Far Cry Primal interviews

Ubisoft Toronto’s creative director Max Beland and lead writer Kevin Shortt break down the origins and intricacies of Far Cry Primal.

PCPP: You worked on the Shangri-La Far Cry 4 missions; was that a trial grounds for what you’ve done in Far Cry Primal?

Max Beland: Ubisoft Toronto made all of the Shangri-La missions, and we made the tiger of Shangri-La, so we definitely learnt and we took our experience and we brought that to Primal. We did way more on Primal than we did on Shangri-La in terms of controlling the beasts, because we have more than 14 beasts that you can control. We didn’t know at the time that it was a trial run.

Up until this point, Far Cry games have been synonymous with vehicles and machineguns and things like that. What are the essential elements of a Far Cry game that allow you to create a game that doesn’t have guns, vehicles and the sort of things that people come to expect from the Far Cry brand?

Max Beland: The Far Cry brand is about open-world. It’s about you arriving in this frontier that you’ve never visited. It’s about player creativity. It’s about systemic gameplay. Of course, it’s about combat, and Far Cry Primal has a lot of weapons. I think the coolest weapons are the beasts. Of course we’ve got spears, we’ve got bows, we’ve got clubs, we’ve got fire and bombs you can throw. So we’ve got all that, but we also have all of the beast inventory that you can use. Of course, in 10,000 BC there weren’t any cars—you can’t drive your Ford or your Jeep—but what we’ve done is we’ve done the beast riding for [protagonist] Takkar.

How much is familiar in this Far Cry game?

Max Beland: We really tried to strike a game balance between familiar and new. Again, that’s why I love the Far Cry franchise, because it allows us to do that. Our pillars are not limited to one character. It’s not one city. It’s not one time zone. Our pillars are about open gameplay, the world against you, the freedom of exploration, and all these things I think fit extremely well in the Stone Age setting where you’re a hunter, you’re a gatherer, you can craft your weapons, all of that. I think it really fits to have a Far Cry game in the Stone Age.

Why is crafting so important in Far Cry Primal?

Max Beland: It’s something that works very well with the theme: those first humans who were starting to group together and hunt together. They couldn’t go to the store and buy a bow, right? They had to craft it. So it made a lot of sense to put some more emphasis on that. When you talk about having Far Cry set in the Stone Age, it just makes sense. Having the world against you, being this hunter/gatherer that’s not at the top of the food chain, that you have to work to get your weapons and to get your beasts. It fits so well in the brand that, in a way, it was a no-brainer.

What impact does the dynamic day/ night cycle have on gameplay?

Max Beland: Night-time is way more dangerous. The predators are going to be more aggressive, and there will be more predators in the world that are going to be attacking you. I highly suggest you carry fire with you for night-time. The other thing is we also have different setups on the outposts and on the bonfires, depending on the day and the night, there’s going to be maybe fewer people, and patrols are going to be different. We’re really playing with that to make it feel like it’s a real, living world. But, for sure, at night, you need to bring animal fat because you need your fire with you.

Is fire used for more than just setting your weapon alight?

Max Beland: You can have your spear on fire, you can have your arrows on fire, but your clubs can also be on fire. We really play with the fact that you have a flame with you: you can see better, but also the animals are going to react differently with the fire. Some animals are going to be more afraid of fire; some animals are going to be less afraid. Also, we’ve designed a hierarchy with the animals. If you’re travelling with a dole—the smaller canine—if a bear sees you, the bear’s not going to care about your

The predators are going to be more aggressive, and there will be more predators in the world that are going to be attacking you

dole. But if you’re walking around with a big cave bear, well then the doles or the wolves are going to go, ‘Oh, shit! I’m not going there,’ and they’re going to leave you alone.

So are you saying that a cave bear is the ultimate animal to have as a companion?

Max Max Beland: Beland: We created that hierarchy between the animals so that, depending on what you’re doing, you might want to have a different animal with you. If you want to be more stealth, you’d want to bring a jaguar with you, or a panther; but if you want to go loud and proud, you bring a fucking cave bear and you just send it into an outpost, and you’re just sniping away with your bow. So I think it’s very different. For me, that’s what Far Cry is about. It’s about giving the player all of these great tools, all of these systems that are playing together that are all connecting and standing clear and saying, ‘Have fun. This is your game.’

Was it the Stone Age setting that came first, or the fact that it needed to be a Far Cry game that came first?

Kevin Shortt: We’ve always thought the Stone Age would be a cool setting for Far Cry. It just fits Far Cry. It took us a while, and we toyed around with stuff, and then the opportunity came along. I wasn’t on [Far Cry] 4, but people were finishing up [Far Cry] 4, and we decided now is a good time to go for this Stone Age idea.

Where do you find inspiration for a game that’s set thousands of years in the past?

Kevin Shortt: It really was us looking at historically what went on, what was happening back then. From my perspective as a writer, one of the big breakthroughs was when we decided, ‘Okay, we’re going to go with Wenja. We’re not going to use English.’ That was interesting because we had to change the way we wrote. It’s not just, write the English and they’ll translate it for us. We had to think about, ‘Okay, we can’t use idioms.’ You can’t have a chip on your shoulder. You can’t say, ‘I’ll meet you at noon.’

You have to talk in terms of how many suns it is to travel to this point. That got us thinking in a different way. That in itself helped craft the characters because we had hired these linguist experts to help craft the language. Once that language started coming back and we heard the rhythm of it, it had a very earthy, beat-y rhythm to it. That started infecting how they interacted. The language was simpler, so they were much more abrupt in what they had to get across, and we saw that in performances, as well.

Is that a fully created-from-scratch language?

Kevin Shortt: It’s based on what’s called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. That’s a known language, at least, so they speculate. There was no written language back then. It’s about 4000 to 6000BCE, which is roughly when they spoke this language. So there’s no actual evidence of the language, but they reverse engineer the languages and they’re able to say, ‘Okay, this must have been what they spoke.’ So our language is based off that. What we did is hire experts who specialise in PIE, but they still had to create the language. It still had to be adapted for us because we have three languages in our game.

How much of what you’ve written originally has to change based on the iterative process of game mechanics evolving and changing?

Kevin Shortt: All the time. It’s a completely iterative process. I used to work in television and you could see it. In games it’s very different. You constantly have to adapt, and it’s not just story that’s adapting. Everyone’s adapting. You see it in the game, it doesn’t work the way we thought, we have to adjust it, ‘This completely doesn’t work so we’re taking that out.’ Well, now that they’ve taken that out, our scenes that we wrote are completely not working so we have to rework those.

It’s constantly something that you’re struggling to keep up with, which is why I think it’s really important when we’re developing games, we’re always making sure that we establish the world first. We don’t come up with the story first, we don’t necessarily come up with exactly the gameplay, it’s: ‘What’s the world that we’re going to work with?’ So everyone can kind of rally around that and go, ‘Okay, we can all work with that and then start adding in the pieces slowly and carefully.’

Do you have ways that you can have more traditional storytelling elements on top of players discovering emergent moments through gameplay?

Kevin Shortt: Yeah, for sure. With this one we definitely tried to find, ‘Okay, where are the opportunities where we can tuck in little bits of story?’ We’re trying to do that all the time. For instance, you’ll find cave paintings throughout the world. There are little moments there where you can tell some sort of story, just with cave paintings, which fit as part of the world. Sometimes we try to take an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, with this campsite, can we try and add these types of things that are going to suggest a story that the player can find?’ We look for that as much as we can.