Set on the fictional Caribbean island of Yara, Far Cry 6 appears to be like to push the boundaries of what we’ve seen from the lengthy-working series earlier than, providing not only a area to discover but a whole nation.
Yara’s Cuban influences are clear: sweeping vistas, vivid flora and a guerrilla revolution brewing at its core in response to a tyrannical dictatorship. What outcomes is a battle set in opposition to a tropical paradise that’s brimming with tradition, music and persona, but additionally oppressed by the dictator Anton Castillo, with its residents harassed by his navy checkpoints and patrols.
It’s an setting you won't instantly affiliate with one other of Ubisoft’s established franchises, Assassin’s Creed. But Far Cry 6 World Director Ben Hall tells us that, whereas there are key variations between the worlds of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, there are some clear similarities too.
Fusing philosophies
If there’s one one that has the expertise essential to create Yara’s residing and respiration world, it’s in all probability Ben Hall. A senior-degree designer on Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, earlier than changing into the World Director on Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Hall knew that taking up the function of World Director of Far Cry 6 would current a problem completely different to any he’d confronted earlier than. While Assassin’s Creed video games are third-individual, open-world titles with a heavy historic affect, Far Cry video games, against this, are first-individual shooters and as Hall Points out “much faster”.
"We went to similar lengths of reference and research as we would for an Assassin's Creed game, so bringing that same philosophy into it was important."
Ben Hall - World Director on Far Cry 6
“It's a new challenge in the way you approach certain elements of world building,” he tells us. “But from an overarching philosophy, it remains somewhat the same in terms of the process of building, the level of detail – going into that research was something that was important that we put into this world for Far Cry. We went to similar lengths of reference and research as we would for an Assassin's Creed game, so bringing that same philosophy into it was important.
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“But then obviously, being in first-person, spatial awareness becomes slightly different, the focus and attention to detail at an individual location level becomes slightly different. And that's where the support of the team that I've been working with has been phenomenal because they've helped me with that. They've got that experience from previous Far Cry games and we've been able to fuse the two philosophies together to try and build the best worlds we possibly can for players.”
While it’s frequent information that the crew visited Cuba as a part of its analysis, Hall stresses that Yara shouldn't be a replication of Cuba. Instead, the crew at Ubisoft created a fictional world that drew inspiration from Caribbean nations, together with Cuba, as effectively as from Central and South American nations, but didn’t see them “beholden to real-world reference”.
As an instance, Hall factors out some key variations between Yara and Cuba, together with alligators in swimming swimming pools (Cuba doesn’t have alligators) and a scarcity of flamingos (Cuba is crawling with them). It’s a considerably completely different strategy to that taken with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, the place the objective was to recreate environments that exist already as traditionally correct as attainable – a lot in order that Odyssey is now used as a studying instrument in faculties – but Hall emphasizes that analysis nonetheless performs an essential function.
“We do a lot of research, and it's really important that people do that because we're not from that part of the world,” Hall says of the nations the Far Cry 6 crew used for inspiration. “For us, it's really important that we go to the lengths to make sure we learn as much as we possibly can. So that when we are speaking to experts, and they're looking at what we've built, we're talking about changing and tweaking little things that we've perhaps not got quite right, or that we can make better, rather than whole sweeping changes to the world.“
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Creating a fully realized country
From concept to completion, Yara took roughly four years to create, the challenge being to create a complete, fully-realized country that also serves as the playground Far Cry fans expect – a first for the series.
"It's not as big as Odyssey but it's the most ambitious Far Cry map that we've set to date."
Ben Hall - World Director on Far Cry 6
“No matter where we ended up with the setting, it was always going to be that we were going to do a revolution that's going to be about a country,” Hall tells us. “And that really changed the mindset of the team, because it was now much wider, our reference and research-gathering widened out. But we also needed to make sure that Yara could contain all of those different elements that make it feel like a country, all the different layers of infrastructure, the idea of where people lived and worked, and how those things used to work once upon a time, was something that we now needed to think about.”
Yara’s map is the most important of any Far Cry recreation so far, but Hall “didn't want to just go for size for the sake of size”. Instead, the main target was on guaranteeing that Yara felt like a rustic by way of its scale, whereas on the identical time being a sensible enterprise for gamers. But how does this differ from Odyssey, which boasted a mammoth map protecting roughly 90.7 sq. miles (based on GameRant)?
“Footprint-wise, it's not as big as Odyssey, which was important because we didn't want to create the same sense of emotion,” Hall explains. “With Odyssey, it was about exploring: taking time to explore the wilderness and find those locations. Whereas, with the Far Cry games, it's faster-paced, you want to get to places more quickly. But we also want to evoke exploration, the sensation of being a guerrilla is about understanding the landscape that you're in, exploring that landscape you're in, and then finding things that you can use to give you one up over the military so that concept of exploration was still important.
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“It's not as big as Odyssey but it's the most ambitious Far Cry map that we've set to date.”
According to Hall, that ambition’s focus is totally on the depth of content material and the extent of element throughout the world. Ubisoft has created a rustic that has its personal historical past, distinctive places and other people with their very own tales and opinions on dictator Anton – nevertheless, it’s arduous to disregard the Cuban influences on these parts. Hall tells us that considered one of his objectives was to entice gamers away from their essential goal, to discover these more intrinsic parts of the world.
If Hall’s earlier world-building is something to go by, Far Cry 6’s Yara appears to be like like it should provide a really intriguing proposition when it releases on October 7, 2021 – simply put together to be tempted off the overwhelmed path.
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