Far Cry 3

Far Cry 2 was a creature of contradiction. It gave us an open world like no other, an equatorial tapestry of shifting palm fronds and brittle grass, sluggish rivers and sweaty towns, sand dunes and cliffsides. With its liquid global lighting, self-propagating fire system and animate vegetation, it never painted the same picture twice.

 

But beneath the visual stew, it was an oddly colourless and repetitive beast. Closely spaced enemy outposts restaffed themselves the second you strayed out of view, making retracing your steps a chore. Settlements were silent, desolate, and you could only interact with people by fighting them. Cars deteriorated like clockwork, obliging you to swap rides after every clash or undergo the tedium of a first-person repair animation. Main characters struggled to differentiate themselves, voice-actors rattling out lines in a low monotone.

 

Ubisoft Montreal isn't simply out to correct this contrast with Far Cry 3; the heavyweight developer also wants to satirise it. The E3 demo begins in brutal style, with a rifle butt to your character's face as he photographs hostages at a paramilitary encampment. Regaining consciousness, you find yourself lying with your hands tied, being lectured on the nature of madness by a twitchy, mohawked man who clearly speaks from a position of some authority.

 

Your captor's name is Vaas, and he's the warlord of this particular corner of the game's tropical island setting. "Have I ever told you about the definition of insanity?" There's a hideous shriek as a nearby thug kicks a bound, weighted prisoner into a watery pit. "Insanity is doing the exact same f**king thing over and over again, expecting s**t to change." You're treated to a few minutes of unnerving soliloquy before you're shoved over the edge yourself, but that's not the last we see of Vaas.

 

He returns at the end of the demo, with the encampment in ruins following your ferocious getaway attempt - textbook Far Cry action, the player infiltrating, disrupting and (almost) escaping a knot of passive AI troops. As you drag yourself out of blazing helicopter wreckage the nutball grabs your hair and pulls your head back to stare into your eyes. "Have I ever told you about the definition of insanity?" he asks again, serenely. OK, Ubisoft. We see where you're going with this.

 

Fade to black - and we're back in the room, discussing Far Cry 3's fish out of water sensibilities with producer Dan Hays. "Let's say you've never, ever gotten on a plane, never had the crazy one year off from school, or you've left your job and you decided that you're just going to explore," he says. "If you've never had that experience, that's what we want to capture.

 

"You get off the plane, or you get off the boat and you think: 'I've experienced life, I'm good. Nothing can surprise me.' Bang - surprise number one. Surprise number two - twice what surprise number one was. Surprise number three - completely different. Then you realise: 'wait a second, I shouldn't be as confident about life'."

 

It's an agenda that directly recalls the words of Benjamin Willard, Apocalypse Now's laconic lead, contemplating the shadowy banks of the Lao river. "Never get out of the boat - absolutely goddamn right. Unless you're prepared to go all the way." Francis Ford Coppola's retelling of Heart of Darkness haunts Far Cry 2, and Ubisoft evidently feels that his sweltering meditation on the places where civilized man and barbarian meet is worth a second glance.

 

Far Cry 3 protagonist Jason Brody, a stranded photojournalist who's mysteriously handy in a firefight, is something of a cipher. While that's to be expected at this stage in development, there's the suspicion that his transparency as a character is deliberate, that Ubisoft wants to minimise the imaginative distance between player and avatar. Hays all but says it out loud. "What's really interesting about Jason, is that Jason gets on this island thinking he can handle things. Jason is you, the player."

 

The desire to implicate players in the premise, shell-shock them along with Jason himself, lends a sinister edge to certain press conference clichés. At times during our chat, Hays sounds less like a producer blithely detailing a "living, breathing world" as an unscrupulous tour guide, inviting a crowd of ignorant holidaymakers to stray out of their depth. "If you've never got on a plane, never had that experience in Thailand, or that experience in the Phillippines, or in the middle of the Indian ocean or whatever, you can now - for 60 bucks."

 

"We want to sell that dream to the player that they're almost there," he adds later, talking up Ubisoft's new graphics engine, which easily matches the best Xbox 360 has to offer. "That they can almost smell that space, that they can almost taste that space." Steeping players in Far Cry 3's world is vital, Hays suggests, in order to deliver the full brunt of certain moral dilemmas, dilemmas that will quickly douse any white knight pretensions visible at the outset. "You run across a character and he's doing terrible, terrible things, but you need them. What does that say about you?"

 

Lest pundits accuse the developer of reverting to type after experimenting with a different geography, Hays asserts that the choice to set the game on an island was made with characterisation in mind. "Vaas was one of the earlier characters that we ran into. We were in the design sessions talking about it: Where would this guy live? Where would this brand of insanity be real? And where would your reaction to it be real?

 

"It made sense for Vaas and even some of the other characters, who are a little crazier than him, to live in this space, to make it real, to make it believable, and get away with the lawlessness. This is a place where humanity and the laws of humanity don't exist. You've got to pick a place that's off the map to be able to support that."