- When you pause Far Cry 3, you’ll see regular menu options
- There is also “a blobby, butterfly-winged shadow of a Rorschach ink blot fill the screen, with peeks of lush foliage visible between splotches of darkness”
- Open-ended combat
- Plan bouts with enemies well before you face off
- You may decide to charge in for a frontal attack, hang back and snipe enemies from a distance, or place C4 on the side of a jeep and send it to an enemy encampment
- Freedom is tied to the story
- Unlike Far Cry 2′s “hard-edged political cynicism”, Far Cry 3 is “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 is “a hallucinatory push through an island’s underground caves”
- In this mission, protagonist Jason Brody is injured and is searching for a doctor
- Brody heads up a slope and encounters a wooden house; Dr. Earnhardt is inside
- The doctor quickly administers an injection; he’s also “rambling to himself in a jittery, dreamy fashion”
- Earnhardt asks Brody to gather some mushrooms from a cave system nearby
- No shooting in this mission
- Platforming/exploration instead
- “Brody makes running jumps over precarious drops which can only be accessed through an underwater tunnel at the bottom of a cliff”
- There are crumbling handholds
- Things become unpredictable as you head into the caves’ depths
- “Colors begin to saturate before changing hue entirely. Perspective becomes unreliable, and objects that appear within reach one moment suddenly shrink from view.”
- Brody looks at his hands that are “leaving ephemeral trails as they move through the air”
- Cave appears to be reshaping: walls become floors when he tries to climb them, plants pop up randomly
- Eventually Brody locates the mushrooms; setting has become night
- “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 while the island’s enemies are unstable as well
- Brody is beginning to lose his grip
- Although Brody was your typical guy on holiday with friends/his girlfriend, he is now thrown into a situation “that threatens to send him off rails”
- Players will have to contend with native fauna and domesticated animals
- Dev. team wanted the game “to be emotional and raw”
- Insanity was a word that came up often in early meetings
- Producer Dan Hay: “When we really felt like we captured it was when we got Vaas. That’s when the word ‘insanity’ crystallized for us”
- There are numerous villains in addition to Vaas
- Vaas is “a sociopath, and very nearly a psychopath”
- You’ll hear Dr. Earnhardt muttering about him
- Guards seem to hint at a respect that’s built on fear
- Vaas’s voice actor, Michael Mando, had auditioned for the role of a more typical villain who was six-foot-six, 300 pounds, stoic/series, and unemotional
- Mando’s audition was completely opposite of what the team was looking for, and didn’t land the job
- Even so, Mando’s agent called him three weeks later and told him that Ubisoft was willing to make a character based on the audition he did because they liked it so much
- “There are hints that Vaas will be more than just a two-dimensional threat”
- Ubisoft doesn’t think of Vaas as a sociopath/villain; he has a lot of pain, and “everything’s just an extension of that”
- Not clear if Vaas is the one holding Brody’s loved ones captive
- Next part of the demo involves Brody being sent in to interfere with Vaas’ communications
- He has to shut down Medusa, the radio tower of a beached cargo ship
- “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’”
- Brody begins in the ocean, heads toward the beach, and quietly takes out a knife from a guard’s back pocket
- He stabs him with the knife and follows this process for another guard
- With a third guard, he throws the knife into his skull (seen in the E3 demo)
- Since he’s fairly close to the boat, Brody takes out binoculars so he can assess the situation
- Ubisoft is making the game with a “360 degree” design approach
- Each scenario will contain “stealthy, action-focused and creative approaches”
- “The sand is strewn with cover for those who wan an open-air gunfight, while stealthier players can hide within the exposed hold of another beached vessel as they move towards their goal”
- Reinforcements arrive in hovercraft on the beach
- There was one tester who found a hang-glider and approached the radio tower this way, which allowed him to avoid battle
- Another mission has Brody looking for a friend; he has to invade a ship
- More linear environment shown with fewer options, though it lets players experience “an ear-splitting shotgun at close quarters”
- Brody opens the hold doors, causing an explosive booby trap to flood the ship
- “His struggle to escape is the kind of scripted setpiece that makes up the entirety of games such as Call of Duty, and is more than a little reminiscent of a chapter of Uncharted 3″
- Hay: “It wasn’t like we set out to make it on an island, 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.”
- Game designer Andrea Zanni: “We have land animals and sea animals. They’ll be there as threats, they’ll be there for you to utilize – 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.”
- You’ll see a lizard during the cave mission
- There are sharks circling floating bodies after there is an explosion in the ship mission
- Hints from the team that there is a dark history to the archipelago
- Open-world designer Jamie Keen: “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. You feel like the world’ 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.”
- No weapon degradation
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