Keith Stuart returns with the final part of the interview with Far Cry 2’s narrative designer Patrick Redding and producer Louis Phierre Pharand. This time they talk about how story works in a totally free-roaming game world… Clue: it’s not easy.

Also: the downside of Unreal Engine 3…

Threespeech: So how does a narrative story work within an open environment?

PR: That’s a dangerous thing to ask me – have you got an hour? I was at GDC earlier this year and did a presentation on this exact subject and I struggled to keep that under an hour and worked months to get to that!

The short version is, we have taken an approach that we call dynamically assembled narrative. The concept behind that is, this is still a first-person shooter, this isn’t Mass Effect, we’re not building a giant conversation engine - the player’s principle interaction with the game world is through pulling the trigger. So what that meant was, we needed to develop systems to track the actions of the player both at the low level, in terms of what we’re shooting at, and the mid-level - what kind of objectives am I doing? Where am I going? Am I sabotaging something? Am I assassinating somebody?

Also, the high-level in our game is about, who am I betraying? Which faction am I working for? Which faction am I helping to bring down? All of these are elements we can use in our story - we definitely have an over-arching plot to it, but the idea is, we don’t want to impose that plot on the player. What we wanted to do as much as possible was kind of pull the player, draw the player towards areas of narrative importance, rather than forcing them into these locations. In an open-world game this is absolutely critical, because the player could literally be anywhere, we don’t know where they’re coming from, we don’t know if they’re in a vehicle… all of these things are a factor and we need to be able to address them.

So what we did is, rather than saying, ‘okay we’re going to have this pre-set scripted event that’s going to happen exactly this way every time, we just need to wait for the player to trigger it’, what we do instead is say, ‘here is some information that we want the player to have, here are a set of characters capable of delivering that information who have voice data that supports that, and, finally, here are a number of factors that the player may have influenced previously, that can in turn influence the way that information is delivered to them and the kind of missions that are available’.

And what we do is we take pieces out of what we call micro narratives and kind of squish them together into a complete dialogue or conversation. Then our AI, which is unscripted highly systemic and very unpredictable sometimes, delivers that information to the player, regardless of where the player is. Non-player characters can be wandering around doing their own thing, but when they encounter me and if they’ve been given information and told to deliver it to me, they’ll deliver it.

Really, as a story designer my job is to figure out the earliest point that I can let go of authorial control.

LP: That’s pretty had for writers to do.

PR: Actually it’s great for me, because we have Susan O’Connor, the writer from Bioshock, she won an award for Best Writer at GDC this year, as well as Armand Constantine, who’s handling some of our more systemic dialogue. While they write dialogue – I kind of handle all the book-keeping, I manage all the weird influences and dependencies that come out of a highly dynamic system like this, and I let them know what’s in those little boxes in the flow chart so they know what they’re supposed to write.

LP: It’s a huge spider’s web of options really. It’s going to be impossible for the player to play the same way twice, and it’s going to be impossible for you to play the same way I did. Because, first of all, you chose out of ten characters and that’s going to have an influence on how you play the game and who you’re going to meet – I mean, you could play as Marty, I could play as Frank, but you’re going to meet Marty in the game and I’m going to meet Frank…

PR: Maybe… Maybe not

LP: We’re not sure! There’s so much depth in this game, it’s been three years in development and we’re at the stage where everything has converged and we’re polishing all these different systems to make sure that they work really well. It’s extremely exciting.

PR: All the stuff we’re describing sounds a little abstract, but the thing to take away from it is, the player should be playing the story, it shouldn’t be something we’re imposing and saying, ‘okay, by the way, the narrative has continued to move on without you.’. No, it doesn’t work that way, it’s unfolding at the same speed as the player is moving through it, and the player’s actions are really what’s determining it. In fact, our story missions themselves can be altered dynamically by the player’s choices; if he chooses to assassinate the leader of a particular faction then it means we have to swap that guy for someone else in the next story event.

Threespeech: That sounds like logistical nightmare.

PR: It is a nightmare, it’s pretty much a nightmare.

LP: It has an impact on the animation team it has impacts on the AI team…

PR: The animation team hates me.

Threespeech: What is it with Ubisoft Montreal? We’ve just had Assassin’s Creed which was also an incredibly ambitious game - were you swapping notes with each other?

PR: We actually kept secrets from each other!

LP: We have a lot of guys on the team now who were on the Assassin’s team – they’re both big projects. Today we’re on 170 people. We’ve got a luxury actually – we’re in our own little building separate from the main office and that created a small studio atmosphere. On the technology side, it’s two separate engines. The Assassin’s engine is called Anvil, ours is the Dunia engine and since Ubi wants to be a major player in the PC market again – that’s the mandate we’ve gotten: to create a new engine for the whole company. It’s already being used by other projects.

Threespeech: And it’ll definitely be a simultaneous launch with PC and consoles?

LP: Yes. It’s biazarre really, because the way of doing things mostly on the graphics side was ‘okay, have a lot of polygons, have the biggest textures…’ it was just creating so much streaming data…

PR: We turned 180 degrees…

LP: Yeah, we completely changed the pipeline and basically what we do is have super small textures, using multiple layers. It’s super technical and I get lost in it most of the time, but the performance is unbelievable. We get extremely high quality, we can get up close to things that the Unreal engine can’t do and to be honest as a gamer I’m getting a little bit tired of seeing games developed using the Unreal Engine because they always have the same feel, the same look.

And to be honest we studied Unreal Engine at the beginning, we thought ‘okay let’s go with Unreal Engine 3’, but we weren’t able to do the game we wanted with it, there were so many parameters, too many hurdles that go in our way - we just said, ‘right, let’s just build this engine on our own’. And anyway in the end, it’s an investment for the company – it’s an internal engine, it’s going to last for the next few years and it’s going to ship a lot of games, I’m sure.