Far Cry 3 does a lot of things right. It's fun to play, the island setting is beautiful, sneaking around is a lot of fun, gunplay is solid, and everything works well. But the story… well, the story has some issues.

As I pointed out in my review, the unevenness and general kinda dumbness of the narrative is the thing that holds Far Cry 3 back from "we'll still talk about this in five years" glory. I'm midway through my second playthrough, and the problems with the story are more apparent than ever.

It's never terrible (and at times is perfectly enjoyable), but the storytelling is often lazy, sometimes irritating, occasionally offensive, and never manages to come together into a unified vision. And the ending just flat-out stinks.

However, with a single change to the story, Ubisoft could have addressed almost every problem the game's story has. Not only that, Far Cry 3's story could have gone from "forgettable romp" to "everyone is calling this the best story of the year."

"Oh, god," you may lament, "surely you aren't going to engage in this worst sort of Monday-morning quarterbacking! Surely you aren't about to suggest your own ending while ignoring all of the development hurdles that make writing a video game so uniquely difficult?"

Yes, I'm afraid I am. Indulge me for a moment, and let's imagine what might have been.

We're going to have some big ol' Far Cry 3 spoilers in here. Okay.

First, the problems. Here they are:

• It's tonally inconsistent. Far Cry 3's tone is all over the place. We've got serious business going down, Jason's brother gets killed, there's a super-dark rape subplot, people are being subjugated, murdered, and sold into slavery. But then there's Jason's stoner friend cracking drug jokes, the out-of-place Quentin Tarantino references, the ridiculous (though awesome) pot-farm burning mission, and all manner of wacky CIA hijinks. Generally, the story's tone is all over the place.
• The heroes are assholes. There's an argument to be made that we're not supposed to like Jason and his motley band of attractive white kids. But that's never really explored by the story… we just sort of leave them after a certain point, and they return for the ridiculous, tacked-on conclusion. They're all assholes, including Jason. I wanted them all to die, including Jason.
• The race stuff. Far Cry 3 handles race in some pretty problematic ways. Far too often it relies on the "Magical Negro" trope, and Jason is given tribal tattoos that allow him to "access his inner warrior" and become a badass. Particularly in sidequests, the native people of the island are portrayed as helpless simpletons who are just thrilled that this untrained white boy from California has decided to come and save them all.
• It's not believable. There's a big difference between realistic and believable, and games generally can skip the former if they're nailing the latter. But Far Cry 3, when you step back and think about it, never feels realistic or believable. Why is this kid suddenly able to save everyone on the island? How is he any more qualified than any of Citra's many tattooed warriors? Why is everyone behaving the way they are? Why does Vaas go to such Bond Villain-like lengths to kill Jason in elaborate ways? Why are we being asked to accept that rich white Americans can be kidnapped and sold into slavery?
• It ditches the best character. The best character in Far Cry 3 isn't Jason, nor any of his friends. It's not Citra, it's not any of the other questgivers, and it's certainly not Hoyt. The real star of Far Cry 3 is Vaas, the manic, menacing pirate overlord who so entertainingly pursues you for the first 2/3rds of the game. And yet after a certain point, you simply go and… kill him. In a dream-sequence? And he's never heard from again. What a waste!

So, those are the main problems with the story, as I see 'em. But here's the thing: The entire story could have been salvaged by a simple decision, a plot point I felt was telegraphed throughout the entire game, and which I was perplexed never came to pass:

Halfway through the game, it's revealed that you're not Jason. You never were. You're Vaas.

OMG.

TWIST.

This could've been made to work with the existing content in a number of ways. Let's say the entire first half of the game is an elaborate hallucination brought on by, I don't know, torture and imprisonment. How about this: Vaas was a successful worker for Hoyt until his power over the island grew too strong, and he pissed Hoyt off by failing to kill an American kid who escaped him. An American named... JASON BRODY.

Hang on, hold on, okay. Back up. That image is from the handbook in the game. Let's see here. Here we've got this guy:

and this guy:

One looks like a bad mother, probably crazy enough that he could cause some damage. The other looks like a grade-A doof. I don't mean to say that the doof's story can't be interesting, but it'd be more interesting to tell us the doof is the hero, then pull the rug out from under us.

