 2, I am out of games to write 10 year posts about. I badly wish I could be three years away from putting up a ten year retrospective on some game I made at LucasArts or Valve or Amazon - but the waves just didn't break that way.

That said, I'm working as hard as I can to get you all something you can write about for the next ten years. Thanks so much for all of your support and passion and engagement. Without all of you playing, talking and writing about this game, I very likely would not be here today working on the next one.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 6

I don’t think anyone could have predicted this would be my number one. For all of the number ones you were expecting, you’ll have to check Part 7 once it goes up in a couple of days. Part 7 won’t be so much a list of honorable mentions, as it will be a list of alternate #1s that didn’t seem to fit the rest of the list.

#1 - a post by Akoomsh
‘Never read the comments’, says the popular wisdom. And to be honest, I’m not even sure how I originally came across this obscure post by a random player on the Steam forums. But I saved it to my Instapaper account, and over the past few years since it appeared in 2013, I’ve gone back and re-read it several times.

I think this piece is important for a number of reasons. First, it’s not criticism, so much as opinion writing; it’s not directed at the creators and it doesn’t exist within the established circles of critical discussion. It’s not a reply to someone else’s blog post, article or retrospective. It’s not an attempt to generate clickthroughs or page views. It lives on its own, and from a reach perspective, it may just as well have been written in a diary and tucked under a pillow.

Furthermore, one gets the impression (or at least I make the assumption) from reading it, that the author is not even particularly familiar with the critical discourse surrounding the game. He claims to have read comments - likely forum posts themselves - about the game, but does not seem to be regurgitating other people’s messages from the usual sources. He seems - at least to me - to have arrived at his assessment of the game on his own. The fact that he’s not really saying anything new is not important at all - the fact that he is arriving at his conclusions and his assessment of the game autonomously is what matters to me. His does not appear to be an opinion constructed from exposure to the opinions of others. It feels to me, at least, to be genuine.

It helps, of course, that he is celebrating the experience we intended. I could easily point to a thousand forum posts that are equally detached from the critical discussion that lambast the game for its many unconventional designs. I’m biased in pulling the one forum post in a million from the player who ‘gets it’. I hope you’ll indulge me.

Because in many ways, that’s the entire point of this exercise. For years before Far Cry 2 I frequently asserted that I don’t make games for reviews, or for money, or for any of the superficial reasons that I am a professional game developer. I asserted that the reason I make games is to contribute to the discussion about what games are and what they can be. The thing I have often claimed to value above all is the sincere feedback of other developers, and the opinions and impressions of those players who choose to deeply engage. I have often said that if the games I worked on could change the perspective of one person, it would all be worth it.

Going ten years without having shipped a game has made it enormously difficult to keep believing that. In the first couple of years after Far Cry 2 is was still an easy position to hold. After 5 years and a couple of failed attempts at a couple of different jobs, it became harder. After Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory reached its ten year anniversary, I was pretty full of self-doubt. Maybe just making games for a paycheque should be enough. Maybe I was holding a position that easy to hold for a guy who’d been lucky enough to work on a few critically acclaimed games in a row. Maybe it was only privilege and fluke that allowed me to claim some higher purpose in my work. Maybe I should just shut the fuck up and do some work - put my mouth where the money was instead of vice versa….

But this is the one; Akoomsh is the one player in a million who gets it. And he gets it not because he read all the other articles by the people who are like him, the people with whom he is predisposed to agree. He gets it on his own. By his own admission, he struggled with the game, and he found his own way to what the game is about. Far Cry 2 changed his perception of what games are and what they can be, and what they can say, and how they can say it. Akoomsh, and some invisible minority of people like him, are the reason I make games, and this forum post is worth more to me than a 10/10 on a popular website, or a big bonus earned for hitting a sales target. It’s proof that the things I believe aren’t futile and that I’m not just flailing at windmills.

It’s proof that games are worth fighting for - even if fighting means a decade of losing. And I owe it to all the Akoomshes out there to keep fighting.

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The Tin Man of Far Cry 2: Part 5

The Number Two in my Top 10 definitely breaks my ‘rule’ about not using pieces that were written in the first six months or so if the game’s release. I chose this one, however, because I feel it doesn’t come off as a review so much and it has a timeless quality about.

#2 - Africa Wins Again: Far Cry 2’s Literary Approach to Narrative
I’ve chosen Tom Armitage’s piece because I think it is one of the earliest pieces that comprehensively addresses the major design and narrative elements of the game and structures them around a unified argument. The argument itself; that Far Cry 2’s structure is somehow more literary than that of other games, is not one I necessarily agree with, but it does provide a way for him to structure his criticism.

In many ways, Armitage’s piece presents the core arguments that Keever’s piece in the Number 9 spot counters. A lot of time passed between Armitage’s piece in 2008 and Keever’s in 2017, and many of Keever’s criticisms are interesting and fair - but Keever also makes those criticisms after having played Spec Ops: The Line, and Kane and Lynch 2; games that did not exist when Armitage was writing. Similarly, Keever’s understanding of Ludonarrative Dissonance is much more sophisticated than Armitage’s (or mine) was in 2008, and stands on the shoulders of excellent analysis such as that of Polansky from 2015. If only we knew in 2005 what we know today, Far Cry 2 would have been a much better game.

Overall, I think Armitage’s piece is important, and it earns its place at #2, because I think it is the piece that best encapsulates the favorable side of the commentary around the game when it shipped. I think the more critical commentary around the game in that time frame was far less sophisticated, and it took many years before the criticism of what the game was not succeeding at was finally properly articulated.

I think one of the things that is unique about Far Cry 2 is that it arrived at a time when game criticism was becoming suddenly more sophisticated. As a game that (arguably) merited more sophisticated discussion, its very existence attracted a kind of critic, and a kind of writing that was probably predisposed to be favourable. At least that’s how I interpret the imbalance of critical writing about Far Cry 2, circa 2008/9 with the benefit of hindsight.

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