Yesterday was the last day of 2008’s Game Developers Conference, which for the first time in several years I was able to attend without any preexisting press commitments. I didn’t go to any press conferences, announcement-oriented sessions, or spend much time in the press room (where I have overheard such classic video game journalist statements as, “That talk sucked; it was, like, targeted at developers or something”)–I just went to lectures and presentations, learned a lot, and met a bunch of interesting people, which is what’s best about GDC.

One of the more interesting lectures I attended was by Patrick Redding, narrative designer on Ubisoft Montreal’s upcoming Far Cry 2, whose creative director is Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory). Hocking also gave a fascinating earlier talk on how to qualify (and, by extension, better define) the rather vague term “immersion.”

Redding gave a great deal of insight into the remarkably ambitious dynamic African setting of Far Cry 2. Interestingly, at least as I see it, while Far Cry 2 and Crysis are both essentially followups to Far Cry, they have gone in drastically different directions–Crysis took Far Cry’s player choice in gameplay style and amplified it through the nanosuit, while Far Cry 2 takes Far Cry’s focus on open-ended environments and blows it up into a systems-driven, semi-autonomous ecology. Hence Redding’s rather unusual title, “narrative designer.” As distinct from a writer, Redding conceives not the dialogue itself but rather the underlying systems that allow Far Cry 2 players to (supposedly) participate in a dynamically-driven narrative, one that is largely shaped by gameplay choices.

In the narrative of the plot, Far Cry 2 takes after Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness or Coppola’s film adaptation Apocalypse Now–”a journey into the depths of Africa and into the mind of a madman,” as Redding put it. Meanwhile, the narrative of the gameplay is more based on the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest or Kurasawa’s classic film Yojimbo (arguably inspired by Red Harvest), in which the protagonist (here, the player) pits brutally pits warlord-led factions against one another.

To facilitate this, Far Cry 2 simulates the members of these factions and the civilians on whose lives they incur, giving them basic social needs or military duties and allowing the player to exist within the world and participate in it. The background threat of malaria and the need to create (or break) alliances, which are to an extent dependent on the player’s reputation, add incentive to become invested in the human dynamics of the world. Nonetheless, it appears player uninterested in involved story elements can simply treat it as a more typical shooter as they progress.

The details of the systems that make this possible were discussed a great deal in Redding’s talk (while many more were surely kept in reserve), and it probably isn’t necessary to elaborate on all of them here since the game is due in under two months I believe, but suffice to say it got me quite interested in Far Cry 2. I was a huge fan of Far Cry on PC, but even its greatest advocates would admit it was something of a narrative vacuum–so why bother with ambitious dynamic narrative in the sequel?

I chatted with Redding a bit after the talk, and posed that question to him. His initial response, a bit of a throwaway but certainly a valid answer, was that at the end of the day, Far Cry 2 is an easily-marketable shooter and a sequel to a successful action game regardless of whether it has dynamic narrative, so it’s sort of a “safe” testbed.

The more interesting answer is that this is the first time Ubisoft has tried to take emergent narrative like this to such an extent. It actually makes a great deal of sense for the first pass of them to be done in such a war-torn, animalistic setting–at the end of the day, problems can still be solved with the business end of the gun, and NPCs probably aren’t going to be interested in elucidating in great depth on timeless philosophical issues. If everything goes as planned, the team can take its technology and continue refining it to the point where it could potentially be used in a game whose gameplay is more explicitly dependent on complex social interactions.

So cheers to Redding, Hocking, and the rest of the team. This is the kind of problem that needs to be solved. As much as we often talk about how games offer interactive storytelling impossible to deliver in other forms of entertainment, this is sadly infrequently the case–most games end up with the same kind of point-A-to-point-B plot we see everywhere else–usually with a lower standard of quality. True dynamic narrative is something only possible in games. It’s a difficult technology and design hurdle, and it probably isn’t going to be fully cleared by Far Cry 2, but it’s great to see developers being so smart about trying to get there.

Tags: clint hocking, dynamic narrative, far cry 2, patrick redding

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 6:17 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.