Far Cry 2 narrative “took a page from Professor Layton”

By Patrick Garratt

Of course it did. Open world death game set in the African outback assumes narrative cues from odd DS puzzle thing. Stands to reason.

“You see the blocks of text there,” Far Cry 2 narrative designer Patrick Redding said, pointing at the screen during a demo of the game at Games Convention last week.

“We kind of took a page from Professor Layton’s game on DS, to give the player a recap in text of what he’s been up to up to this point.”

The text aspect of Far Cry 2 isn’t finished yet, however, as Redding explained.

“You’ll notice these weird kind of weird little text strings that seem a bit broken,” he said. “That’s just because they’re not hooked up to the final text database.

“We talk a lot about the fact that our game’s story is dynamic, that we assemble the narrative on the fly, so what we’re doing is slotting in the names of characters the player has interacted with – like the different factions that he’s dealt with – and we dynamically update those text blocks in order to give him a description up to this point.”

Nintendo should charge Ubi Montreal, or something. Blatant theft.