Anyway. Back to making stuff up. The particulars of this aren't really that important; there are a handful of ways that the twist could be made to work. Here's one: Hoyt had Vaas tortured and imprisoned, where Vaas relived his downfall through the imagined eyes of his nemesis, recreating Jason's exploits and greatly exaggerating his prowess. As it turns out, Jason just sort of got lucky and evaded Vaas—but in Vaas' twisted mind, Jason was granted magical powers by Vaas' sister Citra and became an all-powerful Rambo. How else could he have eluded Vaas for so long?

At the point in the story when Jason kills Vaas, instead of dying, Vaas re-awakens and it's revealed that Vaas actually killed Jason, and you take control of Vaas. You break out of Hoyt's prison and spend the remainder of the game taking down Hoyt and conquering the island. Maybe there's a sequence where you kill Jason's friends. Sweet.

Not only would this be one of the boldest, most talked-about narrative twists of the last few years, it would solve so many of the problems listed above. We wouldn't have to swallow the idea that an untrained twentysomething rando could take down an entire army. The disdain shown to the islanders would make more sense, given that we're seeing everything through Vaas' eyes.

The tonal inconsistencies would be turned on their heads, and it'd match with the kinda cheesy, pop-dark vibe of the game. The moment we assumed the role of a gleeful villain, it would be much easier to shoot, burn, and pillage our way through the Rook Islands. The white savior thing from the first half would dissolve into irony. The asshole main characters would all get killed, thank god, and our vendetta against Hoyt would feel less abrupt. And best of all, the game would really feel like it was about something: About insanity and dominance, about taking what you want and using it to take more.

The more I think about it, the more I'm surprised Far Cry 3 didn't go this route. Even the menu and loading screens play with the idea of duality: Fading, Rorschach-like inkblots of Vaas and Jason blend into one another. The "characters" screen of the game's handbook shows Vaas standing behind Jason, with a gun pointed at his head. Even the cover of the game prominently features Vaas, with Jason (or someone?) buried up to his nose in sand.

I don't know about you, but if I saw that cover and knew nothing about the game, I'd guess it was about the guy in the red tanktop.

Every time the two characters meet, there's this weird tension, like we're not being told the whole story. How is Jason surviving all this, again? Why is Vaas talking about the definition of insanity, and how that means doing things over, and over, and over? As Vaas lectures Jason about family, love and madness; as Jason wanders through hallucinations and sees Vaas at every corner, every Fight Club alarm in my brain went off. Surely I am this guy, right?

But nope. Apparently Vaas is just some jerk who sort of dies in a dream sequence.

Putting my pie-in-the-sky imaginary endings aside for a minute, my broader point is that many games, even good ones like Far Cry 3, could be taking more risks and telling more interesting stories. Games like Red Dead Redemption and this year's flawed but ambitious Spec Ops: The Line have toyed with similar ideas, and I hope to see more big-budget games taking on similar notions in the future. Considering the high level of across-the-board talent responsible for Far Cry 3, it doesn't seem out of line to have hoped for more.

"The whole game is about subverting video game cliches," Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffery Yohalem told me when I spoke with him back at E3 . "It's a psychological adventure. We're definitely trying to question what a game is, and I think that's what Far Cry 2 did as well, where they tried to explore the limits of video games. And our game is about video games to a huge degree, and about what you expect from video games, and how we change things up."

When I heard "change things up" and "subverting video game cliches," I was expecting something truly surprising. What I got were some well-written characters, a couple of quality drug trips, a helicopter minigun sequence lifted from Apocalypse Now and a final moral choice that made no sense.

Oh, well. At least the game is super fun.

Since you can't charter a joyflight to give you a leisurely look at Far Cry 3 in its entirety, you'll just have to do the next best thing: watch someone jump off a roof wearing a wingsuit and film it.

There are points where it borders on being the intro to some epic fantasy movie, as you see goats frolic in the fields and rolling green hills meet a crashing blue sea.

If you want to try it yourself, the video's creator, BillerKee, has left this map showing where the jump-off point was.

Far Cry 3: Proximity Wingsuit BASE Jump [YouTube, via PC Gamer]

You know how people ask where you were when something important happened? Usually it's for really huge things—a big baseball game, an assassination, a presidential election. They tend to be generation-defining things, stuff that permeates our cultural consciousness.

For games it might not be so much "where were you" but "what game were you playing?" And last night, it happened; I had one of those moments where I became particularly aware of something important, something that captured a shift that's happening in games right now.

