Far Cry 2 - Q&A Feature

During the hubbub of UbiDays we caught up with Clint Hocking, Far Cry 2's Creative Director, to talk about what the game has in store. We cover everything from the game's vast 50 square kilometre map, to what its character line-up will bring to the table, as well as the man eating lion that dev team members encountered in Kenya's Tsavo National Park.

TVG: When you guys revealed the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions we were a bit worried that they'd end up being slimmed down versions of a vast and graphically top of the range PC title. Can we expect the exact same builds across all three platforms?

Yes. The most important thing to say is that we don't have different data. There isn't a PC level design team, a PS3 level design team, and an Xbox 360 level design team; it's the same data. The only difference in teams is that there's an engineering team that's optimising a PS3 version and Xbox 360 version of all the same data. Obviously we optimise data differently for all the three platforms.

Honestly, the biggest difference between the consoles and the PC is that if you have a high end PC (you're running a dual core, or a quad core, or whatever new Nvidia card is in there), then you're going to be getting 60 frames a second in DX10 at some ridiculous resolution, and on consoles you're going to have a steady 30 frames per second at HD resolution.

TVG: The only game out there that Far Cry 2 will really be comparable to is Crysis. Although it was billed as an open world game, we actually found Crysis deceptively constraining - the corridors were still there, but they were just very wide. With Far Cry 2's 40 square kilometres of game world, are you literally going to be able to get on your hand-glider and fly for 40km without being stopped?

I don't think a hand-glider can go 40km. Well, in fact there's no linear 40km distance - we're 50 square kilometres [ed. Maths was never Gwynne's strong point], which means that the longest distance in our game is 12 km or something. But you can get in a boat and drive at top speed from a river in the North West corner of the game world, all the way to a lake at the bottom right hand corner of the game world - or whatever, the opposite corner. It might take you 15 minutes to get there at full speed assuming you're not getting shot out of the water, but yeah, you're free to go where you want, when you want. There are a few mountains that are too rocky and too steep, but that's only a few places in the game world.

TVG: Will you have to complete objectives before you can advance to the next section of map?

No, no - not at all. It's not corridors; the best analogy is to call it a chocolate chip cookie. You can't go on the chocolate chips in some places, just for optimisation reasons and so on and so forth, but you can go in the dough.

TVG: When we spoke at Leipzig last year you said that there would be multiplayer in the game, but you didn't want to just chuck in a bunch of modes like capture the flag as an afterthought. Are you still planning on including multiplayer and, if so, how's that shaping up?

We're still working on multiplayer. Obviously since Leipzig last year there's been a delay, so that delays everything all the way out - all the communications and everything - so we're still not talking about it. It's there; it's pretty cool. Most importantly, the new information we have is that we're supporting it with a level editor. We really learned from the original Far Cry about the importance of supporting a community online, and we also learned from the consoles versions of Far Cry about the value of having a really good in-game editor on PC and on console.

We can't ship our real production editor - it's just impossibly complicated - so the version we've built for the public is a very quick and super user-friendly level editor that allows people to build maps for multiplayer very, very quickly in a few hours. It uses all in-game assets so it's as beautiful as the game, unless you make a giant pillar of rock 500 metres high and don't texture it or something, then it's ugly, but that's up to you.

It's pretty spectacular. Just giving it to some level designers on other projects in the company and saying 'Just go ahead and make a map', and watching them to see what they do in a few hours is mind boggling.

TVG: As far as Far Cry 2's story is concerned, I've heard the term 'multiple endings' being bandied around here at UbiDays. What's the situation with that?

To me, multiple endings means three, or even eight. The problem is that while there are a few story threads that collapse into multiple discrete outcomes, the point is that the climaxes - and the characters that are involved in the climaxes at the end of the game - are all unique to every player because of who's involved, who's still alive, and all of that. It's like saying...

What's your favourite sport?

TVG: American Football.

Okay, well it's like saying there are multiple endings to the Super Bowl. I mean yeah, you start with 32 teams and any one of them can win. Are there multiple endings? Yes. Will one team win the Super Bowl in the end? Yes, every time.

TVG: It must be great having a writer like Susan O'Connor (Gears of War; BioShock) on board, and basing the game on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is inspired. I suppose that ultimately the game has to end up with you facing The Jackal?

Yes. There is a Super Bowl.

TVG: In GTA IV there were key characters that reacted differently to you depending on how you treated them. Your game looks set to offer a similar dynamic, but do you feel that Far Cry 2 has a much deeper offering in that area?

I haven't played enough into GTA IV to know, so I've heard all sorts of great things about it but I just can't comment. From the sounds of it they've done some really awesome stuff, but from the sounds of it it's also really different from what we have, so I don't know.

TVG: With these different characters in the game, are you only likely to meet half of them on one playthrough and so, on a second playthrough, you'll have a completely different experience?

We've done the calculation, and we can only do it approximately just because of the number of different permutations of the characters and story, but there are literally more possible playthroughs of the game - in terms of just the character relationships - than if every person in the world played the game for a thousand years, and they'd never have the same game twice. And I don't just mean whether you turn left or right when you're going down the road, I mean whether you have this buddy or that buddy, or this buddy is your second favourite, or that buddy is alive and this buddy's dead or whatever.

