Last week, we got to speak to the Creative Director of Far Cry 5, Dan Hay. We spoke to him about what makes Far Cry 5 crazier than ever, how micro-transansactions play a role in the game, the importance of Far Cry 3 and obviously we had to ask him about the possibility of a Far Cry game coming to Australia.
HOW FAR CRY 5 IS DIFFERENT TO THE OTHER GAMES
Sometimes when you try and build a Far Cry, you try and calculate a number of systems that could play on each other. I don’t know that we’ve really understood just how generous the opportunities are in this game. We’ve built so many systems in this game that can collide. Things such as guns for hire, fangs for fire, co-op, the fact that you can now fly and have dog fights in the air. The only way that I can explain the difference is that with Far Cry 3, 4 and Primal, when you sat down to interview someone, you’d know where they were in the story, but with this game, you literally have to ask what they’ve just done, because they literally could have tackled any mission in a number of ways. It’s equally terrifying and awesome.
ON ANOTHER BLOOD DRAGON GAME RELEASING
There’s a style or feeling of that we have with the Far Cry brand. Every time we offer something, we try and make it so that you’re never going to know where we’re going to next, which is hard because gamers are so smart. Nobody ever saw Blood Dragon coming, nobody saw Nepal, nobody ever saw we were going to go 12,000 years into the past. It’s the same when we offer DLC. It’s something we try to do with the brand. Even when we try and talk about Montana. One person said “Let’s do Montana” and then another chimed in and said “Why would we Montana. Nobody knows anything about it” and I thought “wait a minute, that sounds exactly like Far Cry”.
WHY FAR CRY 3 IS GETTING REMASTERED
The game that people talk about a lot is Far Cry 3. It was a real turning point in the brand for us. It was my first game with the series and I feel that it’s a game that almost rebranded the brand. It was an absolute no-brainer, because people had been asking for so we wanted to deliver it.
ON GUN DE-GRADATION MAKING A COMEBACK
Those are the types of things that show up in discussions. We talk about Malaria and the guns that fall apart. It’s in the same conversation about moving towers out of the game. Some things land and others just don’t for a number of reason. I’m not saying no in the future, but with gun-degradation, it didn’t feel generous, it just felt rough, where we wanted the game to be about opportunity.
ON MICROSANSACTIONS BEING IN THE GAME
We didn’t want to have anything behind a wall. We wanted to make sure that players could go out and do everything that was actionable, so everything that can be bought from the in-game store can be purchased in-game using credits as well as by progressing through the story.
THE PS4 PRO & XBOX ONE X ENHANCEMENTS
The thing that I’ll say is that we’ve gone pretty crazy about getting the game to look amazing using HDR for lighting and 4K to make sure that everything looks crisp. Our Art Director is a maniac for wanting to make the game look great as well as leveraging new tech. In saying that, we wanted to make sure that there was a level of parity across all consoles. The Art Director said that I wanted the game to look so good, that you could smell it.
THE POSSIBILITY OF FAR CRY COMING TO AUSTRALIA
I’ll never let you know where we’re going to go next, so I won’t answer it, but what I will say is that every time I’m asked it, it brings a massive smile to my face.
Far Cry releases on March 27th on PS4, Xbox One and PC.
