Many gamers have been having a great time destroying animals and evil despots ever since Far Cry 4 came out last month. For others, it's a different story. Despite receiving several patches designed to address its performance issues, these players are still struggling to get the game up and running properly.
The specific technical issues that Far Cry 4 players are experiencing vary across platforms, but I've managed to identify a few trends. Along with the occasional bug, console gamers are mostly suffering from periodic server outages that hamper Far Cry's online multiplayer performance. Some aren't able to access these modes entirely, others have simply given up trying after being kicked out of co-op sessions or player-vs.-player matches. PC gamers have been reporting the largest amount of problems by far, many affected players saying that the game continues to crash at launch, or runs into a number of glitches that are either game-breaking or just plain irritating when it does manage to start.
More often than not, it's difficult to assess the full extent of performance issues with a game—particularly one as popular as Far Cry 4, that appears across multiple gaming platforms spanning a number of different hardware generations. Kotaku writers who are playing Far Cry 4 on PC haven't experienced any of the game-breaking issues that other PC gamers have identified, and continue to report. At worst, Kirk had a problem with the game's framerate stuttering. But he was able to fix that in a relatively painless way.
Responses I received in the comments to that post and by email were pretty evenly split. Players on PC, Xbox One and 360, and the PS3 and PS4 all said that they were loving the game and experiencing no meaningful problems—at least at present, after updating their games with the patches that Ubisoft has been regularly putting out for Far Cry 4. The other half, however, are getting pretty fed up. Most of the affected PC gamers I heard from told me they're barely able to get the game up and running in the first place, so much so that they weren't able to tell me anything about how its online multiplayer is working for them since it takes an hour or more of single-player gameplay to unlock co-op.
Console players who have encountered issues highlight a more narrow range of issues than their PC counterparts. Usually, these focus on the game's two different multiplayer. I've seen many more complaints about co-op than the 5-v-5 "Battles of Kyrat" competitive multiplayer, but that may be due to their relatively popularity.
The main problem across PlayStation and Xbox consoles is that Far Cry 4's servers are unstable. Players continue to lose their connections in the middle of playing, or have a hard time connecting with their friends or the general Far Cry 4 community. Dropped connections also lead to other frustrating problems such as lost progress or having items and skills disappear inexplicably from a player's roster.
