Ubisoft returns to the tropics for an open world shooter you may be crazy about
Far Cry 2 offered a selection of hardened mercenaries to play, as but but Far Cry 3′s hero is a norma! guy. An aptitude for murder aside. Jason Brody’s ordnariness is the point: this is the story of one man’s descent into violence when he’s cut off from the society he knows and has to resort to extremes to survive.
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: In-house (Montreal)
Format: 360. PC. PS3
Origin: Canada
Release: 2012
Combat is gimmick-free, offering a familiar toolset, but it’s the freedom to use it however you see fit that sets Far Cry 3 apart. That said, the game’s upgrade system w ll see Brody improve his various abilities over time.
Pause Far Cry 3 and, alongside the usual slate of menu options, you’ll see a blobby, butterfly winged shadow of a Rorschach ink blot fill the screen, with peeks of lush foliage visible between splotches of darkness. It’s the perfect symbol for a game fixated with the loss of sanity, and set on making players question their own.
Thinking can be key in its fighting too, with Ubisoft Montreal’s game offering the open-ended combat the series is known for, letting players plan encounters from miles off. The approach is up to you: charge in for a frontal assault, hang back to snipe enemies from a distance, or slap a C4 charge on the side of a jeep and send it barrelling straight into an enemy encampment. But all this freedom is tied to a narrative that drops the hard-edged political cynicism of Far Cry 2 for a focus on the personal, charting one man’s spiral into violence, and quite possibly madness, on an archipelago where everyone else seems to have a head start.
One mission in particular, a hallucinatory push through an island’s underground caves, illustrates the point well. Protagonist Jason Brody is injured, and looking for a doctor. After picking his way up a slope that offers a postcard-perfect view of the glistening bay below, he finds an equally pretty sight at its summit – a freshly painted bright white wooden house that serves as a reminder that South Pacific islands make pretty good retirement spots when they aren’t serving as murderous hellholes.
The man who painted it – still spattered with splotches of emulsion – is found inside the greenhouse. He’s unlike any doctor we’ve ever seen, quickly administering an injection of who knows what, but mostly rambling to himself in a jittery, dreamy fashion. His name is Dr Earnhardt, and his is simply one of the many flavours of madness that Far Cry 3 will present to players. In return for helping Brody, Earnhardt insists on the player getting him some mushrooms from a nearby cave system, and this fetch-quest setup is the only conventional part of the mission that follows.
First, there’s no shooting. At some point the weathered AK Brody clutches at the outset of the task is lowered, and we don’t see it again until much later in the session. In place of gunplay, there is platforming and exploration – Brody makes running jumps over precarious drops once he’s in the caves, which can only be accessed through an underwater tunnel at the bottom of a cliff. Some scripted crumbling handholds add a dash of peril, but it’s only when Brody moves become truly unpredictable.
As well as native fauna, players will have domesticated animals to contend with. Exactly what form the hunting system will take is unclear, but it all seems to fit the game’s theme of Brody discovering his inner savagery to survive
That’s when your earlier injection begins to kick in. Colours begin to saturate before changing hue entirely. Perspective becomes unreliable, and objects that appear within reach one moment suddenly shrink from view. Brody takes a second to look at his hands, which have started leaving ephemeral trails as they move through the air. To make matters worse, the cave seems to be reshaping itselt around him: walls turn to floors when he tries to climb them, and plants appear from nowhere, sprouting from the ground alongside putts of smoke that look like more Rorschach blots. When he finally finds the mushrooms and escapes, night has fallen.
For the most part, Far Cry 3 isn’t going to be quite this psychedelic, but the scene clearly demonstrates the preoccupation with mental states that runs throughout the game. Dr Earnhardt is crazy, the island’s villains all display equally unstable tendencies, and Brody himself is clearly losing his grip. He was an ordinary man on holiday with his friends and girlfriend, but is now caught up in a situation that threatens to send him off the rails.
“[We knew] we wanted Far Cry 3 to be emotional and raw,” explains producer Dan Hay, “and the word ‘insanity’ kind of just percolated out of those early meetings. We began to see that we wanted to have a raw emotional experience, and we wanted it to be very much the story of one person sort of caught in a moment. When we really felt like we captured it was when we got Vaas. That’s when the word ‘insanity’ crystallised for us.”
The star of the E3 2011 demo (in which he ruminated on the definition of insanity before dropping a tied-up Brody into a waterhole), Vaas is only one of Far Cry 3’s many villains, but he’s quickly become its poster child.
