Far cry 3 stops working series#

Horseback combat that sees you dashing through the legs of a massive beast echoes the melancholy danger of Shadow of the Colossus. Watching the wisps of light act as a prompt for adventure that you could choose to follow or ignore feels a lot like Ghost of Tsushima’s excellent Guiding Wind. Being able to tag points of interest on the map and see them represented as pillars of light in the world brings to mind exploring Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. And from the looks of it, Elden Ring’s open world is going to be filled with these rewarding little micro mines, dungeons, and catacombs that feel like classic FromSoftware locations through and through.ĭuring the Elden Ring demo, I saw shades of some of my favorite open-world games - the ones that have managed to truly stand out among their countless peers. It gives these moments of discovery a personal touch, and with enough of them scattered throughout the adventure, the story you’re telling suddenly starts to feel much more authored. For me, open-world games excel when your own natural curiosity and experimentation results in finding something completely unexpected and exciting.

Far cry 3 stops working series#

This is further enunciated by what seems like a complete lack of fall damage, which is an absolute win in my book.īut the standout moment for me came about halfway through, when the player dropped down a series of inconspicuous ledges, only to find an entrance to a dungeon nestled into the mountainside at the bottom.

And there are boost pads that allow your horse-thing to jump stupidly high into the air, which points to FromSoftware firmly understanding that, first and foremost, the act of getting from point A to point B in an open-world game needs to feel fun. Combat scales from Sekiro-esque stealth kills assisted by sleeping arrows you craft on the fly, to enough magic arrows and enchanted storm clouds that’d make Big Hat Logan blush, to summoning just an absolute mess of weird little goblin ghosts to help you ransack an enemy encampment. The developer’s trademark weirdo NPCs to chat with, like a talking urn named Alexander the Iron Fist that speaks with a British accent. The recent gameplay has so many little touches that I love. The gameplay here looks like it pulls various tenets that FromSoftware has honed throughout the Souls series, Bloodborne, and Sekrio games, but is now fitting those pieces inside the structure of an open world that lends itself to the kinds of personal and dynamic gameplay moments that we love to excitedly tell our friends about. And if what we saw in the most recent 15-minute look at gameplay is any indication, 2022’s Elden Ring looks like just the game we need to inject some life into one of gaming’s most popular, and increasingly stagnant, genres.įirst off, it feels like Elden Ring is going to have all the things we already love from the team’s previous games. A sprawling map littered with infinite tasks that ultimately feel like busywork just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.īut if there’s anyone who could get us out of our current open-world malaise, it’s the folks at FromSoftware. As we’ve seen from the recent collective shrug that games like Far Cry 6 have been met with, some are growing tired of this design philosophy appearing in everything from shooters to RPGs to historical epics to space operas. The formula that the likes of Grand Theft Auto III, Assassins Creed, and Far Cry 3 helped bring to the forefront of gaming feels like it’s been inserted into nearly every other AAA game we see nowadays, sometimes seemingly for no other reason than the thought that bigger must equal better. That said, the genre in 2021 is absolutely in a bit of a rut.

Despite what some people might tell you (*cough* our pal Yahtzee *cough*), open-world games aren’t dead.