Post-Mortem: The Far Cry Campaign You CAN'T Play Anymore

I've bought an extra 16gbs of RAM, 4TB M.2 SSD, and intended on letting my computer transcode footage into multi-gigabyte uncompressed titan files.

Why?

Because I really like this video, and making it should've been more fun than it was.

The final product was ultimately worth it for me.

Now, all the hours spent watching my Timeline chug along at the equivalent of four frames per second every time I wanted to move a music track .25 seconds further, aren't eating up my memory.

Instead I think back to, despite being 42 minutes in duration with frequent cuts to in-game clips from my playthrough of Far Cry 3's coop mode, there's still so much you didn't see, and so much I desperately tried to squeeze in, even if it could only be seen rather than heard like the flying AK47, Jake's teleporting revive, and Kacey's uncanny speed along ziplines as a fat ex-cop.

In terms of tone, this video really reminded me of my Codemasters Overview of the F1 games, mainly stemming from the sheer amount of genuinely funny and charming clips which appeared during my playthrough.

I've known Jake, JK, and Kacey for a long time via The Shambles Championship, and our chemistry definitely carried over.

Being able to setup sequences like JK's desync in the final chapter was comedy gold, but in reality, I'm just the one placing said gold; all of it was created in the moment via playthrough that chemistry.

It wasn't my idea to shoot at Jake when he asked for help, that was all JK, and it made the moment all the better as it ended up chaining together with so many other events so perfectly.

As an editor, I don't get excited at the big finale explanations or rapid cuts, in-fact, I really hate those as they take so much work for sometimes less than ten seconds…

I get excited at things like JK's desync clip and by total accident, cut the footage in such a way that when I fade the screen to show the "Long Range Kill" medal, it looks like I'm reversing the footage.

That type of smoothness in the edit is what I always strive for.

Perhaps it's a carryover from my start in video editing being Halo montages, but I'm rather obsessed with flow.

Connecting the images to sound in such a way where they feel like they're synced up together as one. Originally, it started with music and gameplay footage, and these days, it's about connecting visuals to speech.

I only consciously really thought about this a couple of years ago, and decided to pursue it further when I noticed one of the best compliments I get on my videos is when people say something to the effect of "I didn't notice X time had passed."

I like to believe the reason why is that there's such a flow the audience doesn't get to notice how long the video actually is, and that they've just spent forty minutes watching a video about a Far Cry campaign that can't play and it sucks.

If there's anything I've focused on this year in my videos it is that, at least, after the Metro Exodus review.

That's the one I’m not satisfied with.

In earlier years, my goal of syncing the video to narration was achieved via cuts.

Lots and lots and lots of cuts.

Friend of the channel Clu would even pull me aside sometimes to specifically point out when I'm going overboard.

In the moment I'd defend because there was almost always a reason for the cut.

Thing is, that's not actually a counter argument.

Having a reason doesn't mean it's good, and just because you're taking time to make an edit, it doesn't mean that edit itself is done to save time on something that is harder but more effective.

In this case, finding a piece of footage that syncs up to the speech without specifically cutting.

That's what I've tried and think have achieved from Goldeneye Rogue Agent onward, and this video was the biggest challenge but even more worth it because of that.

At 16:30, the clip that plays is of JK walking which I found when skimming through all the perspectives.

Before editing the video itself, I made a little compilation of all the dumbest, loudest, funniest, and just notable moments of the playthrough. This clip was saved because I needed all the examples of bomb carrying I could (given the point I'd make in the video), but also because as I'm walking across the screen, JK is telling me that my pistol sounds silenced even though it isn't.

He's correct, it does sound silent, and that's yet another thing I couldn't squeeze into the video itself.

However, I realized when playing around with all the clips, that this one was exactly what I needed for the sentence.

That "because this bridge objective in Ready or Not takes minutes to complete" is exactly the length of JK walking with a clear sight, and "you can't help but notice it" is exactly the length of me walking across the screen.

Not every clip is this perfectly lined up, it's massively time consuming, and if you're not careful, you can repeat the same techniques of syncing speech to the point where it's no longer subtle, but I'm still very pleased with the final result, and think this video might be my best effort of this style yet…

Now let's talk about ideas I didn't realize!

The split-screen montage of games racing each other on features from 2008-2012 was supposed to be the same layout repeated with one extra column being added. I thought the contrasting games would make it flow like I wanted but it really didn't.

Being the box art and years were always on screen even with no gameplay footage, it was much better for them to shift left to right instead.

My original example for the most popular Far Cry 3 Coop video on YT was not Russians in matchmaking, but a Russian in matchmaking during the game's launch week, with Bandicam quality gameplay on an aging PC.

The video was just some dude groaning into $10 headset hopping into a random public coop mission for eight minutes before logging off.

It had 1.7 million views.

I figured immediately this would be the perfect example to use, as it had even more views than Rooster Teeth's Let's Play.

What I didn't do though was save the example, which I now realize I should've because in the process of writing this video and then recording it, this 10+ year old video no longer existed.

I couldn't find it anywhere.

No forums, no alternate sites, no browser history, nothing.

At one point I thought I was going insane and just imagined the entire thing, and who knows, maybe I did.