“A sociopath, and very nearly a psychopath,” in the team’s words, he’s also creepily charismatic. His presence stalks the island – Dr Earnhardt mutters about him, and eavesdropping on conversations between guards suggests a respect that’s built on fear. Thankfully, the performance artist behind the murderer is easier to talk to.
“Vaas is a very intense, very explosive character, and he’s a lot of fun to play.” says actor Michael Mando. “He’s one of those people who doesn’t differentiate between what he feels, what he says and what he does.” Mando originally auditioned for the part of a more conventional villain. “He was a six- foot-six, 300lbs, very stoic, very serious, unemotional person,” Mando explains. “Me being nothing like that, I auditioned for the part, and gave them the complete opposite of what they were looking for. And obviously I didn’t get it. But my agent called me up about three weeks later telling me that Ubisoft liked the audition so much that they were willing to create a character based on the audition that 1 had done.”
The true meat of the Far Cry 3 experience will be found in planning the perfect assault
Behind the manic intensity of Mando’s performance, there are hints that Vaas will be more than just a two-dimensional threat. Of Ubisoft’s own diagnosis, he says:“Personally, I don’t think of Vaas as a sociopath or a villain. If you get under the surface of Vaas, there’s this incredible amount of pain. Everything’s just an extension of that.”
Vaas’s violent intensity is in stark contrast to Dr Earnhardt, whose distracted ard rather nervous persona gives the unshakeable impression of an addict who’s suffering from withdiawdl symptoms.
Players, however, probably won’t be feeling so sympathetic towards the character. It’s unclear whether or not Vaas is personally holding Brody’s loved ones captive, but he’s obviously an obstacle to their safe return.
The next part of our demo sees Brody sent to disrupt Vaas’s communications by shutting down the radio tower of a beached cargo ship named the Medusa. It’s a set-piece designed to show off the fact that, despite Far Cry 3’s madness theme, the game is still, in Hay’s words, “a shooter first”.
Starting out in the ocean, Brody creeps onto the beach before quietly pulling a knife from a guard’s back pocket and stabbing him with it. He does the same for another guard, before throwing that knife into a third’s skull, a signature move that appeared in the E3 demo. Within range o{ the boat now, he pulls out a pair of binoculars – a Far Cry staple – and assesses the situation.
Ubisoft Montreal is promising a ‘360 degree’ approach to gameplay design, with every scenario tailored to offer stealthy, action-focused and creative approaches. In truth, this is little more than an extension of the open-endedness that was already part of the Far Cry experience, but this beachfront set-piece demonstrates the point well. The sand is strewn with cover for those who want an open-air gunfight, while stealthier players can hide within the exposed hold of another beached vessel as they move towards their goal. One tester, we’re told, simply hopped on a distant hang-glider and coasted to the radio tower, bypassing the battle entirely. After our demonstrator opts for an aggressive approach, reinforcements begin landing in hovercraft on the beach. It’s a section rich with possibility, and the true meat of the experience will be found – as with Far Cry 2 – in planning the perfect assault.
The Far Cry series has been built on and around these moments, so what we see next is a surprise. It’s a sliver of a later mission, in which Brody has infiltrated a (this time seaborne) ship in search of a friend. The environment is more linear, of course, with fewer options to plan, but it’s a brilliant opportunity for Ubisoft to show off an ear- splitting shotgun at close quarters. And when Brody slides open the hold doors, he triggers an explosive booby trap, flooding the ship. His struggle to escape is the kind of scripted set- piece that makes up the entirety of games such as Call Of Duty, and is more than a little reminiscent of a chapter in Uncharted 3.
This blending of open-ended design and adrenaline-fuelled scripting should make for a less predictable game than Far Cry 2, which – for all its ambition – suffered from the kind of clockwork mission layouts that could easily lead to fatigue. But, of course, it’s not the only departure from the second game. Ubisoft has returned to sun-drenched archipelagos from whence the series came, and it’s clear that the team is thrilled to be back.
“It wasn’t like we set out to make it on an island,” Hay explains, “but we wanted it to be a lawless frontier, we wanted it to be beautiful, all that stuff. The more we talked about it, and the kinds of experiences we wanted to have, the more we wanted the feeling of isolation.”
