The Far Cry 3 we know is not the Far Cry 3 that could have been. The setting of the open-world shooter was different when it entered pre-production in 2008. So was the creative staff. This sort of thing happens in game development, and it happens often at developer Ubisoft Montreal. Some things don’t work. People leave. Goals change. Ubisoft adapts.
Toward the end of Far Cry 2’s development cycle, narrative game designer Patrick Redding praised the promise of its African setting. “I think it’s safe to say we’ll continue to explore it,” he said. “That said, we might find something new and compelling about the Antarctic setting that wants us to make the next game there.” Either way, Ubisoft Montreal seemed to further distance itself from Far Cry’s traditional tropical locales. “Let’s face it,” Redding said, “jungle islands are probably less exciting than they were four years ago.”
Somewhere along the way, of course, this changed. WestStudio, an external concept art house, helped Ubisoft Montreal realize a visual direction for the return to Far Cry’s seaside origins. A ravaged resort, golf course, and theme park appeared amid scenic beaches and a dense jungle populated by masked pirates. The thematic essence of this first-draft Far Cry 3 remained in the eventual release, but a few important things happened during its development cycle.
Far Cry 2 creative director Clint Hocking never appeared to be involved in the sequel; he eventually departed Ubisoft Montreal for LucasArts. Patrick Redding moved over to Ubisoft’s new Toronto studio to start work on the next Splinter Cell. Far Cry 3’s narrative director, Raphael van Lierop, left Ubisoft for Relic Entertainment. Josh Mosqueira, Far Cry 3’s creative director, took a position at Blizzard. By 2010, the Far Cry creative team was effectively gutted.
WestStudio and Ubisoft's original vision for Far Cry 3 was almost post-apocalyptic.
By hiring new blood and shifting talent within its Montreal studio, Ubisoft filled those holes. This new team, with inspiration from the pre-production leftovers, moved forward with its own island, story, cast of characters, and game design ideas.
The Far Cry 3 we know is not the Far Cry 3 that could have been – but those responsible for what it became are justifiably proud of their vision and execution, even in the face of controversy and criticism.
Before a game world becomes a believable place, the pieces need to facilitate interesting gameplay. One bearer of that burden is Mark Thompson, level design director on Far Cry 3. “We don't have the concept of discrete levels like you'd imagine in a linear game, where you have these 10 sections of game broken up into 10 separate worlds or whatever,” he tells IGN. Despite Far Cry 3’s segregated mission spaces, “there isn't really a concept of any one level” because of the diverse systems that bring the world to life. No space can exist for one specific idea. Dynamic animal spawns and enemy encounters need room to breathe at every inch of Rook Island. A space you might think of as a level “can't have cover set out in an excruciatingly perfect setup for one mission,” Thompson explains, “because you have to be able to come back and explore it and still have a dynamic firefight that a level designer has never seen before.”
The Far Cry 3 team wants you to surprise them here.
The trouble with all of this is, as Thompson puts it, that gameplay systems “aren’t very organic.” Traditionally, a game space is built on grids. Objects within it rely on specific metrics, so they need to be exactly X size and exactly Y distance apart. Cover systems are built for perfect square blocks, so when “you throw all of that into a jungle it’s like, ‘Holy s--t, this is never going to work.’"
Thompson and his team experimented to make a natural world work within these unnatural limitations. It got as specific as generating different rocks to see which types would produce dynamic cover, “because we can't hand-draw cover points.” Part of Ubisoft Montreal’s solution was in Far Cry 2’s Dunia Engine. They had a “recipe,” so an artist dictated the vegetation or geometry needed in a space, “then an algorithm takes our recipe and quickly generates large areas.” As a result, the Far Cry team could “turn and burn on this stuff super-fast. If we wanted to, we could build an outpost in like 20 minutes, and then we could test it” and make quick changes on the fly. “In a day we can iterate on the same outpost like three times, just moving around the pieces or putting a different animal in the cage or just removing the cage altogether, change the different units, put a sniper on top or replace [it] with a heavy on the ground.”
In a simplified sense, the development process behind Far Cry 3 reflects the procedural scenarios players come across. Deliberation definitely exists, and it’s an important factor, but it’s the unpredictability that makes the world, and reacting to it, such an engaging experience. The variation that comes with this kind of craft lends a layer of realism to Rook Island – it is extremely difficult to recognize repeat formations, if they exist anywhere at all.
Forget the action and appreciate this crane for a minute.
That is among the most important things for Thompson, who wants you to feel like “you’re in a space that exists for a reason” rather than in an area that was constructed. The level of detail in certain spots borders on mundane, but it helps sell the certainty of Far Cry 3’s universe. An enemy-occupied lumber mill serves as one of numerous pirate outposts players can reclaim. For Thompson’s team, the thought process was, "Okay, so they take in the raw timber here, it gets processed here, it gets cut and treated here, and then it gets shipped out,” he explains. “We make sure that the level designers and the artists understand that workflow so that when they build that space, they build it in a logical way.”
