Far Cry Primal: Chatting influences, interactions and diversity

I had about an hour and a half of quality time with Primal (you can read about that here) before I was gently ushered into a well it room inhabited by Primal’s creative director Jean-Christophe Guyot (JC) and Ubisoft’s senior PR manager Stone Chin. If JC sounds familiar, it’s probably because he was the director for Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Two Thrones and Forgotten Sands, but we were in the room to talk about the latest installment in the Far Cry series – not Prince of Persia (I already tend to ask questions that typically can’t be answered ‘at the moment’ so I didn’t want to even go to that realm).

Ubisoft’s approach to creating the world of Kyrat in Far Cry 4 was to meticulously look at the Himalayan mountains and the surrounding region. Not only did the developers study the topography, they also looked at the culture found in the region. Far Cry Primal is not set in a world that developers can take cues from by studying an active culture, the game is set in the Mesolithic world that happened thousands of years before we existed as we do today.

After spending time in Oros (the area that Primal is set in), I had to ask JC what region influenced the area that we had explored during the pre-alpha demo. In short, their influence was history and the nomadic nature of man.

"It’s a bit harder because of the setting," started JC. "Reality is our inspiration for Far Cry, all the time. We looked at how people were living, where they were living. We followed the Danube River, there’s a place in Slovakia near the Carpathian mountains. So this is basically the some of the layout [of the area], there’s a gigantic mountain that was there before glaciers, which is what you see in the background [of the game]. We wanted the world to feel very majestic and very big compared to man."

I'll say this, after looking at photographs of the Carpathian mountains and comparing them to the world of Oros, I definitely saw the similarity.

The developers inquired with moviemakers, linguists, anthropologists, and movement coaches looking  to offer the most authentic portrayal of Proto Indo European man for Primal. In fact, the hardest part of developing Far Cry Primal has been the search for authenticity, “finding the line between reality and expectation about how primitive mankind was” as JC put it. Not every detail of the Mesolithic period that Primal is set in is known by historians, so a lot of it comes down to Ubisoft developers filling in the holes of time and gaps in knowledge.

Ubisoft's search for authenticity becomes obvious as you play the game, there's an attention to detail with the non-playable characters as they roam about in loin cloths (or winter clothes, as needed). Sub-titles are used throughout every interaction between characters, translating a language that is the best representation of what Proto Indo European man would be speaking (kudos to the voice actors on learning that).

As I took outposts in the demo and my tribe’s population grew, I came across more and more members of my tribe hunting and gathering. While the demo wasn’t focusing on interactions between the tribe and Takkar (the character you are playing as) I questioned JC on whether or not the tribe members wandering held any value to the game. He smiled slightly and replied that the demo wasn’t focusing on that and that Ubisoft would be revealing more information in the future, but yes.

Something that JC did point out during our interview was how vital this time period was for man, it was during this time that the concept of property and ownership came into play which has in turn been the source of plenty of wars. "Mesolithic is the time period between paleolithic and neolithic, it’s the moment where mankind started to shift from hunter gatherers to more of a settlement. This period is really interesting for us, because it’s the moment where they were starting to settle and owning stuff.”

This might be indicative of Primal's story – tribes warring over their new found property.

I chose to address the cast of the game as, the subject of diversity and sexism has become common in forums and comment sections, In fact, Ubisoft recently made headlines recently over the inclusion of the first transgender character in the most recent installment in the Assassin’s Creed series. Influenced by this move on Ubisoft’s part, I asked JC if the search for diversity and inclusion had impacted the development of Far Cry Primal.

His answer was simply, yes, in a way they were influenced by comments from the community.

“You are always influenced, you’re not making something in a vacuum. It's a valid concern," said JC. "The way we chose to approach it in Far Cry, you know, it’s always the world and the characters that make the real richness in Far Cry. Again not talking about it today too much, we made sure that in the cast of characters you encounter on both sides, enemies and friends, you will see a lot of diversity in character."

On the subject of diversity, Stone interjected that “It’s a good dialogue, we welcome the dialogue. We don’t live in vacuum.”