Far Cry 3 vs. Skyrim

There are lots of posts on this already, but I wanted to give my opinion.  I have only played a portion of Far Cry 3, so I am certainly not an expert on the game, but my first hour with the game has shown me all I need to see.

GOOD

I was very impressed with the intro/tutorial.  It drew me in and kept me involved the whole time.  I was genuinely scared for my character.  I have to say that this portion of the game felt more "realistic" than Skyrim's intro/tutorial because it felt like what I did mattered, unlike in Skyrim where the tutorial just waited on my to get to the next checkpoint.

I'm running both games on a two year old MacBook Pro.  It was easy to set FC3 up so that it ran smoothly on this machine.  Skyrim took many hours of fiddling with settings to run smoothly without too many artifacts like popups.

The world is lush and feels realistic.  The plants don't move out of my way, but that hasn't bothered me in the past few years of games.  It makes me want to just wander around the island to see what I can find, which leads me to...

BAD

The game is very mission-based.  I am used to wandering around wherever I want in games like Skyrim to find little things to do--it makes the world seem alive.  FC3 is more like the earlier GTA3 games, where the current mission is the only important thing.  The missions I have been on so far have invisible boundaries that cause a reset if you move too far from the mission area.  Once the mission is completed and you are instructed to go to the next mission you have the opportunity to wander around on your own.  Unfortunately all you can do is collect plants, kill and skin animals and maybe kill a couple of red-shirts to loot them for collectibles.  There do not appear to be any "side-quests" or any things you can do to spend time on your own outside of mission.

CONCLUSION

I was hoping for a tropical Skyrim, but this is not it.  The game looks great and plays well, but the beautiful landscape is wasted since you can't really do anything with it.