Of course, it wouldn't be this promising without some sound design thinking behind it all. This is where Ubisoft producer Dan Haye comes in - I had a chat about the messages within the game, how Rook Island was designed and the emotions that the developer wanted to make the player feel. Read on...
SPOnG: Far Cry 3 has a new protagonist in Jason Brody. How does he compare to the protagonist in previous Far Cry games?
Dan Haye: He’s definitely different. There’s no question. Right off the bat, we wanted to capture at this feeling of uncertainty and loneliness. Remember when you first went camping as a little kid? You’re having a blast - the world is your oyster, everything is great.
Then it starts to get dark, you start to get a little scared, and then you hear a twig snap. Your imagination does more damage than what’s really out there.
We wanted to give that to the player. A feeling of being a little kid, being small, and then being able to grow up within the confines of this island.
So we were very specific about wanting to have an everyman character - not a soldier, just a normal person like you or I - who got in over their head and responded out of necessity, in a very unpracticed way. You quickly learn that when the chips are down and you have to survive, you can. And you end up almost becoming elegant at it. The island was a character unto itself, really - its design gave us an opportunity to do that.
Dan Haye: Yes, absolutely. We try to think of it almost like a play. Where you’re sitting around a table with your family and everyone has their own, deep, unsaid emotions. There’s the father, the two sons, maybe a sister, the mum and the interplay of what’s going on during the meal.
In the game you meet Grant, [Jason’s brother]. Now, Grant’s obviously pretty tough. He’s very much somebody who’s there to help you at the beginning. But with that in mind, you start to wonder what dinner’s like at Jason’s house. What it’s like to be in Grant’s shadow and how much Jason appreciates that, when they’re not in trouble.
Just the subtlety, the nuance of the emotions that you and I can relate to... the loss of Grant... you can actually hear small segments of memories throughout the game to add some colour to Jason’s character. We don’t try and write the entire story. What we try and do is just leave gaps that the player’s imagination can write, and be a participant in. I think that drawing on those emotions, and drawing on stuff that’s credible and what we all know, allows the player to jump in that much easier.
SPOnG: The game seems to be full of immersive moments that really draw you into the world around you - one after the other without dropping a beat. How did you approach the design of the game so that you maintained that flow throughout?
Dan Haye: In every single instance, you treat it like a piece of music. There are notes in music, there are runs - but there are also rests. To be able to appreciate the runs and the notes, you have to have the rests. So we looked at the game by balancing the emotion, the moments... we give you somebody like Grant and then we take him away.
And when we take Grant away - you’re holding the controller, and you can actually feel the feedback of his heartbeat slowly dissipating when your hands are on his wounds. Then you lose him. The player loses him. You actually feel that loss. And Vaas very quickly says, “Run. Run because you’re nothing but a piece of meat to me. Run. And let’s see how far you can make it.”
To be honest it cannot just be constant insanity all the time. You have to have moments where you’re feeling the raw emotion of loss, or the raw emotion of love, or even just enjoyment. Allowing the player to balance between the run-and-gun of the missions and being able to just going out and forgetting for a time.
It’s a balance between the two, and the idea is to offer enticements. Choose where you want to go, how you want to go, when you want to go, and the story that you write will be on your own.
SPOnG: If designing the game is like writing a piece of music, does that mean making the game in such a way was a challenge for you guys? Did it come naturally for you to take this direction?
Dan Haye: It hasn’t been easy. It’s not just a piece of music - it’s also played in concert. You have a number of different things - animation, audio, presentation, cinematics, characters, memorable moments, little points of interest for exploration... it’s a concert. It’s a symphony of things that we’re trying to offer. And the trick is to allow the player to be the conductor, in a lot of cases.
In some ways, you’re transitioning from the world that you’re in now, to a world that’s like going down the rabbit hole with us. To spend some time on the island, to meet the characters. It’s really tricky. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it’s easy. At all.
But, I think that we have an opportunity where we have a really great fanbase, and a product that people are clamouring for - we have open-world, co-op and PvP... There’s just a lot to offer, and so it’s just about offering a variety of experiences for the player.
Dan Haye: If we’re talking about themes that we’ve read in books and things, I think Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter are good examples of influences. There was a scene in The Deer Hunter that I remember very clearly that when I watched it for the first time, the feeling of ‘What does that mean? What’s coming next?’.
