Back in 2005, there was this little game developed by a Russian studio Deep Shadows, it was called Boiling Point: Road to Hell.
The game took place in a fictional country, on a tropical island with plenty of jungles, somewhere around South America and had huge open world populated with people and animals alike. There were also various means of transport at your disposal. The game's world was huge - 625 square kilometres and there were no loading screens whatsoever.
It was a bit buggy and didn't have as high production values as any Far Cry game, but it had plenty of promise and ambitious ideas under the hood and was highly addictive and enjoyable if you looked past its minor flaws.
Firstly, it had proper RPG elements, like for example during conversations you could select one of the possible dialogue tree options with different outcomes and thus interactions with NPCs were very meaningful and there were different ways to fulfill your quests. Moreover, there were several conflicted factions with whose you could collaborate and it had an influence on the balance between those factions. If you double-crossed somebody, and that faction became hostile to you and engaged you on sight, you still had the chance to make amends, as you could meet with their leader in a local bar and try to do a couple of missions for them and gain their trust anew. Of course there was leveling system with upgrades for skills that worked similar to Skyrim (you leveled proficiency of those firearms you used the most). Furthermore, there were quests in the game that were not about killing people.
Secondly, the realism of the game mechanics was a really important layer: vehicles required fuel, weapons had degradable durability (same applied to different types of ammo) and could even jam. What is more, your character had limited stamina and his psychomotor skills were prone to degrading over time and firefights were really difficult if you were in a bad shape. That's why sleeping was useful in the game (you could rent a room in a hotel which was better for you or sleep in a car that was less beneficial towards regaining stamina but still got its job done). Besides, managing inventory was also cleverly done: usually in all games, you have a certain threshold of capacity and if you go over the limited, you are encumbered and walk slower. In Boiling Point however there was no such threshold, instead the more you carried, the slower you walked, so every additional kilogram of equipment made you walk slower, instead of the fixed threshold that offered no penalty for carrying ridiculous amount of gear, but would slow you down to a snail speed if you just went over a fixed limit by a tiny pixel. Furthermore, you could store your gear in the trunk of your vehicle and speaking of vehicles - besides limited fuel, you could also change tires or repair them if they were damaged.
Thirdly, the world was every bit as alive as it seemed in modern Far Cry games, like Far Cry 3 and 4 with open-ended gameplay that allowed you to use a vast array of different kinds of vehicles, including choppers. There were jaguars, cobras, piranhas and other dangerous creatures lurking in the jungle.
Fourthly, problem-solving, you could either try to complete as many missions as it's possible and gain trust of a lot of factions who could then help you or you could just bribe your way through if you had more cash, or you could just try to complete the main story missions.
Overall, I think we could name this game STALKER in the jungle and I think people from the original STALKER game who fell out formed Deep Shadows and created this game (if I'm not mistaken), but the game suffered from bugs and lack of polish, although the last patch ironed out most of them.
This game destroys Far Cry 2,3,4 in scope, mechanics and ambition, because it harks back to Deus Ex, System Shock 2 and harks forward to STALKER as well. It's really a shame this game didn't make it big, or the devs didn't get the chance to work with a bigger budget under some more prominent publisher's belt.
Log in to comment