STACK #161 Mar 2018

GAMES FEATURE

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Telling Stories The Far Cry series is back this month with Far Cry 5 . Paul Jones spoke with lead writer at Ubisoft Montreal, Drew Holmes.

I 've been hooked on Far franchise crammed full of content to be discovered, and has progressively improved with each new entry. It often Cry since I picked up Far Cry 2 in 2008 . It’s a quality

D r e w H o l m e s

surprises with its settings and locations, too, as evidenced with Far Cry Primal , a game that released just over a year after Far Cry 4 came out in 2014. Far Cry is a popular series with gamers; it was the must-play game at E3 last year for us, and judging by the queues at the Ubisoft booth at PAX in November, the gaming public agreed. For the fifth official title, Ubisoft set the game closer to home; the fictional town of Hope County in the US state of Montana. Lead writer on FC5, Drew Holmes, recently talked us through the process of deciding how the locations in Far Cry are determined. “Like most things in game development, it’s a lot of people pitching ideas and that list getting whittled down,” he explains. “Everything builds out of that location, so everyone along the Ubisoft chain is going to give their feedback. “There are some key criteria you need for a location to feel like it’s “Far Cry”. Wildlife plays a huge part. Ferocious predators and interesting prey to hunt are key. You also need to feel like it’s a bit of a frontier – that you’re not quite sure what’s over the next hill. “You always want that pending sense of danger, not just from your villains, but from the environment itself. You also want verticality – there’s nothing more satisfying than climbing to the top of a mountain and wing-suiting into a nearby valley.

You always want that pending sense of danger not just from your villains, but from the environment itself

“There had been a desire to bring Far Cry to the United States for quite a while, and when the scout team went to Montana it really nailed all of the key criteria and then some.” For Far Cry 4 , Ubisoft sent a team to Nepal on a research mission to ensure they accurately

“We had several trips with various groups,”

says Holmes. “It’s really important if you say, 'This takes place in Montana' that the game world looks and feels like Montana. Getting to know the locals and seeing what their favorite parts were was key. But it’s still a game, after all. It’s a fictional county and we’ve condensed the biomes of Montana into our county. Montana is a massive state (a third larger than Victoria), so we wanted to make sure we had all of that variety you’d see without adhering strictly to reality. “What’s been really great is to get feedback from people who have lived in Montana – one

captured the region’s landscape in order to create an authentic depiction of the fictional Himalayan country of Kyrat. Despite Montana being practically on the doorstep this time around, a team was still dispatched on a reconnaissance mission to gather intel on the location.

006 MARCH 2018

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