The features of this island are curated in such a way that they reflect the history accurately. “Maybe 10 percent of players pick up on that stuff,” Thompson speculates. The lumberjack and millwright contingent of his audience must be larger than most of us might have suspected.
“For me,” Thompson says, “it’s important that the spaces are credible and believable. The things that happen in them are obviously…they’re a stretch.”
For the Far Cry faithful, an island is equal to the savanna; it’s just a place that enables your chaos. More likely, Far Cry 3’s small but significant changes to Far Cry 2’s formula – whether you loved or loathed it – made a significant impression on players. Far Cry 3 producer Dan Hay told IGN that the story enabled the return of the Buddy System, and that there were “opportunities when we started talking about doing co-op,” but the narrative drive demanded a sense of isolation. “We want you to remember what it was like to be that kid,” Hay says. “You were in that tent, it got dark, you heard the sound of a twig snapping, and your imagination did more damage than we could do. That was the goal.”
You're very aligned with Jason's story, even if you think his friends are douchebags.
Thompson says Ubisoft Montreal experimented with numerous ideas “just to see if they were worth fixing or worth just forgetting about altogether.” Weapon degradation – which caused guns to jam or even explode in Far Cry 2 – was an interesting variable that ultimately “hindered the fun a little bit too much.” Thompson continues, “The open world in Far Cry 2 was missing the most meat…it was really just the bones. That was where we wanted to expand as much as possible, so that there was more than just respawning checkpoints and one kind of collectible. We wanted to have the idea of an actual civilization.”
Hay cites this as Far Cry 3’s most important accomplishment. “The greatest success is probably the living world…. You always wonder, when you’re making a game this big and this deep and this rich, ‘have you got the right recipe? Do you have the right pieces?’ It’s like alchemy. It isn’t all going to come together in just the right way.” The marriage of linear campaign missions and open-ended exploration, Hay explains, was a tricky hurdle he’s “immensely proud” of overcoming. “The thing that we got right was the open world and your ability to just go out and play” at your own pace without punishment.”
For lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem, that freedom needed to have a meaningful effect on the story of Jason Brody, Far Cry 3’s protagonist. If a young man setting out to rescue his kidnapped friends ignores them for the fun of exploring an open-ended island, how does a team of writers and designers reconcile the player’s urge ignore the threat? Yohalem says that “everything you do in this game world is curated and intentional.” He wants players to examine what their in-game actions say about themselves. If you’re ignoring the goal of rescuing those close to you for the sake of finding treasure, hunting animals, or killing pirates, what does that say about you?
Many might argue that the charisma of Brody’s friends negated any concern for their well-being. Liza, Jason’s girlfriend, is often condescending of a man she allegedly loves. The bleached-blonde stoner friend Oliver is a frat-boy stereotype who can’t be bothered to remove the sticker from his flat-brimmed ball cap. Keith (and his mullet) spends so little time talking to anyone that he’s defined only by his drunken idiocy in flashbacks. Why should you care to rescue these people? At what point do you give up on them and leave them to die?
“At the start of the game you're very aligned with Jason, even if you think his friends are douchebags,” Thompson says. “You still want to
Jason Brody: immature idiot turned killer.
rescue them because you understand the connection with friends and family.” Dan Hay continues down a similar path, explaining that Brody’s friends are meant to reflect a self-centered slice of youth. Eventually, you mature, grow up, and “realize that some of [your friends] were just using you, or some of these folks didn’t have a clue what the hell they were doing, or they were just scared.”
Referring to one of Far Cry 3’s endings, in which players can choose to kill Jason’s friends and live among the island natives, Yohalem asks, “You might still not like [them] at all, but at the same time, can you kill that person? I think that if you can't, I feel like that should say something really beautiful about you, and about all of us. If you can, then it's also interesting to examine why you can. Is it because it's in a game context? Is it because of something inside of you? Games allow us to have that kind of examination.”
Discomfort plays into Far Cry 3’s examination of its players as well. Much of it caused controversial ripples throughout its audience. Over the course of Jason’s story, he sees and takes part in vivid acts of obscene violence, including torturing his own brother during an undercover ruse. The intent is to disgust the player while showing that Jason’s increasing obsession with violence has crossed a line. However, this scene, among others, could be interpreted as exploitative – in a game where violence is fun, certain moments of harm don’t necessarily change the tone. In a similar potential disregard for sensitivity, when Brody rescues his friend Keith from a sexually abusive captor the story moves on and forgets about the character and the consequences. Maybe a rape victim becoming a silent recluse should tell the audience something about abuse. Perhaps Far Cry 3 didn’t have the time to care about the aftermath.
Far Cry 3 positions a Caucasian male as triumphant amid a group of floundering minorities. What that means is on you.
