Click Nothing

'...and let slip the blogs of war!'

So I didn't really want to muddy up the stats we were collecting and tracking for this during the actual development of it, but for those who never found it, we were maintaining a fictional blog for the character of the journalist Reuben Oluwagembi who you meet in Far Cry 2.

The blog was loosely conceived by myself, LP (the producer), Pat Redding, and the writer Kevin Shortt. Once we got the concept nailed down, Kevin mostly handled it by himself and did an excellent job keeping it real, managing the voice of the character, and building a rising tension that would lead into the start of the game such that the world described in the blog on the launch date of the game would be the world the player finds himself in when he started to play. It also develops some interesting backstory for the warlords Mbantuwe and Tambossa and sets the stage for the collection of the "Jackal Tapes" scattered around the game world (all of which are available to listen to on the blog if you didn;t find them all in-game).

In support of the writing, Kevin also worked with Stefan Koziol, one of our artists to do some photoshopping and image compositing on photos the guys took while they were in Kenya. This ties back to some of the reference material we used for actual buildings in the game and gives the whole blog a kind of hyperreal quality that I love.

There were a quite a few regulars showing up, leaving comments and - for the most part - participating in the fiction we were creating. A few of them (judging both from posted comments and from some emails sent to 'Reuben') even seemed to mistake it for a real blog from a real war correspondant on the ground in our fictional African country.

Anyway, I must admit that I would have loved to get this richness of backstory into the actual game itself, but the longer pipeline of game asset development and integration made that impossible. Even though we're definitely not the first to try such a thing, I think you learn the most by doing, and there are definitely some lessons we can take away from this that will help us in the future.

Tough Love

So Far Cry 2 is on shelves now world-wide. I can see from the XBox dashboard that lots of my friends are playing the 360 version. Achievements are not only great for players, but for developers too as I can track where each of my friends is (more or less) in the gameflow by seeing which Achievements they've unlocked.

Looks like we're tracking to pull down an 86 to 88 aggregate rating depending on how you count it and where you look. I'm not at all happy with that, but I'll save the speculation as to the 'why'. Numbers aside, I've gotten a mountain of emails and read a good number of comment threads and posts that are talking about the game. For the most part people seem pretty blown away by the things we did well and a little frustrated at a couple of things we did badly.

One blog in particular had some cool discussion about the joys of fire, the pain of enemy repawning and the absurdity of buddies (as a result of lack of realization and iteration/polish time). Aside from the sassy-but-smart commentary on my game, I had some time to thumb through it and there is quite a lot of good stuff there on other titles and on the industry. I've linked Pentadact over on the right. Check him out.

Shanghai'd

A hundred and fifty years ago that was the name for the event of being carried off to Shanghai, but instead of salty South Seas pirates abducting me, I'm doing it in style thanks to the fine people at Japan Airlines.

I did 3 short days in Sydney out of the Ubisoft office there, doing a theatre presentation to press, community and some buyers, then hopped up to the Gold Coast (the only picture I got) to do a stage demo (plus a few demos on the floor) at the EB Games retailer show there. Ben Mattes (Producer on PoP) and I each did a short presentation in a big theatre there for all the store managers. I was on right after Cliff Blezinski demoed Gears 2. Didn't have long to chat with him, I guess he is flying around all over the world just like we are.

Once again, people in Australia seemed pretty floored by the game, and while we were there our first Australian review hit the news stands - it was also our first 10/10, from PC Power Play Magazine. Sweet.

The Ubi Australia crew took good care of us and Sydney is a beautiful city, and while I didn't get to see a lot of it I really liked what I did see. It's clean, the air is fresh, the people are friendly, and the food was really good. I did get to see the Sydney Harbor Bridge and the Opera House, but only at night, and I didn't get any pictures. No time to hit Bondi Beach (LP made it down there one morning when he couldn't sleep though).

Anyway, I'm in Shanghai now... wanted to get my Aussie trip blogged before I throw up pix and stories from here... we have the weekend off, and we've just spent all day wandering the city.

It's nuts. More to come.

