Content area
Full text
Far Cry 2 was an enormously challenging project from both a technical and creative perspective. For the team at Ubisoft Montreal, it was our vision from the beginning to deliver a seamless 50-square-kilometer open world, with no loading, that was as beautiful from both technical and artistic standpoints as any modern, top-tier, corridor shooter. We also envisioned for the game a highly dynamic and destructible environment that supported robust and realistic fire propagation through building structures and vegetation.
Open world ambition
Once in production, we retargeted from a PC-only release to a planned simultaneous launch on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. And each version would support multiplayer versions and contain a level editor.
As if that weren't enough, we also aimed to innovate on numerous fronts by making the main characters of the game autonomous and unscripted, allowing the player to build relationships with them through game mechanics. We further expected these characters to be able to live or die at any time as determined by the player's actions, effectively creating a dynamic narrative that could sustain itself beyond the attrition of the major characters of the story.
As is typical, we succeeded at delivering some of these things, and failed at delivering others.
What Went Right
1) Tools. From the very beginning, technical director Dominic Guay asserted, "We have designed a game that forces us to make tools that will allow artists and designers to build and iterate content very rapidly."
With engine development planned to happen parallel to game development, we would be working under constantly shifting budgets, and we would need to be constantly tweaking and tuning the gameplay, even as the technical constraints changed. We literally needed to be able to build a square kilometer of the game in one day, and then be prepared to throw it away the next day if things changed.
At the end of pre-production, we presented a two-minute time-lapse video of a level designer and a level artist creating a one-square-kilometer section of African jungle in four hours. The proof-of-concept included all the terrain, dynamic vegetation, roads, structures, AI, and gameplay, and demonstrated beyond any doubt that we could create our game world.
The toolset would ultimately become the foundation of the level editor...