I had a choice between two newly-released games: one, a highly-lauded triple-A game. Far Cry 3. The second, a Facebook game. The Friend Game. I'd been playing both that day, so I had a good sense of what both offered. At first glance, they are absurdly different games that might not seem equatable: one is an open world first person shooter. The other is a Zynga game where you get to know your friends.

Maybe not so different, though. Last week while speaking to Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton the subject of feeling a designer's presence and humanity in a game came up.

You ever play a game that you can just plainly see where a developer is hooking you? A calculated feel. All games are designed, yes, but I mean this veneer of superficiality that some games have. Famously, that's what we often point out in Facebook/Social games. But we weren't talking about social games. We were talking about Far Cry 3. Kirk elaborates:

"A game like Far Cry 3, say, is kind of an ultimate focus group game - it is AMAZING, but it's also like, perfect, like if you'd just asked 100 gamers to describe their ultimate shooter and then made it really, really well. It's not bad (at all), but it isn't magic in the same way as a Persona (or a Tokyo Jungle or a Papo and Yo or a Journey or a whathaveyou. Or hell even Far Cry 2.)"

Not a knock on Far Cry 3, to be sure. It seems weird to criticize a game for giving you exactly what you ask for, but in a sense it's kind of like having a stranger just kind of nod and fake-smile at everything you say, giving you exactly what you want to hear, versus having the rough moments of tension with an actual friend. Which do you value more?

Here's the rub: a game that gives you what you want? Wonderful. There is nothing wrong with that, even though personally I feel bored of jumping into a game and kind of knowing exactly what I'm about to get. It's kind of indulgent like that, playing these focus-group games.

We might have rolled our eyes when the phrase "It's Skyrim with guns" came up as a description of Far Cry 3, but the fact that idea can exist is a testament to the ‘safe' heritage Far Cry 3 pulls from. Take a proven, successful game (Skyrim). Okay, tweak it a little bit and, tada! Far Cry 3. It's a good game, but it's also kind of boring—paradoxical, I know.

The Friend Game, meanwhile, also gives us 'what we ask for,' at least inasmuch as it has tried and true social-game design elements. In this case, those elements are being used in the context of answering questions about one another. Think questions like "Does [friend] sleep naked?" Stephen breaks down how it works in his article about the game,

Answering questions like those about yourself and your friends is how you play The Friend Game. Correctly indicating how your friend would have answered the same question-about herself or about you-is how you win.

The Friend Game works because it appeals more to the things we like to do on the internet. Get connected, absorb information—particularly, things where we get a glimpse of lives of other people.

Not just any people, but our friends. We have a pre-existing personal investment, so when the game gives us an opportunity to learn more factoids about each other through quizzes, the pull extends well beyond the game. The game just streamlines what we might typically gather about someone through social media, hanging out with each other, and gossip.

Interesting things happen, dynamics-wise, in my relationships with the people playing The Friend Game with me. For example: when the game asks me if a friend would trust their life with me, these are the questions that arise.

Would she? I don't think we know each other that well. I don't think she would...
Well, I wouldn't. Why would someone else trust their lives to me? Woah. Woah.
But wait. What if she says she would out of courtesy? Hell, to what extent is what people say about me how they really feel, and to what extent is it something they say because answering in specific ways might be upsetting? Cripes, I don't know!

It's perfect for Facebook, really, as Stephen told us. I can't help but think of the original purpose of the site, where people judged how hot other people were. Facebook has always been about judging other people. Now there's a game around that, only we're juggling what we really think with what the other person wants to hear versus what type of relationship we actually have. Who am I the most honest with? Why? I'm fascinated that a game is making me ask these questions.

Zynga might've designed it specifically to keep us playing, but the wider social aspects of the game are things they can't really control. These messy things are, for me, what give the game a charm that Far Cry 3 doesn't have.

Tim Rogers, friend of Kotaku and one of the writers for The Friend Game, joked that we should wait until "it starts asking you if such-and-such friend would live out the rest of their life in solitary confinement if doing so brought about world peace . . . and you say no and the friend unfriends you because they are so offended."

And, yes, he's not being serious, but still—I could totally see something like that happening. And, more importantly, it reflects on what happens after we play—when I'm thinking, huh, really, is that how people see me? Why did they answer that way? Are we as close as we thought? Closer, maybe?

