Saturday 30 January 2016

Primal Evolution

Far Cry Primal

Far Cry goes back to the past to present us the future of the franchise

Let’s be honest. While there are examples of successful series that have taken wildly unexpected turns in recent years – Metal Gear Solid and Super Mario being the two obvious standouts from 2015 – they are precious few in number. Games that are part of a wider, successful franchise tend not to rock the boat too much when it comes to their design choices and settings. Fewer still have swum against the current and succeeded in providing their audiences with something worthy of their respective franchise’s lofty status.


Sticking to a tested formula is the safer option when it comes to both marketing and design, providing the potential players with something they recognise and instantly understand. That money earned can be ploughed into the development of the next entry in the series, and thus the cycle continues. Far Cry Primal is the latest attempt by a major publisher to alter course and challenge the expectations of its player base, straying from the modern military backdrops the series is known for, instead focusing on life as it was 12,000 years ago. With animals to tame and command, vast open areas devoid of fortified bases and towns and a sharp focus on engaging with the natural world instead of technology, Primal, on the surface, comes across as atypical for the Far Cry course.

However, dig a little deeper, talk to the people behind the scenes and start thinking about Primal in relation to other recent games from Ubisoft Montreal and that separation from the series’ core looks less stark. While an evolution is certainly occurring here, despite the move to the past, it would be wrong to suggest that this upcoming entry in what is now one of gaming’s most venerable and recognised series is a departure from those elements that have so far brought such acclaim. Animals, for instance, have for a long while now been a central thread of Far Cry’s desire to provide complex, emergent gameplay systems. Systems that push the player into a reaction, as opposed to simply waiting for the player to pull on them to create that relationship between cause and effect that is so vital to this kind of open-world experience.

We recently spoke with Primal’s game director, Thomas Simon, who explained that, indeed, exploring further the impact animals can have on player behaviour felt like a sensible evolution given the chosen setting and time period. “Far Cry has really rich gameplay systems and there are different aspects to them that we can explore”, Simon explains when asked about whether or not your ability to tame and command animals in Primal felt like the logical next step for the franchise.

“We decided to develop the animals and your relationship with them – trying not to make them all simply be your enemies, but also allow you to bring them over to your side and see them interact with the world [from a new perspective]. Animals have been a part of Far Cry games for a long time and they’re a really iconic part of it, but I don’t think that what we’re doing is necessary the next step in that regard. However, it was certainly one of the possible steps we could have taken.”

Given the time period and the prevalence of the natural world over urban life, though, Simon does acknowledge that focusing on your interaction with animals, and their interactions with each other, felt like “a natural step” among the possible routes he and his team could have taken. The first goal in enhancing those interactions centres around making sure the player can accurately read the intentions and results of animal behaviour. Without this improved level of communication from game to player, it would be difficult to appreciate what is possible to achieve from the enhanced design.

“We started by exploring the hunting aspect,” continues Simon, “and reinforcing the reactions of animals to make sure that the players could read them, understand  them and, at a basic level, see whether you were looking at prey or predator. That helps develop a contrast to what’s going on and allows for more situations for the player to develop their skills when it comes to dealing with the animals.”

While Primal features far more animal interactions than Far Cry has seen up until now, the desire to enhance this element is informed by previous outings. The Shangri-La moments in Far Cry 4, in which you have partial control over a tiger within a mystical setting that exists in parallel with the ‘real’ world of the game, helped craft the direction of animal taming and instruction, Simon tells us. Rather than simply copy what was offered in Shangri-La, however, Primal sees a far more sophisticated take on the concepts controlling animal actions and mannerisms.

“We wanted to explore further [what we did in Far Cry 4],” Simon explains, “having animals hunting each other, but also hunting humans. What we like a lot is that, now you can control an animal, you see a lot of layers to the gameplay that you couldn’t see before, so that evolution has come about because of Primal being in  development. Also, it came down to us wanting to find a way to give players some sort of super weapons, and I think those beasts were the super weapons of 12,000 years ago. By giving them different gameplay capabilities we were able to create different arsenals and that reinforces the tactical freedom that’s important to Far Cry and the relationship the player has with the series’ animals.”

Animals, then, might be more sophisticated and behaviourally diverse than they’ve ever been in this series, but their design revolves around evolution over revolution. The goal with Primal, clearly, is to create an experience that pushes the boundaries and triggers us to rethink what we expect from a franchise that is now over a decade old, but it’s not to completely throw out the concepts that have now become synonymous with a Far Cry outing. It’s not just interactions with, and between, animals that have been informed by Far Cry’s past history, however. The environment itself follows the same path of progression despite being largely devoid of the fingerprint of humanity and the constructs that come along with that. Made up of calming green tree lines, wide, lazy rivers and dramatic snow-capped mountains, Primal offers a particularly rural flavour – far more so than anything offered in Far Cry 3 or 4. Still, Simon is adamant that the setting came into focus because it “made sense for a Far Cry game”, as opposed to being designed in isolation from the wider picture painted by the series.

One of the goals behind Primal’s world design is to increase the density of the environment in order to increase those instances inwhich you can sit back and witness the wildlife engage itself in its digitised edition of the food chain. That much was planned, but not all of the positive results have been so diligently crafted. Many have come about as a result of allowing those quintessentially Far Cry principles, of overlapping gameplay systems and genuine player freedom, to take centre stage and be afforded the opportunity to deliver volatile meaning from your actions. “There have been some super cool surprises, which is always a nice side effect of developing games like this,” says Simon in response to how Primal’s world alters the rules governing those emergent features.

