14 DAY TRIAL // Far Cry 3 might respect the series’ tradition of delivering over-the-top violence, but the development team at Ubisoft believes that it’s all justified because the story of the game gives a clear motive for the action the player performs.
Mark Thompson, who is the lead game designer working on the game, has told VG247 that, “Violence and artistic value aren’t mutually exclusive: it’s more about how honest you are with people regarding the games’ core mechanics and the story’s characters.”
The game creator believes that too many titles in the first-person shooter ignore the fact that they are asking the player to take out huge numbers of enemies and that creates a disconnect between the in-game action and its narrative.
Thompson added, “If the characters in the game don’t react to the violence performed by the player; then you create a plot hole, one specific to the interactive nature of games. We addressed this head on and wrote a story that was about the core mechanic, about killing.”
For the developer, killing, the central mechanics of the first-person shooter genre, is at first a novelty for the player and once he becomes accustomed to it, the Far Cry 3 turns it into one of the core elements of the story.
The new game in the series will ask players to inhabit the body of Jason, a normal everyman who needs to explore a number of tropical islands in order to find and rescue his kidnapped girlfriend.
As the game progresses, he meets and interacts with a cast of more deranged characters, all of them lacking morality, and Jason needs to ignore morality as he does everything he can to reach his goal.
Far Cry 3 will be launched on the PC, the Xbox 360 from Microsoft and the PlayStation 3 from Sony in late November and early December.