Urgh... wtf... what time is it? Africa, safari, TGS, Aus and now we're GOLD

Meh. I'm fucking tired as hell.

Africa was fucking cool. We were in Johannesburg for a couple of days doing the Rage game show there. Thanks to all the folks at Megarom (our S. Africa distributor) who made the trip so easy on us and thanks to the team from the UK office who joined us and organized everything. Special thanks to Jason and Jeep (ie: Jason's awesome truck) for unfucking my stuff when I forgot my devkit in my hotel room before the last stage demo.

Lots of big crowds around FC2 on the show floor, and it was great seeing all the South African fans who seemed to really love the game. They unanimously were very pleased to hear the AI swearing at them in Afrikaans, and I saw a lot of jaws hit the floor... people telling us that we 'got it right' in terms of the visuals and the overall feel. Mission accomplished on the authenticity front.

After Joburg was two days on safari in Pilanesburg. Elephants are awesome. We saw some lions consider taking down a baby rhinoceros. I'll remember that for the rest of my life.

After Joburg, we had the nightmare trek from South Africa through Singapore to Tokyo for TGS. Planet Earth is big. It was about 22 hours of travel. We were demoing for the press in a hotel room and out of fatigue I never even made it to the show floor, I just stayed in the room demoing and between interviews I played with the map editor and built myself a MP map. The Japanese press seemed very impressed with the level editor (no surprise, it's fucking impressive).

I'd never been out to TGS, and in fact have never been to Japan, so it was great that we again had an extra day to wander the city and check it out. We wandered around in Shinjuku mostly, checking out the little shops and restaurants. The food was amazing and I really enjoyed the city. Hopefully I'll get to go back there one day and spend a couple weeks there.

We left Tokyo for the 'shortest' leg of our trip, a simple nine-hour hop down to Sydney. We did a demo of the game in front of about 80 press and vendors and community folks at a movie theatre, and then did some demos and interviews at the Ubi office. This morning we hopped on a plane for the Gold Coast - as of this writing I am in my hotel room. We have a demo at a big EB Games vendor conference tomorrow, and then we're back to Sydney and soon off to Shanghai.

More news to come when (if) I have time.

Oh, and by the way, for those anxious, Far Cry 2 officially went Gold on all platforms yesterday (I'm not really sure what 'yesterday' means right now, but it wasn't 'today' and it wasn't 'a few days ago'... so yesterday east Australia time will have to suffice).

It's over and I am almost done.

I'm back... no, wait... I'm gone again....

So Far Cry 2 console versions are off in submission and my many months of closing this beast are winding down. It's been a hell of a long haul, but I'm finally starting to get my sanity back. As previously announced, the game will be on shelves on October 21st (US) and October 23rd (I think) in Europe and elsewhere. Anyway - don't quote me, check your local retailer for dates. Or just pre-order, dammit.

So the good news is, I'm back. Several months of grunt work in the trenches have left my neurons shell-shocked, but they're already starting to regroup and I can feel the distant echos of coherent thought rallying them out of the desperation that comes with being in a purely reactive closing mode.

The bad news is, before I really get on my feet and start blogging again for real, I have a promo tour to do.

And holy fucking shit is it the most insane promo tour ever.

For those who watched the Dev Diary stuff for the Africa trip, you're probably aware that just before the Leipzig Game Convention last year, I pulled out of that trip at the last minute in order to get the Leipzig demo together.

So now, I get to go to Africa. I leave in 5 hours. And it ain't just Africa, either. For the next 21 days, I will go from Paris to Africa to Singapore to Tokyo to Sydney to Shanghai and back again. I'm going to set foot on 5 different continents in 3 weeks - missing only Antarctica and South America.

Anyway - I won't likely be blogging any compelling game theory or criticism or analysis until a while after I get home, but in hopes of getting back into the groove of posting regularly, I'm going to do my best to blog the entire tour, so come back often to see what far away land I am posting from.

It's good to be back.