That's the beauty of it. The Friend Game plays with us more than we play with it. So, when I had the choice between Far Cry 3 and The Friend Game last night, it actually didn't really feel like a choice. Far Cry is a reminder that all highs fade, and soon enough we'll move on to another game—maybe "Far Cry with wands" or something. And not to overly-hype it up or anything, but The Friend Game has the potential to stay with you—make you think, maybe. Or, more interestingly, actually alter your relationships a bit.

I played a Facebook game instead of a triple-A game yesterday. I look forward to being able to say that more and more, in the same way that this year saw me playing more indie games, more not-quite-games, more personal games, more mobile games. This year was strange like that, wasn't it? Exciting, but strange.

So the choice between Far Cry 3 and The Friend Game felt significant—like, you hear that these new-fangled social and mobile games are taking over, but maybe at best you've seen it happen around you or, maybe at best these new games are but a temporary distraction from the ‘real games' we're meat to return to. For me, that wasn't the case last night.

Just cause Jason Brody's vacation didn't go exactly according to plan doesn't mean he's not going to take advantage of the opportunity to take some quality photographs of his travels.

Excluding the bloodier events, let's sit back and take a virtual tour of Rook Islands, as photographed by Jason Brody himself. Or, more accurately, Redditor HanzJimmer. Great, now I need to go on a vacation to a tropical island somewhere, brb.

And the tigers wept, and the tapirs sang: Ubisoft has confirmed that they're working on a patch for Far Cry 3 that will let players adjust or remove the game's clutter-y user interface.

In a statement sent to Kotaku:

Based on feedback from both press and fans, the Far Cry 3 production team is working on a patch that will allow you to toggle most HUD/UI elements based on player preference. The patch will also avoid issues encountered in the .dll hack that might create a mission walkthrough break (missing QTE prompts, critical information, etc;). The team is excited about how the Far Cry 3 community and fans of the game are enjoying themselves, and finding new ways to experience the Rook Islands. More news will be coming on the patch shortly…

Far Cry 3 is a lot of fun, but the screen-clutter kind of a mess, particularly if you're pretty good at the game and don't want to be told what to do all the time. Unfortunately, the game didn't ship with any way to turn that mess off—most players would just have to be content with constant notifications popping up every few minutes.

This week, some folks came up with a way to hack the PC version so that the HUD vanishes entirely. (The HUD-free screen up top is from my game with that tweak active.) I like playing that way, but it does come with its share of annoyances. A more preferable solution would be if Ubisoft let us choose how much or little of the UI we wanted to see.

Sounds like they're giving us exactly that. There's no ETA on the patch, but hopefully it'll be out in time for most players' second go-round.

Apparently, this Bioshock Easter egg is only available if you preordered or if you have a special edition of Far Cry 3—so some of you may not actually be able to see this in-person. That's okay. Would you kindly watch this video?

Far Cry 3 is a very good game. So good that, even after beating the main story, all of the radio towers and a good percentage of the outposts, I've started a new game and am still playing.

All these hours later, one thing still grates: No matter what you do, you can't turn off the game's screen-cluttering UI training wheels.

Thankfully, if you're playing on PC, now you can.

Yesterday, a .dll file tweak made the rounds that allows you to do remove all HUD elements from the game—with a simple .dll tweak in a HEX editor, every single one of the game's UI pop-ups, from the mission reminders to the minimap, vanishes.

The tip was posted to Reddit by user GaulKareth, transcribed from a video made by BenderisPlaying. It took me about five minutes to implement the hack. Here's how:

DX9/10: Locate and backup \bin\FC3.DLL, then open the original file with a HEX editor, I'm using Hex Workshop.
DX11: Locate and backup \bin\FC3_d3d11.dll, then open the original file with HEX editor.
Search for "showuielement"
In the next few lines you will see S.h.o.w.U.I.E.l.e.m.e.n.t.
Replace the S.h.o.w.U.I.E.l.e.m.e.n.t. with H.i.d.e.U.I.E.l.e.m.e.n.t.

The Reddit post also has a way to remove the various "accent" sound effects the game makes to go along with the HUD, but I actually don't mind those, so I left them in.

I've been playing the game with no HUD for the past day to see how it works, since I didn't want to just recommend doing this if it messes up the game. Fortunately, this tweak works perfectly, causes no stability problems, and really does make Far Cry 3 feel different.

