US, February 22, 2008 - With Far Cry 2, Ubisoft Montreal is taking a different kind of approach to first-person shooter narrative. The majority of the story is generated in a player's head, along the lines of something like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., but seemingly more free-from. That's not to say the game is entirely devoid of developer-generated story, but the way you interact with it is largely up to you.
According to narrative designer Patrick Redding, gameplay revolves around a player walking into towns or environmental spaces and playing two factions against each other. As the 50 square kilometer world is explored, you'll wind up taking on missions for each faction, killing NPCs, and generally affecting the game world, all of which impacts your infamy rating.
This rating is important because it's the hinge on which nearly all narrative development swings. It affects how NPCs, both friendly and hostile react to you, how your occasional companion NPCs regard you, and ultimately how much health you have. At Far Cry 2's outset, your character contracts malaria. To diminish the disease's effects and explore more of the game world, you must appeal to civilian NPCs for medicine, which actually increases your maximum health. If you act in such a way that causes your infamy to dramatically rise, you'll notice civilians will start refusing to interact with you, effectively cutting you off from additional medicine and capping your potential health. At that point, you'll have to rely much more on your infamous reputation (and guns, of course) to help you get by.
On inspiration behind Far Cry 2, Redding cited Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as basis for the sequel, and said said Ubisoft also considered its movie adaptation in Apocalypse Now and the dynamic of, "the false veneer of civility versus the savage truth." The problem with Apocalypse Now is it's a journey up a river. "We're not making a boat simulator," says Redding. Your character in Far Cry 2 is pursuing a Kurtz-type character, but the journey isn't meant to be so constrained.
A main goal for Ubisoft is, particularly in a game where it's impossible to predict how a player might behave, to maintain Far Cry 2's continuity. First, they have to capture the players' attention, then they have to make sure the player doesn't see the artificial seams of how they've blended scripted and dynamic content. It's not so much about having scripted events in specific locations, but instead having a lot of generic behaviors that can be used in many different places in lots of different ways. Redding calls them bricks of micronarrative. "For us the story isn't just about the data, it's really about the system that we are going to have to sit underneath the game and manage the delivery of that."
For Redding, the most powerful stories are the ones created in players' heads. He likened story structure to an island, where the island's shallows surrounding the beach will arouse in the player a curiosity to continue toward land and see what's there, to draw them away from the artificial boundaries of the game world. "You need to decouple premise from story," says Redding. "[the premise] that's been plastered on the back of the box [players] forget about that after probably an hour after turning on the console."
As a side note, Redding also encouraged those in attendance to "be stochastic" on several occasions, which has to break some kind of world record for number of times any one person on earth has spoken the word inside of an hour.
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