Far Cry 3 and the inventory problem

Dear Far Cry 3,

I wanted to thank you for inviting me to spend time on your beautiful tropical island paradise filled with red-shirt pirates, ninja tigers and quick-to-anger murderous bovines. Exploring your beaches, cliff tops and jungles has been a truly amazing experience and despite what I'm going to say, I must stress I am grateful for that and honestly believe you have something truly wonderful going on for you.
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I also want to apologise that I haven't spent nearly as much time with you as we were both expecting. I fully realise that after an initial introduction to your world that we both agreed I would be back soon and I would be back often. I could lie to you and tell you that I've been busy with work, or that I've been under a lot of pressure, but I thought maybe you deserved the truth.

I got fed up looking after my bags. Your inventory was becoming a real faff and I found myself doing strange things like hunting down tapirs so I could make bigger bags out of their skin so I could ultimately hunt more tapirs. Also, what I "skinned" from said tapir was not its skin - I can only imagine you got me to hollow out the mound of flesh that I dug out of the poor creature in order to use it to hold my stuff - and it would explain why all my ammo is all slightly sticky.

Managing my inventory was becoming a real drag. Every time I would find something that I could pick up in the world, I would hold my breath and hope I wouldn't have to play the inventory-slot juggling game. I admit your inventory management is nowhere near the level of the Tetris mini-game that sits in Diablo, but it still involves stopping the game mid-flow to bring up the inventory menu, hearing that dreary "atmospheric" background music drawl across my ears, navigate through menus clearly designed for a console, find the item that I didn't want to keep and make space for the new item.


Of course I could just leave the item there in the world, but it clearly wants to be picked up and it keeps throwing a "press E to pick up" prompt in my face if I so much as glance at it, so what am I supposed to do? I know you will say this is my problem - that I should just leave things and just because I can pick it up doesn't mean I have to, but I know that given the right scenario I can do exactly this. I don't know if you know Minecraft (you guys would probably get on) but in there, the entire world can be picked up and put in your inventory, and the world is much much bigger than your inventory. Despite this, I don't go around picking up every cube of dirt I can see, or at least I don't very often.

I was also initially amused when you told me that my wallet wasn't big enough to hold all my money, such a relatable problem for all of us. I might have even laughed out loud until I realised you were serious. I'm still not entirely sure what I should spend it all on when everything on two legs seems to carry a perfectly serviceable AK-47. I mean, I bought a bow and arrow because it looked cool, but then ran out of arrows and nobody else out there carried arrows. Plus I believe had to skin something to hold arrows and so gave up in the end.


You give me a beautiful tropical playground and I complain about my luggage, I know, it sounds like the very worst example of entitlement on my part, but think of it like driving. I like driving, but I don't like getting stuck in traffic because it's a perpetual exercise of stop and start. With an almost full inventory, that is exactly what you are, Farcry 3, stop and start.

Again, allow my to say sorry for not coming to visit more. I will probably come and see you again soon as it's not you, it's me and my slightly "gotta catch 'em all" attitude. I'll bite the bullet and carve out a few more tapir-torso satchels or something and find some hapless creature to turn into a bigger wallet and I'm sure we can get past this, but for now, I just wanted you to know why I hadn't been back sooner.

Please excuse me, for I have many more letters to write.




Dear Skyrim...