RPS: The shooting looks great, but to what extent is stealth supported? And what about ingenious use of physics? I think the environment will become even more competitive than it is now. My feeling is, tightly controlled and scripted ‘cinematic experiences’ like CoD4 will always remain competitive, but that the number of studios who can deliver this level of polish will diminish rapidly. However, at the same time, the level of polish and execution in games like CoD4 is insanely high. For me, personally, I find it much, much harder to become engrossed in your ‘typical’ linear FPS after having worked on and played Far Cry 2 for so long now. RPS: Do you expect the linear shooter to fade out in the light of recent wide-open game designs? In any case, I do not believe it is possible to make a game of this complexity and scope without top-notch project management and confidence in the vision coming from the highest levels. In the end, the cuts we did make were not major, and it was excellent project management and oversight that allowed us to recover from serious cascading failure. That said, we did make cuts, but we were always tracking the problem and its potential cascading repercussions. A massively systemic game is something like a house of cards – removing all the 7’s from the deck when the house is half built is certain collapse. Because our vision was so open and systemic and so heavily interconnected, we encountered a few hurdles where we realized there was no real valid path to descope – frequently, descoping meant MORE work than delivering the original promise. RPS: Games as ambitious as this often end up scrapping loads of ideas - is there much that had to go on the Far Cry 2 scrapheap? What is REALLY cool is enabling the player to see the challenge in front of him, adapt his strategy to suit it, and then improvise using a solution on the fly as new elements are thrown at him. Sure wiping out an enemy camp with a flamethrower is cool, but forcing the player to do it the way we think is cool makes it tiresome and potentially frustrating. And it’s not just ‘spatially’ open that we were striving for – it was also our intent to give the player the freedom to complete his objectives the way he wanted, using the tools at his disposal, rather than forcing him to do X, Y or Z because it was ‘cooler or sexier’. Consequently, from almost the beginning, we were converging toward a massively open, no-loading world and building the game engine that would make it possible. We always felt that the best ‘answer’ to the promises of freedom made by the original Far Cry… the best thing we could do to earn a ‘2’ after the title was to deliver a truly open experience where player freedom and the players decisions drive the experience. RPS: Did you always know the game was going to be this open-ended and sandbox based? Was it wide open from the start? We hired Susan O’Connor – one of the writers of Bioshock – to help us bring all these characters to life in the nearly infinite number of permutations possible in the script. It was an immensely difficult creative, logistical and technical challenge that required among other things hiring the best writers in the industry to ‘fill in the blanks’ of a truly massive script. That means that major characters, such as the Warlords, Captains, Lieutenants, and the Buddy characters can live or die based on the actions the player takes and the story will dynamically change based on who lives, who dies, and who the players friends are at any given moment. Patrick Redding – our narrative designer – is tasked specifically with making sure the story adapts to the player’s actions and decisions. In order to do it, we more or less invented the field of narrative design. Hocking: To tell a meaningful and engaging story in an open, non-linear world, we decided we needed to tell an open, non-linear story – a story that adapts itself to the player’s actions the same way the non-linear gameplay experience adapts to the player actions. RPS: Can you tell us a little about how you've approached telling a story in a non-linear game world? What kind of problems did you encounter with this during development? This is a game worth paying attention to.
Read on for a verbal monsoon of all things Far Cry 2. He's a clever sort, and was patient enough to talk about how non-linear storytelling works, how your NPCs buddies operate in the game world, how bits of a car can be your undoing, the potential for exploration in a 50km tract of videogame Africa, the "visceral punch" of the injury system, and how people will overlook the awesomeness of a guided missile system. So I dropped a line to Mr Clint Hocking, a creative director at Ubisoft Montreal, and the lead brain on Far Cry 2. I don't know about you lot, but all that Far Cry 2 coverage left me with a few questions about the game.
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