In the scene, a bunch of guys are about to go off to Vietnam, and two days beforehand they’re are at a wedding and they’re all drinking and having a good time. There’s a soldier who’s sitting there who’s just come back from the frontline. And he’s having a shot. They go over and try to have a shot with him but he’s very quiet, very contemplative. He’s not celebrating anything. They don’t understand why he’s like that, because they don’t know what’s coming.
The juxtapositions of the fact that you have a soldier who’s very stoic, and the rowdy soldiers having a good time... the two moods for the same event... it’s a very interesting story unto itself. What we tried to do is just look for raw emotion, like that. Moments that the player would recognise.
You think of other influences, and you might think of books like The Road, where there’s tremendous loss and then great hope. Movies like The Beach, where you see the beauty and the paradise, but then you also see that there’s danger behind it. So I think all that stuff, plus our own lives and the experiences that we’ve had, played into the mosaic that is Far Cry 3.
Dan Haye: I don’t know how best to qualify and describe Vaas, because he’s not simply a bully. He’s beyond that. I think everybody’s been in a moment where they’ve either been at a bar, or at school, and they thought they could handle a situation, or been in a place they shouldn’t have. And they realise very quickly that they’re not as tough as they think they are. And they’re put in a moment of very specific weakness.
It’s a life lesson, and Vaas is the guy who teaches you that lesson. He was our instrument to provide the player with that moment - where they felt that weakness and thought they would have their lunch money taken. Everybody remembers that particular moment in their life, where they realise that they’re not a hero and that there are circumstances where they’re just going to have to sit there and take it.
What’s interesting about those moments is that there’s two sides to that coin. When you look at it on face value, you feel very much like a victim. But when you look back on it, you also remember whoever it was that hurt you, or insulted you, and you start to think about what made them tick. And if you’re a little bit more contemplative about it, you realise that they were probably a victim themselves.
Then you start to look at Vaas differently, and you start to ask, ‘Who made Vaas?’ There are hints in the game - how he acts, and what he’s doing - that are revealed later, with the relationship of his sister, for example. You begin to learn how the island made him what he is...
Dan Haye: It’s very challenging, absolutely. You do not want the story to be too heavy-handed and be an impediment to the player’s progress. The idea is that it’s just another enticement - something that allows you to learn the characters. And to be honest, we think of our characters as personality bombs who go off on the island. So you might not be with Vaas at a particular moment, but you can see his influence.
And sometimes that’s enough. You don’t need to have him there every minute of every day, yelling at you or treating you like a victim. It’s enough to see that there are pirates out there. It’s enough to see enemies going out and hunting tigers and loading them into cages, for example. You understand that there’s an intelligence at work. There’s a network, of sorts.
But you don’t have to be reminded of it every minute. Especially with an open world game. It’s really important that the story is just a thread - one that is woven through the tapestry that is the game. And that you’re very careful with how much time you spend on each [cinematic]. You need to offer the player the enticements of being able to go into the open world, and have the story as a palette cleanse. Or play the missions and have the open world as a palette cleanse. It depends on how you play.
SPOnG: There were moments during play where control was taken from me to make sure you’re able to see something and focus on something in the story. It must have also been tough to have these elements without going so far as to irritate the player.
Dan Haye: It’s an extremely fine line. You want to make sure that you’re offering a momentary enticement, then giving control back to the player and allowing them to choose whether they take the bait or continue with their own adventure.
Dan Haye: I’m-- That’s a great question, actually. It’s the first time I’ve been asked that. I don’t know... again, we didn’t set out to answer all those questions. But I think it all comes back to those feelings and emotions that we wanted to have in the game. Going back to that camping analogy of you being alone and hearing that twig snap in the dark... I’m extremely superstitious, and I believe that people’s imaginations are things that affect them incredibly deeply.
So if we give the player an opportunity to use their imagination, put out little breadcrumbs of information, we can recreate that same feeling. Say for example that I’m bombing along in a truck, and I look down and see a fire. I look closer, and that fire is surrounded with a pile of bodies, with a blood trail that goes off into a cave. What happened? Well, we don’t tell you.
The idea is that we allow you to come up with your own story. To allow you to come up with what everything means. It wasn’t heavy-handed - it was just this thing where we wanted to give the player something that had a little mystique to it.
SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!
Dan Haye: Cheers!