Back in Leipzig

A year ago we first unveiled the game at the Game Convention here in Leipzig. Now we're back. It's been a fuck of a long year, but I'm really looking forward to getting the game in the hands of the fans here in Germany... they seemed to really love it last year. This year it's not just demos, its hands-on on the floor.

We just put up a very cool trailer on Game Trailers... I'm very happy with this one... it's our best yet. And also, I didn't have a chance to point to it yet, but since so many people are talking about the music in the trailer (Barra Barra - the Rachid Taha song) I'll point out that the song is NOT in the game, but the music in the game is fucking amazing... here is an article by our composer Marc Canham talking about soundtrack for the game.

Next week I will be at PAX.

au Louvre

As of this writing I am in Paris, getting ready for Ubidays.

We'll be in the Louvre, where we I will be presenting a short, live stage demo during the opening conference on Wednesday night (Paris time - that will be Wednesday afternoon EST and Wednesday morning PST).

We'll also be doing full length demos and hands-on demos with the the press as well as doing all kinds of interviews and stuff throughout the day Thursday.

Ubidays in San Francisco was just over a week ago so coverage from that event, plus the live streaming coverage from UPlay dotcom and the live coverage Gamespot is hosting should all land over the course of the day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Of note, our first full trailer will land sometime in there so keep your eyes open for that.

Choice and Consequence

Randy is so frikkin' smart.

His latest column on Next-Gen dot biz is right on. In particular, I really appreciate this concise statement of one of the big challenges we face today as game designers:

Modern games, by contrast, teach us things like it doesn’t really matter which way you choose to go. That someone will always watch over you and check you’re OK. That there is an omniscient judge of your behavior who is generous with this information. That you should do what you’re told and get really good at it.

Anyway, the article is short, so you should read it. I won't try to rehash it here either... no point in cluttering up what Randy gives us so eloquently and concisely. I think Randy raises most of the important questions, and I sure as hell don't have answers. I do think, though, that if the people who are interested in tackling (and maybe one day even solving) these problems were to just try and take on one of them in their next game, we would have all of them solved in the next 3 years. So get to it.

I sent the article around to my design team and after reading it one of the guys on my team turned to me as said 'sounds like he wants to play Far Cry 2'. Well, I'd like to think we're trying to tackle some of these problems... but as I said, it's going to take a bunch of us attacking from different directions to gain any ground.

Pat's Narrative Design Slides

Pat Redding is the Narrative Designer on my project, and he gave a wicked talk at GDC about the narrative design of Far Cry 2. He has recently put his slides up for anyone interested, and they are annotated with the text of what he said, meaning they're actually usable.

This is must-have info for anyone interested in the design and implementation of systems that turn control of the story over to the player.

Our Man in Havana Returns

It's been a long time since I posted - but I have a real excuse, with links to prove it. Aside from Christmas, and an extra week of vacation in Havana I managed to squeeze in as a result of the game being delayed, I've been busy as hell meeting with the press and promoting the game.

Our first official teaser trailer has been released. Cheeky commentary from Kotaku and from Joystiq on that.

I presented the game to Gamespot's Andrew Park in San Francisco who wrote a great preview here, that follows up an equally awesome preview from last fall.

Far Cry 2 became Ubisoft's first game to take the cover of Edge Magazine, with another great article that is available online here.

Stephen Totilo ran three seperate segments on the MTV Multiplayer blog - one about our innovative integration of explosive barrels (no kidding), one about the PC game market and a third one about the challenges we've been facing building real meaningful investment in characters who are mechanically and procedurally developed in the narrative design.

And speaking of the PC market UGO called Far Cry 2 the 4th most anticipated PC title for 2008... following StarCraft 2, Fallout 3, and Spore. Damn you Will... edged out again.

There is lots of other new coverage out there if you're interested.

On the GDC front - coming soon - I'll be giving a talk about Immersion, I'll be participating the Game Developers Rant, and for the first time I've been invited to be on the Faculty of the Game Design Workshop. Attending the GDW was probably the most valuable time I ever spent at GDC, and I think everyone in the industry should attend it at least once. Hopefully I'll see some of you there.