Far Cry 3 Weapons + Analysis

Last week I was having a look at my “load outs” in Far Cry 3. And I thought there were a few weapons that looked the same from a stats perspective or were dominated by better other weapons. I wanted to figure out if some weapons were better than other in absolute term.

In a previous post I described how I got the weapon stats by “pixel counting” bar charts on the Far Cry 3 iPhone app.

So the first I came up with was radar charts showing all weapons for that category. One thing to point out is that all values are indexed on the maximum for that property (damage, range, etc) across all weapons.

Assault Riffles

The assault rifles category is interesting in the sense that there are 6 different weapons but only 3 groups really stand out.
The MS16 stands out on its own; the STG-90 and P416 could be grouped together and finally the AK47, F1 and ACE.

SMGs

The SMG category shows more diversity where there isn’t a weapon totally “eclipsing” another. However weapons holding the centre of the chart seem to be dominated by some weapons in the assault rifle category, mainly MP5 and BZ19. Otherwise SMGs only show an edge when looking at mobility and fire rate.

LMGs

With 3 weapons the LMG category pretty much follows the assault rifles category. The PKM stretching towards damage and range (see MS16), MKG stretching towards fire rate (see STG-90 and P416) and U100 holding the centre with a bit more accuracy.

Snipers

The sniper category shows a bit of an overlap between the M700 and Z93; the SVD providing a good alternative.

Shotguns

With 3 shotguns this category provides good diversity.

Top Weapons by Property

If you look at the top ranked by property (damage, range, etc) the result isn’t always as expected.

The MS16 and Z93 are toping the damage ranking chart and although we have an LMG in 4th place, the first shotgun is way down the list.
On the accuracy chart, again a bit of a surprise to see that the shotgun 1887 is as good as some snipers.

The results are as expected on fire rate with SMG and LMG leading. On mobility results are also as expected with only SMGs and shotguns in the first half of the ranking.

Range ranking is topped by snipers and with no SMGs nor shotguns in the first half of the ranking.

A Step Further

This is all well and good but can we actually find the absolute best weapon. So I tried to see if some weapons were allocated more points than others or if they were all variations of the same total points.

Interestingly a group of snipers and assault rifles seem to have been allocated more points, shotgun doing the worse of the lot.

I also thought it would be useful to look at a “damage per unit of time” metric since the main purpose for our weapon is to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. The metric is a simple multiplication of damage and fire rate, no weighting nor normalisation applied.

Finally, I looked at ranking including accuracy. What’s the point of frantically spitting out bullets if you don’t hit your target.

Conclusion

So, what can we make of all that? All weapons are not equal; and from a numbers point of view the SVG is head and shoulders above everything else (or is it?). The second tier weapons would be STG-90, P416 and PKM.

Now, from personal experience, I am comfortable with the STG-90 and the P416 ranking high as they are reasonably close in terms of stats and P416 is the weapon I am most proficient with.

When it comes to the SVG and PKM, I am a bit more surprised and think it highlights some shortcomings in this analysis.
I personally struggle to play with the SVG because of its huge recoil which isn’t taken into considerations here and undermines the fire rate x accuracy ratio. High recoil slows your fire rate down for optimum accuracy and “forcing” fire rate drastically diminishes accuracy.
The PKM obvious weakness is its long reloading time and nor reloading time nor magazine size are taken into consideration. Magazines size and reloading times impacts on how much “damage per unit of time” can be dealt, whilst reloading you’re clearly not firing.

So, for all recoil, reloading time and magazine size being equal (or close to average) the ranking stands but if your weapon of choice has one of these functions performing way better or worse, it’s to be taken with a pinch of salt.

Finally, the ranking does not take into consideration the weapon range but this is still an important attribute when considering style of play and the geography of the battle field.

The spreadsheet can be found here.