The South Pacific setting certainly offers an attractive blend of beauty and savagery, with the western fantasy of a tropical paradise melting away to reveal a violent struggle to survive. As open-world designer Jamie Keen explains, “We want to make sure that it feels consistently like an area in the Indian Ocean: Pacific Islands, Polynesian islands, that kind of thing. But we’re not trying to limit it too much. The main thing is that this is an island of insanity where anything goes, that the roughness comes through in the art”.
And it’s not just a static environment, either. When Brody ended his drugged trip through the caves earlier we spotted a rather large lizard foraging in the nearby grass that our demonstrator was careful to avoid. “The island’s ecology is a big part of what we focused on to make sure the island is livable and breathable,” says game designer Andrea Zanni. “We have land animals and sea animals. They’ll be there as threats, they’ll be there for you to utilise – you can go out into the jungle and go hunting, which is all part of Jason growing and surviving on the Island. If you go deep into the jungle, you’re going to have some encounters that may not be so pleasant. So they’re a part of the ecology of the island, and really making the island this savage place for the player.” Obviously, :he lizard we spotted near the caves is one such creature, but it’s a brief glimpse of sharks circling bodies floating in clouds of blood following the ship’s explosion that sends primal shivers vibrating through the spine.
Everyone we talk to hints that there’s a dark history to the archipelago, although they’re coy about specifics. Regardless, it seems to be spotted with enough inviting caves, mysterious ruins, and abandoned habitations that players will be itching to explore. “It’s about making sure that the player is constantly feeling enabled by what you can do in the world and enabled by the world itself,” says Keen. “You feel like the world’s inviting you to make you feel like you constantly want to move through it, constantly want to know more about what’s going on there. Recently, we put a mineshaft just on the way down to a lighthouse. And players heading to the lighthouse see it, and everyone just goes, ‘Oh look, a mineshaft!’and they have to explore. We want to constantly surprise people [with] how much they’re going to find when they do go exploring and follow their nose.”
“It wasn’t like we set out to make it on an island, but we wanted a lawless frontier”
Whatever players discover in Far Cry 3, it’s unlikely to be pleasant. Ubisoft Montreal has crafted a space that hides what appears to be a very dark heart not far beneath its beautiful surface. Far Cry 3 may have left the weighty themes of arms dealing and civil war behind, but in their place is a more intimate tale of madness and survival. And this story will piay out in a setting that retains the series’ unfashionable penchant for giving its players genuine freedom in the age of the set-piece.
There have been three very different Far Cry game* – what’s the ronnerting thread that links them oil together?
It’s a raw experience, first and foremost. In the Far Cry games, you’re dealing with rough tools, you’re dealing with a place that’s remote – it’s always distant, it’s always off the map. And, for us, we wanted it to feel exotic. You think about the types of weapons used: they’re rough weapons, they’re not polished… They’re almost black market in some cases. You think about the location: it’s usually way, way off the grid, and it’s almost like a lawless frontier. So we knew we wanted to start in that type of place, and then the other area that’s been the thing we want Id pull from is this feeling of discovery.
How much have you researched mental disorders for the madness theme?
Quite a bit… We spent a ton of time focusing on trying to make sure that we had credible people in the world. We actually went out and we talked to guys who deal with these types of characters for a living. There’s a group of journalists who, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Vice Guide To Liberia, or the Vice Guide to a whole bunch of places, but they go out and put themselves in harm’s way. And in order to make sure that we’re mak ng a credible experience, that we’re mcking characters that ore real – even though they are insane – we sat down with these guys and said here’s what we got: ‘We’ve got Vaas, we’ve got the doctor; how do you feel about them?” And they began to tell us stories about some of people who they met, some of the unique instances that they got into, and we were like, “That sounds u lot like some of the things that we have in the game.” Then we put Vaas onscreen, and we put the doctor onscreen, and we got a little smile. They were like, “OK, yep, I feel like I’ve met that guy…’
Will the insanity-themed moments be integrated with the rest of the game?
For us, we wanted to offer discovery and opportunity, so it’s an offering. The key thing is it’s an offering. It was more about the idea of: ‘OK, we want to be a great shooter, and then we want to offer the enticement of going in and going off the rails a little bit. So we offer the palate cleanse. You’ve been shooting for 3 while, and Jason has that experience. It can’t be high-octane boss, boss, boss all the time unless you’ve got something that’s in contrast to it. But if you’re a core shooter player and you want to go mission to mission to mission [then] you still have that opportunity.