However, this was also during the time Youtube completely overhauled their UI and algorithms, so maybe the dude got a notification, was reminded he had videos from 10+ years ago, and decided to remove them.

I wouldn't necessarily blame the guy, it was just obscene timing.

So instead, I went with the final example I did, and had to add the extra line "with coop in the title" because I knew people were going to go "um but what about Rooster Teeth."

They still did, but at least without any objective reason.

2:05, I originally had it edited as "you really can't play this anymore, at least, not how it was intended" followed by footage of the awful split-screen two player mode on console.

I got rid of it because I was going to have the exact same line at the end, and it didn't flow with the following bit of "forgive the usernames, we were high schoolers."

Looking back, I could've saved myself a lot of /iamveryintelligent comments from people who'd run over their own mother to accuse a gaming YouTuber of clickbait.

The thing that was amusing though was how many of the same comments questioning my title also couldn't get past the first two levels of this campaign.

I do regret though not finding a way to simply rewrite the split screen line I had originally in a manner that flowed, and wouldn't repeat the line at the end, because what I always care about is people understanding what I’m saying, and there's certainly viewers who after hearing a line like "no, you really can't play this anymore" will viscerally react with "you can though" and no amount of clarification, nuance, or understanding of what it means to play something as its designed, is going to change that.

You said you couldn't, but you can.

Pay for your crimes.

End of story.

I'm reminded of when Ross Scott had to clarify in his video "Games as a Service is Fraud" that five games gave a full refund after shutdown, or gave consumers the tools to continue running it.

"I made a clickbaity title, I'll fess up, if we're being completely honest, games as a service is not fraud, it's only fraud about 96% of the time. So if anybody says I'm exaggerating, it's true."

That's kinda how I feel about this.

Did I make the title knowing it'd get attention?

Yeah, that's the point of a title.

Is it an exaggeration?

Yes.

It's an exaggeration for the people who do not mind playing an awful four player campaign with only two people not available on all platforms at sub 30fps framerate without any balance changes to gameplay.

…Yeah, I'm not worried about them.

They can join the Battlefield Hardline Campaign fanclub for groups of people I've pissed off over the years.

The Ernest Cline poem was always going to be in there. In-fact, the inspiration for that came from me introducing it to Kacey, JK, and Jake during our playthrough.

Unfortunately, none of us had a recording of Kacey narrating it and losing her shit laughing at the very line which appears in the video.

I wanted to see if I could get that same geuine reaction from somebody reading it aloud and got a couple of my friends to do it, but it just wasn't clicking for what the video needed, so I DM'd Brendaniel, asking if he was familiar with the poem, to which he said "I wanna make fuck films for nerds."

He sent me three takes the next day and it all worked out perfectly.

He's awesome.

Here's his business email if you wanna hire him.
brendanielreadsbusiness@gmail.com

I originally wanted to go completely insane with the fast-forward bit, and actually edit an hours' worth of footage with all the pacing, editing, and music I'd do for real, and skip past it for a joke.

As funny as that would be though, it would sacrifice the rest of the videos quality, IE, the thing people are actually watching.

So I slapped some gameplay together but, still put in the effort to have chapters, music, audio, and enough editing in the clips that people would still get the vibe that we're genuinely skipping over what this video could've been, if I disrespected people's time more.

What's great too is that the illusion worked!

I got multiple comments of people questioning if I had actually made an hour's worth of content just to skip past it.

That some viewers even had to pause to consider it, feels satisfying to me.

In the final mission of the default campaign, I wanted to have a full on animated map, kinda akin to Rainbow Six Siege's trailer depicting the layout and how the enemies spawn as I described.

To me, it'd be a lot more elegant that constantly cutting the footage for emphasis, but unfortunately, I'm not a graphic designer, and I wasn't going to hire someone and make them work hours and hours for something that ultimately just isn't necessary.

Plus, I managed to squeeze in a visual gag anyway…

Finally, the bit I was most nervous about regarding this video was its conclusion.

Having seen Ross Scott's video a million times, post dozens of tweets about game shutdowns, and care a lot about this subject, I felt my conclusion was rather limp wristed, as being familiar with the depth of the subject matter, I felt I was barely scratching the surface.

Yet, I have to summarize it in minutes, because otherwise it'd be two separate videos uploaded together rather than a cohesive whole.

However, what I came to find were a lot of compliments about the end of the video, because I forgot most people still aren't engaging with this topic, so having a fast, accessible, and direct piece at the end of a video is actually a good jumping off point for people to get on.

Having discussed this topic on Twitter, I learned that there's people out there who will just endlessly lick the boots of companies in a vain attempt to one up people on what's "just how it is."

Those are people to ignore, and in the meantime for everybody else, pointing to games from 1996 that have more features, showing Ubisoft's first full budget Far Cry game being the only one that's secure on PC, and demonstrating the generations of content that will be wiped away forever unless something changes, is enough to get people fired up.

I'm currently thinking about doing a So I've Finally Played on Dead Space 2, whether or not that will actually get off the ground I can't guarantee, but regardless, I'm really pleased with this Far Cry video… and finally…

What I think I need to do…

is play a good game.