What I think is fascinating is that sure, in the first few hours of the game you're going to meet a couple of buddies; you're going to rescue them; maybe one of them will die, maybe not. By the time you get through the middle of the game you'll probably have had a couple of them die. Maybe you don't like a couple of them and maybe there's one that you really do like - that you really care about. That's when things really get interesting; when you're talking to your friends saying, 'Man, I met this guy Andre and he's doing this, and it's really cool, and then he came in and saved my life. We were doing this mission together and then he got killed. I was totally pinned down and I was going to die too, and I felt really bad but I thought "**** it" and I left him there - I don't know what happened to him.'

Then your friend is like, 'Andre! Yeah, I remember that guy. He showed up at that Mike's place and then he came out and rescued me one time while I was in a fire-fight. Then he said something and I thought he was an idiot, so I shot him.'

So you go, 'What're you talking about, man?! Andre was the best!'

And he's like, 'Yeah, I thought he was an idiot.' So it's a completely different relationship with the character depending on the individual.

TVG: The PS3 version here at UbiDays is the only one that's not hands on right now. A lot of developers have had troubles with developing for PS3 where multi-format releases are concerned. Have you experienced anything like that in development?

I'm not the tech guy, so I don't want to put too many words in their mouths. The main thing is just that it optimises differently than the Xbox 360 - it's just a different problem. I don't know that it's harder - maybe it is. I think the reason we're on console at all, PS3 or Xbox 360, is because we made the decision early on to use the processing power of new hardware on PC. Yes, you can have really giant textures on PC and stream them really fast because you have powerful hard drives, lots of RAM, and all of that. You don't have that same luxury on console but we really believed that the way to manage next-gen game development is to have lighter assets that move faster, and we actually needed that to support our open world - even on PC. It turned out that not having a bunch of giant textures that you have to stream all the time is the only thing that allows us to ship on console at all.

And actually the PS3, as far as I understand it, is actually very good at doing processing, so that's why we've got it here. The reason it's not hands on is because it's a little crashy and we get 'out of memory' errors if you start fires - that's the most common crash we get. It's just minor optimisation problems that need to be dealt with, but it kind of sucks to get players hands on with a game that has fire and then they try and start a really big fire that's awesome, and they crash. So it's like, 'let's just control the demo a little bit and you can see it's the same game as the Xbox 360, it's just a different optimisation problem, that's all.'

TVG: We've found that a persistent problem with PS3 games has been resolution, but you don't see that being a problem come the end of development?

Well, again, our game doesn't use high-res textures. We use lots of low-res textures that are layered in complex shaders, so we can't really turn the resolution down that much.

TVG: With the game's length, do you see it being the length of a regular FPS or are you going for something vast here?

I think it really depends on how you play and what's important to you in the way you play. Again, a lot like in GTA, there's an achievement in GTA for completing it in 30 hours. If that's the way you want to play, you can do it in 30 hours apparently. A lot of people play GTA for 100 hours plus, and a lot of people play it for 40 hours and don't finish it. It's not a question of when do you finish the game; it's a question of when are you finished with the game. I think you can still finish our game - there is still an end - and unlike GTA III (I haven't finished GTA IV) where you can finish the game but keep playing, with ours you can't - once you get to the end it is the end.

TVG: Do you have any interesting ideas for Xbox 360 achievements like big game hunting across the African savannahs for example, where you get 20 Gamerscore points for taking out a lion?

We have a lot of interesting achievements. We've got two years of games with varying degrees of awesomeness in their achievements and trophies that we can look at and go, 'What makes a good achievement set and what's really engaging for players?' We did it really carefully. I think at the beginning a lot of people went, 'Oh! Achievements! We forgot,' and then just did them in an hour. Our programmers were really pushing us to get the first designs done early because a lot of them require specific coding and so on and so forth. I'm not going to tell you what any of them are, as much as I'd love to, but our achievements are really cool and we have Trophies on PS3 as well.

TVG: Finally, speaking of lions I heard that the dev team encountered one while they were doing their research in Africa...

I wasn't there, but my understanding of it is that they were on safari; they had two or three trucks with drivers, and I think they were in Tsavo National Park that has man eating lions in it, right? It's not a joke. Their guards are like park rangers with AK47s - it's a dangerous place, man. So they stop one night and it was getting dark and they had a cook with them who made their food and stuff. The cook was making their food and he had something like a machete that he was using to cut up meat and stuff like that. They were just standing around their camp putting their tents together and the way they described it was that you almost didn't hear it - you felt it inside you like a tremble when the lion roared - it vibrates you. They all stopped and went, 'What was that?' Alex saw the cook grab his machete and run to the truck. He pushes the camera man that they had with them out of the way and runs to the truck. The camera man goes running after the cook; he slams the door of the truck and the camera man goes "You're in my seat! You're in my seat!"

Alex and LP were standing beside one of the guards with their tents, and they feel and hear this lion roar in the bushes. They look at each other and the guard goes "Kchick" with his AK47 so they're like 'Run!' and they book it and get in the trucks. Half an hour later the guard told them it was safe to come out before saying, "Yeah, he's just letting us know he's here."

TVG would like to thank Clint Hocking, Far Cry 2's Creative Director, for taking the time to speak with us about the game, which is due out this Fall on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.