“We didn't do any of it lightly,” Thompson reassures IGN. “We didn't do any of it just for titillation, just for the sake of it. However it's received, everything we did was with good intentions.” He explains that the potentially controversial subjects were thought about carefully, and included only if they were “an important part of the story and needed to be there.”
Other controversy surrounding Far Cry 3 centers on race – Jason Brody, a young, white male, reclaims the island for a group of dark-skinned natives who couldn’t do it without him. Their leader, Citra, falls in love with him rather than any other tribal warrior; in one of Far Cry 3’s two endings, he is the only man worthy of impregnating her. Hay refers me to Yohalem and “the idea of being self-aware” when I ask him about what, if any racial implication exist within Far Cry 3.
Nothing concerning race occurred to me while reviewing Far Cry 3. When I tell this to Jeffrey Yohalem, his immediate response is, “That says something about you, doesn’t it?” He elaborates, “When you approach a work you approach it with an angle. All of us do. It's human,” and Far Cry 3 aims to “show your angle. On some level you can look at it and yourself and go, ‘huh, that’s interesting that I felt this way.’” In his eyes, those who perceive elements of racism, or even race, are “interested in these issues,” and project their concerns onto the material they’re consuming.
Deliberate or not, Far Cry 3 positions a Caucasian male as triumphant amid a group of floundering minorities. The weight of what that means, apparently, is on you.
At a more basic narrative level, one of Far Cry 3’s greatest points of contention is the death of Vaas, the pirate warlord who’s positioned as the primary antagonist from the first frame of gameplay. He was equal parts charismatic and crazy. Actor Michael Mando’s expressive performance instilled such a potent whimsy to a frightening and wholly likable villain that Ubisoft Montreal changed Vaas' character concept to match the performance. Consequently, when Jason kills Vaas, the lunatic’s limited on-screen presence felt like a disservice to his enormous potential. When lamenting the limited screen time of Far Cry 3’s cast, Hay wishes for more Willis, more Buck, more Hoyt, more Daisy. He never says Vaas.
Vaas Montenegro, AKA Far Cry's Darth Vader.
When I mention Vaas, Hay launches into a speech about, of all things, the emotional resonance of Darth Vader:
“You think about that opening scene in Star Wars. What you think is a huge ship is going by overhead, and then it is absolutely dwarfed by a massive ship. Then everything inside it is white and the Rebels are holding against the door. It blows up. They just had a firefight going on, and when it’s all over, in walks this guy who’s head-to-toe in shiny black. That moment is galvanized in your memory as a kid forever. For us, giving that taste of Vaas and making sure that it’s short and that it’s sweet and that it is about craving more of it…that was a focus for us.”
Yohalem, meanwhile, calls upon 20th century literature to explain Vaas’ early exit. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, “the main character dies in the middle, kind of parenthetically. The whole book is going and you get to these parentheses in this middle portion, and she's dead.” From there, “the rest of the book is about the absence of her. That is so daring. And we did it. I think that it's hard for some people, but at the same time, you also want that kind of a character to take a bow when everyone wants him the most.” The absence applies not only to Jason’s story, but Far Cry 3 as a whole. It leaves the player in a space where there’s no immediate goal, no problem to solve. It leaves you wondering what to do. “You never feel that in a game,” says Yohalem.
After the credits roll on Far Cry 3, you’re thrown back into the island with the freedom to explore, collect, and kill what’s left. This defies both endings: the one in which Jason leaves the island, and the other where he dies on it. What’s more jarring than the fictional contradictions is that Brody’s back without motivation.
If you forget that you're going to die for a second, because you're examining what being alive is about, then art has done its job.
“Well, now you have this whole island, and you have this thing without any of the human side,” Yohalem explains. “The play is gone, but you have the empty stage, and you have all these things to experiment with. But the question is, are you missing [something]? What do you feel like with that missing? Do you miss it?”
I did.
“But that's fascinating, right? Because you want to go have fun,” he says. “When you're in the story, you go off wanting to do all the cool stuff on the island, instead of helping your friends. It's like you're avoiding work, because you don't like them.” When the motive vanishes, avoiding it becomes less appealing – suddenly the absence of a directive is what compels you. This falls in line with the parallel Yohalem and the rest of the Far Cry 3 team fought for: the unity between gameplay and story. Like the death of Vaas, the departure (and return) of Jason gives you something to work toward because there’s little else. How players react to that, Yohalem admits, is once again on the player; they may miss that altogether.
“As long as you're open to looking at it, then it's fascinating,” says Yohalem, “because then it's like a massage where someone touches your back in a way you've never felt before…it's a sensation, which is what being alive is about. If you forget that you're going to die for a second, because you're examining what being alive is about, then art has done its job.”
At that point, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the jungle, the arctic, or Africa. What matters is how you react to what that place and its people make you feel. Whether you celebrate its disgusting tone or feel sick to your stomach because of it, Far Cry 3 made its mark precisely as intended.
Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He loves Far Cry and his only niece almost the same amount. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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