Editor's Note: The following article first appeared in Game Informer Australia Issue #75 and is written by David Milner. You can follow him on Twitter here.
It begins with a bang. Or, more accurately, a crushing thud to the ground. Takkar, Far Cry Primal’s protagonist, is chased off a cliff when a sabre-toothed tiger rudely interrupts his mammoth-hunting expedition. His party is slaughtered. After regaining consciousness and realizing he’s been separated from the safety of his tribe, the Wenja, Takkar has to quickly satisfy his most primal, urgent needs: find a weapon, find food, find shelter and find his people.
There are no complex emotions or themes at play during the game’s scene-setting moments. Takkar is not returning to his homeland to bury his mother; he’s not liberating a nation from a totalitarian regime; he’s not even a carefree frat-brat on a holiday from Hell. He just needs to stay alive in a land that couldn’t care less about him.
“It’s more direct. There are more immediate concerns,” says Kevin Shortt, lead writer on Far Cry Primal – a man with the unusual task of crafting dialogue for a game that doesn’t feature a single word spoken in a living, real language.
After spending four hours with Far Cry Primal, exploring its open-world and diving into its new features, I can attest that it simultaneously feels like a Far Cry game and a new experience. The core franchise pillar of surviving a hostile frontier is omnipresent – but this isn’t just any frontier. This is the first frontier.
“We want it so that when players go into this world, they really feel like they’re in the period of 10,000 BCE,” says Shortt. “The animals are very accurate and precise. A lot of research went into what they looked like... The trees are massive... The glaciers are huge. That’s to help give you the sense that you’re not the top of the food chain in this world.”
An elevated vantage point, a sun-drenched vista over a glacial valley and a herd of mammoths roaming below makes it clear just how alien and hostile this place is. Far Cry has always toyed with the theme of being a stranger in a strange land – but this is the strangest land.
“Even though the narrative is more base, and survival is a much more important theme, we still wanted to make sure we have the humanity of today,” Shortt explains.
Despite the strictures of primitive language and 12,000 fewer years of evolutionary development, Shortt says that there’s “still room for complexity in the game’s characters.” This soon becomes apparent. After crafting a bow from scrounged resources and hunting deer to recover health, Takkar picks up the trail of his people using his Hunter’s Vision (similar to Batman: Arkham’s Detective Mode), and follows the tracks into the land of Oros. Before long, he encounters Sayla, a fierce Wenja woman wearing a necklace adorned with severed ears – presumably the height of fashion at the time.
“Sayla is basically suffering from PTSD,” explains Shortt. “No one will articulate it that way, of course, but as you get to know her story you realize she’s got this weird ‘whispering into the ears’ thing going on. She’s hearing voices. When you start to learn her story, you’re going to understand why. She’s seen this horrible destruction of her tribe. She believes that everyone is hearing the voices.”
Like almost everyone else in Far Cry Primal, Sayla is in the process of being mauled by a prehistoric beast when Takkar first encounters her. One heroic intervention later, and the pair make their escape together.
Sayla explains to Takkar that the Wenja in Oros have been driven apart by Ull, the orc-like leader of the hostile Udam people. Ull has declared war on the Wenja, decimating their settlements and spreading their people to the ends of the realm. As luck would have it, it’s up to Takkar to reunite the Wenja tribe.
Sayla leads Takkar to the primeval comforts of a campfire and the safety of her cave – the beginnings of a much larger settlement, and a key new system in Far Cry Primal.
Building A Tribe
Dotted across the open-world of Oros, wise and skillful individuals await discovery. Ubisoft refers to these people as “specialists.” Completing quests for a specialist convinces them to travel back to your burgeoning village, where they build themselves a basic hut and settle into your tribe. This, in turn, attracts others to your upstart settlement, increasing its strength and renown. Before long, Takkar and Sayla’s campfire will grow into a fully-fledged community.
Each of these specialists can teach Takkar new skills related to their role in the world. The warrior, for example, will pass on new fighting abilities. The further down his quest chain you go, the more combat skills you unlock. “Finding these people in the open-world is a key element to the game,” says Shortt. “How you find them is really up to you. As you build your village, you’re going to see opportunities to go out and find these specialists. But what’s cool about the narrative is there’s no set path that says, ‘Now you must go to the warrior.’
“We leave it up to the player to decide how they want to approach it. You can leave a character until towards the end of the game if you want. You don’t have to deal with a character if you choose not to.”
At certain points, Takkar will be able to upgrade a specialist’s hut using gathered resources such as wood, rare animal skins and various plants. Aside from just making the village look cooler, these renovations unlock new missions from that particular specialist which, in turn, lead to new unlockable skills.
Rather than feeling like a tacked-on Minecraft-lite component, settlement building neatly feeds back into all of the game’s core systems, creating a compelling gameplay loop. Exploration, narrative missions, hunting, gathering, crafting and unlocking new skills are all tied together elegantly in the settlement system, giving each of these individual components more weight and purpose than they’d otherwise have.
Shortt says that the settlement idea, like many of the new gameplay tweaks, sprung organically from Ubisoft Montreal’s research into the period. “This is pre-history, which is a really important notion. We worked with an anthropologist out of the University of Montreal, which was great. He went to the caves in France, and he’s seen the weapons and tools they used. And he was really able to give us a good sense of how Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived. The Mesolithic Period – when the game is based – is when humans actually started settling, so this is the first time that we have a village that you build.”
Although permanent dwellings clearly have their evolutionary advantages, they also have their downsides. “Humans used to be very nomadic,” explains Shortt. “As they settled, other tribes would settle, and once that happened they started fighting over resources. And then you see wars starting to happen. This period is really the beginning of all that.”
With the first tiny seeds of a new village planted, Sayla sends Takkar on a quest into the wilds to find one of the most important specialists: Tensay, the shaman.
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