[This classic postmortem was originally published in the March 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine. In honor of the game's release 7 years ago today, we're republishing the article in full.]

FAR CRY 2 was an enormously challenging project from both a technical and creative perspective. For the team at Ubisoft Montreal, it was our vision from the beginning to deliver a seamless 50-squarekilometer open world, with no loading, that was as beautiful from both technical and artistic standpoints as any modern, top-tier, corridor shooter. We also envisioned for the game a highly dynamic and destructible environment that supported robust and realistic fire propagation through building structures and vegetation. 

Open world ambition 

Once in production, we retargeted from a PC-only release to a planned simultaneous launch on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. And each version would support multiplayer versions and contain a level editor. 

As if that weren’t enough, we also aimed to innovate on numerous fronts by making the main characters of the game autonomous and unscripted, allowing the player to build relationships with them through game mechanics. We further expected these characters to be able to live or die at any time as determined by the player’s actions, effectively creating a dynamic narrative that could sustain itself beyond the attrition of the major characters of the story. 

As is typical, we succeeded at delivering some of these things, and failed at delivering others. 

What went right 

1) Tools

From the very beginning, technical director Dominic Guay asserted, “We have designed a game that forces us to make tools that will allow artists and designers to build and iterate content very rapidly.” 

With engine development planned to happen parallel to game development, we would be working under constantly shifting budgets, and we would need to be constantly tweaking and tuning the gameplay, even as the technical constraints changed. We literally needed to be able to build a square kilometer of the game in one day, and then be prepared to throw it away the next day if things changed. 

At the end of pre-production, we presented a two-minute time-lapse video of a level designer and a level artist creating a one-square-kilometer section of African jungle in four hours. The proofof-concept included all the terrain, dynamic vegetation, roads, structures, AI, and gameplay, and demonstrated beyond any doubt that we could create our game world. 

The toolset would ultimately become the foundation of the level editor that shipped with all versions of the game. It allows players to create multiplayer maps rapidly and iterate their designs to deliver professional-quality levels to the FAR CRY 2 multiplayer community.

2) Commitment to innovation

It is a misconception that innovation is overthrown by corporate coup and that large companies are averse to innovation. Innovation is more typically chipped away at, piece by piece, and frequently, it is dismantled from the bottomup. As experiments in delivering new experiences fail and time ticks by, individuals tend to retreat to more conventional or established solutions, which not only wither the blossoms of innovation, but can kill it at the root. 

On FAR CRY 2, we often committed to no-compromise strategies that would not accommodate partial withdrawal. For example, the dynamic narrative structure of the game does not function with fewer than 12 buddy characters. When the game flow and scripting of the narrative were massively behind schedule, and the character modeling team was badly overloaded at the same time, removal of buddies began to look very attractive. 

But there was no Plan B. There was no way to have a “partially dynamic narrative.” There was no way to throw money at the problem and render cut scenes at the last minute to tell the story, because in a very real sense, we had not written a “story”—we had written the elements required to support a dynamic narrative that worked with exactly 12 buddies.

Maybe this sounds like something that belongs in the “What Went Wrong” section, but in fact, it was an all-or-nothing commitment to the important elements of the dynamic narrative that made it possible at all. There remain many peripheral failures in the delivery of the narrative design, but the fact that we were committed to delivering it at all is what allowed us to make those failures, and consequently to learn from them so that we can iterate and improve them in the future. 

The Far Cry 2 development team

3) Empowering creativity 

As creative director, my job is not to create the game, but to get the most creativity out of an entire team by empowering people to work in a way that allows their creativity to be expressed in their work. FAR CRY 2’s team reached that state more successfully than any other I’ve worked with. 

This creative empowerment took a number of forms over the course of the project. In the concept phase of the project, I worked with a small team to harvest and catalogue all our ideas about what FAR CRY 2 could be, and then sorted through them to aggregate the concepts that seemed to work best. After that, I briefed every new member of the team to ensure they understood the game concept and had someone to talk to about any creative concerns. 

In production, I began the long process of turning over creative responsibility to the implementers. By ensuring that designers delivered all documentation on time, and that they then worked closely with implementers, we were able to slowly abandon the conceptual vision as it lived in documentation and in our heads for the reality of what was in the game and in the code. As this transition happened, individuals were encouraged and given the confidence to take creative ownership of their work, whether it was a level, an animation, or a piece of code. 

If, toward the end of a project, a creative director is still explaining to people how and why to do something, he has already failed. Under the best circumstances, a creatively invested implementer—not a designer—is the person most qualified to make the decision about how best to deliver on the vision. 

4) A true next-gen art pipeline

Before we were even finished with our concept phase, it was clear to art director Alex Amancio that a new art pipeline would be needed to deliver on the promises we had made.