Feeling the mission

Ubisoft Montreal gives
Far Cry 2 the human killing touch

ADAPTIVE AI, AMBIGUOUS MORALITY: Far Cry 2

by ERIK LEIJON

Three years ago, in an interview with the Mirror, Ubisoft Montreal lead game designer Clint Hocking was talking about his ambitions for the future of gaming.

Musing about future designs, he said, “‘So what? [The game] looks real, but what do I care?’ I want to feel something when I play this game.”

Hocking couldn’t go into much detail about how he planned on answering those questions, as his secret title was still in the early stages, but the idea of adding an emotional investment was the mission statement for Far Cry 2, released for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC this week.

Ubisoft Montreal’s African-themed first-person shooter starring desperate mercenaries in a hopeless civil war hopes to be so revolutionary, gamers won’t even notice the thwarting of modern gaming conventions as they play.

Hocking, narrative director Patrick Redding and the entire development team have aimed to create a dirty, visceral world without constricting walls or cutscenes to interrupt the experience. Instead of having a game split between story-advancing scenes and unrelated shooting missions, Far Cry 2’s story and gameplay are driven almost entirely by the artificial intelligence (AI)—meaning every choice made by the player will decide the game’s outcome.

“What we wanted to do is create a situation where gamers feel like they’re playing the story, not being told the story,” describes Redding, a 39-year old California native who attended UBC with Hocking. Video games traditionally tell stories through static cinematic cutscenes separated from the actual playing portions of the game. Without cutscenes, Far Cry 2’s cast of 12 mercenaries were created to adapt on the fly; their constantly changing relationships directly shaped by who the player decides to shoot or how he affects the 50 square-kilometre open world.

Humanizing the AI-controlled characters was accomplished through a method Redding was responsible for, called micro-narrative. “It’s the notion that content is broken into as many small pieces as possible and then sequenced as a reflection of the game’s current state, like pulling information out of buckets.”

For instance, if you happen to kill your buddy in cold blood, the other mercenaries’ dialogue will change to reflect this, while your deceased friend is erased from the game entirely. This meant recording nearly 150,000 words of dialogue (an amount comparable to Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell) that could fit almost any potential situation. Games that provide players with different choices have been done in the past, although Far Cry 2 attempts to be unique by making the main characters morally ambiguous, meaning there are no clear good or evil paths to follow.

Shooting people is also meant to be more contemplative, as every potential target is controlled by the adaptive AI instead of a set pattern written by the designers. “It’s like The Sims for mercenaries,” says Redding. “They have conversations with each other, some are aware of where I am, some aren’t. Some are asleep and some are stoned. We’re showing players there’s a spectrum of threat levels, of different AI behaviour.”

Redding adds that Far Cry 2 still has a strong narrative and isn’t a series of cause-effect situations. “Randomness is not what we’re looking for. We’re looking for noisy outcomes. We want players to feel verisimilitude with the world and they’re putting their noise in the system.