One Caveat: The only problem I've come across with this tweak is that on some story missions, you'll be required to do quicktime events, and the prompts no longer show up on-screen. I got attacked underwater by a pirate on a mission, and was unable to guess my way to victory. I had to quit the game, go to my backed up original .dll, and fire it back up. The bummer was that the QTE happened near the end of the mission, and thanks to Far Cry 3's stupid save system, I had to play the whole thing over again.

If you're going to implement this hack, keep a backup of your original .dll file easily accessible (you're doing that anyway, right?). Then, going back to the UI is a matter of a quick copy/paste. Alternatively, you could go check out a let's play video and find the QTE in question, I suppose, if you've already played the game and don't mind seeing it again.

I wouldn't recommend this for people going through for the first time: You'll have to be pretty familiar with the button prompts, your weapon-wheel is gone, and you won't get contextual cues to do takedowns and the like. (Though if you are playing for the first time, I've got some beginner's tips for you, as well.) But if you're a seasoned player, taking off the training wheels is just the thing.

Just like when removing the HUD from Grand Theft Auto IV, you'll quickly acclimate and begin to experience the Rook Islands in a more intense, heightened way. It's so much fun that it's all the more bizarre that Ubisoft opted to leave any HUD-adjustments out of the Options menu. It'd be great, for example, if I could just have a compass on-screen. (And I guess it'd be too much to ask for Far Cry 2's awesome in-game map.)

Luke agrees:

Like any good open-world game, Far Cry 3 is built around redundancy. You don't need to see enemies on the mini-map, because you can tag them with your camera. And you don't even need tags, because if you use your ears, you can hear them. Or, you can finally use those combat syringes you crafted but never wound up using. You don't need a waypoint to tell you where an outpost is, because outposts all spout columns of smoke that can be seen for miles. You don't need to mark radio towers on your map because radio towers are… well, radio towers. They're pretty visible. Want to know where to go next? Do what you'd do in real life: Make for higher ground and look.

Other things to try: Dial up the difficulty to hard. Experiment with your weapon loadout (No sniper rifle? Pistols only? Fire weapons only?). Turn off the music, turn off enemy tagging. Suddenly, it'll be like you're playing a whole new game. Or at least, a very different one.

I'm being glib with the "best" thing, of course—there's no one "best" way to play a game. This mod is something of a scorched-earth approach, but until more mods surface or Ubi patches the game, it's an interesting and fun way to go. There are some other early mods and patches floating around, notably some patches that remove elements from the minimap, but I haven't tried them, so I don't know if they work or not. If you've used any other tweaks, I hope you'll share your experience in the comments.

There's some concern on Reddit and elsewhere that tweaking your .dll will get you banned from Uplay. I haven't been able to turn up any evidence of this happening to anyone (and it hasn't happened to me), but I've sent a note off to Ubisoft to ask if this kind of thing can get people in trouble. I'll update if I hear back.

In the meantime, I'm having a blast. A game that used to look like this:

now looks like this:

Nice.

How to remove all HUD/UI & Sound indicators in Far Cry 3 [Reddit]

Darktown.

It's long been my favorite area in Dragon Age II, a stupid name that embodies the worst in fantasy game lore-writing. My friends and I have taken to calling it "dorktown," and I can still quote the codex entry by heart.

"The foul miasma known as chokedamp clogs and swells in every corner of the Darktown."

Chokedamp! Good times.

I've already talked about how much I love the weapon-descriptions in the game, and this little chestnut in the "Badtown" description made me laugh.

Conscious shout-out to Dragon Age II? Accidental reference that just illustrates how bad the name "Darktown" really is? We may never know.

Either Freddy Jr has discovered a particularly brutal glitch in Far Cry 3 or the vehicles of Rook Island have some dark ulterior motives.

Whatever the case may be, no cranium is safe from the hungry maw of this Jeep's flatbed, which spews forth blood redder than pirate balaclavas and more plentiful than a Miike film. The horror...

FPS Russia is one of my favorite YouTubers, because I get to live vicariously through him shooting weapons that I doubt I could get my hands on.

Yesterday the esteemed shooter uploaded a video to show off some of Far Cry 3's weapons, which Kirk is a big fan of.

Watch FPS Russia shoot Far Cry 3 enemies Vaas and Buck with the various weapons, and definitely stick around for the end when he whips out the Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. Holy shit.