“The fact that you don’t have any very noisy weapons, for example, makes you able to have animals get closer to you at all times as you’re not scaring them away. That means you see things from them that you wouldn’t witness in the same way if you were shooting an AK-47. Also, because you’re travelling either on foot or the back of an animal, you’re much more immersed and connected to the environment. You’re not locked into a box of a vehicle, which also creates noise that scares animals. “Everything is part of the same gameplay question, everything is a consequence of something else. That means the world feels closer to you and it allows you to witness much more. So, yeah, the result is a mix of intended design choices and surprises.”

For sure, our experience with Primal thus far does reveal a world that you feel very much a part of. That lack of technology, while a shock at first, strips away much of the potential distractions and forces you to engage more with the elements going on around you in a bid to progress and take command of your situation.

Rather than using a gun to slay an animal, before charging in and skinning it for crafting supplies, you instead find yourself taking an altogether more patient path. That might involve stalking your target and waiting for a predator to arrive and kill it for you, providing the chance to tame a new ally in the process, or quietly observing the scene to identify the weakest target before launching an attack.

Simon is adamant that this kind of thoughtful interaction is the result of the design team approaching the Stone Age setting from a perspective of ‘can’ over ‘can’t’. While there might not be much in the way of technology to play with, that doesn’t mean the setting is devoid of potentially interesting tools to use and playing styles to engage in.

“We based our ideas around ‘What can we have?’ rather than ‘What do we have to remove?’, so our options quickly expanded because of that,” elaborates Simon. “When you start digging into what weapons humans were using at the time, and if you start thinking about what kind of Far Cry touch you can add to them, you pretty quickly come up with a lot of interesting weapons. We have very different bows, we have bombs, we have traps, throwing knives, poison, fire... so, at the end of the day, it was really exciting to come up with things that we could add that we could justify for the time period.”

That ‘Far Cry touch’ to the weapons revolves around each offensive option being what Simon refers to as “systemic”; they have to hold the potential to function in all situations at any time the players choose. In other words, any weapons that serve a single, definitive purpose are unsuitable within the context of Far Cry’s open world ambitions.

One example of such an adaptable tool is fire, the essential Stone Age phenomenon able to be applied to many of your weapons to give a flaming club or blazing arrow. The key to fire, though, rests in its ability to set off chain reactions by interacting with many of the other ideas inherent to the setting and the inhabitants within it.

Swinging a flaming club and besting a single enemy works well enough, but if you can set fire to the shrub surrounding a hunting outpost and panic the humans within, and the animals in the nearby area, then you’ve just raised the bar in terms of potential emergent gameplay. It’s so satisfying to sit with glee as you observe your handy work from an overlooking ridge, watching as the danger you’ve created leads to further exaggeration. Humans struggle to get themselves to safety, top predators lay in wait for vulnerable beings to run their way, panicked and tripping, and the fire continues to spread.

Once the commotion is over, you can stroll in and take what’s left of the camp for yourself. Even if nothing survives, at least you’ve cleared the surroundings of immediate danger.

“…that’s why we decided to reinforce the idea of fire, which is really iconic [to the period] and it can also trigger a lot of surprising chain reactions,” determines Simon.  “It can hurt you if you don’t use it carefully, or it can be extremely powerful if you master it.

“It’s similar with poison. We wanted to use the poison to allow you to create havoc without being seen, which adds to your ability to approach the game through stealth. The systemic aspect of the game, actually, works into all elements of what you can do – not just your ability to cause damage.

“Far Cry is a game that has to be grounded in reality, but we can try to be creative with that reality. That means that, technically, yes, people could have created  firebombs, but we don’t have definitive proof that they did. So there’s a bit of our creative mind behind how that works, just as there is with some of the other weapon concepts. That drives the team on when it comes to Far Cry as a whole, not just for Primal. I think we’ve refined it pretty well in Primal, though.”

The ability to tame and command animals, then, represents just one route to success. If you don’t want to journey down that route, you don’t have to – although you can expect your travels to be fraught with immense difficulty if you do detour away from commanding animals. Without the luxury of motor vehicles and mechanised weapons at your disposal, combined with the increase in animal numbers roaming the countryside, travelling on foot alone is genuinely hazardous.

In true Far Cry fashion, though, you can opt for the slower, more cerebral approach of stealth, or focus on crafting new items to make yourself the most heavily armed entity the ancient world has ever known. The goal with the beasts, as Simon said, is essentially to make them super weapons, but that doesn’t mean they need be mandatory to succeed: “The game can be played with different levels of reliance on beasts. It’s really the player’s choice. If you decide not to use them then that will have a really big impact on how the game plays for you. Or, if you use them in a way that’s not so wise, that will impact your game a lot, too.

“There will also be moments where we make sure that you use different kinds of weapons. Some enemies, for example, are specifically designed to be ‘anti-beast’ units - so you’re going to have to fight alongside your beast to beat them, or use them in a different way entirely to get past them."

The beasts, then, like other weapons included here, adhere to the systemic nature of Primal and, in a wider sense, Far Cry as a general proposition. They represent just one of the alterations made to situate the game in the Stone Age, but they do not exist in isolation to the core design seen throughout the series as a whole. One of the primary challenges in continuing recognised design choices is to deliver them in such a way that they do not feel derivative or lazy.

There is no better way to convince your audience that both they and you are running out of enthusiasm for a franchise than to simply throw the same concepts at them, in almost exactly the same way as seen in previous releases. Should Primal perfectly hit that balance between the recognisable and the innovative then it could be the game that propels Far Cry into the next stage of its evolution.