Ubisoft Montreal’s Far Cry 2 is not an inviting game. Like the war-torn (and presumably fictional) African state it depicts, Far Cry 2 is brutal, sparse, and offers little guidance.

Right from the start, your vulnerabilities are made clear: weapons you find on the ground rust and jam; you periodically suffer the effects of malaria; damaged vehicles require basic engine maintenance; and serious injuries demand improvised surgery, often with pliers.

On top of that, combat encounters (often approached with those rusted, jamming-prone guns) are fairly straightforward FPS affairs, and with the amount of mission-to-mission driving required in the game’s enormous open world, their frequency can grate.

Many gamers have gone online to post initial frustrations with the game — an understandable reaction from the perspective of somebody unaccustomed to its structure and design ethic, particularly in the context of an FPS.

But in the week since its release, there has been an interesting phenomenon unfolding. I have seen more and more posts by people announcing that Far Cry 2 finally “clicks” with them, that they have internalized the game’s structure and systems, and have been rewarded with unique, memorable moments.

For me, those have been Far Cry 2’s stock in trade. Game designers often speak about the dominance of the personal player story over the designer’s authored narrative. Indeed, that potential is powerful, and clearly more relevant to games than any other entertainment medium. But practically speaking, to me, relatively few games truly exploit that potential.

Far Cry 2 has been an exception. (more…)

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. (more…)