Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Far Cry: Primal is big. Its trees are big, its plants are big, and its terrain is enormous. You pad around a lot in this great stretch of digital land, stealing outposts, foraging, and killing animals. Sometimes you ride the animals - bears and sabre-tooth tigers can be tamed like horses - and sometimes you have existential visions that send your character into a gold-dust-tinged delirium.
Primal is very Far Cry.
It’s something of a pleasant surprise. Without a brazen ‘5’ slapped on the end of it, it’s easy to assume Primal is something of a bridging game - after all, Ubisoft’s already trod that ground with Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. But it is, as lead writer Kevin Shortt tells me, the publisher’s “next Far Cry”; albeit one that doesn’t fit into a neat numerical box.
“For us, Primal is a full on Far Cry,” says Shortt. “The main campaign is around 30 hours, we’ve created a whole new world, new flora and fauna. it’s a full game, and so if anyone has doubts about that, they just spend a bit of time in the game to realise it’s something huge. This is our new Far Cry game.”
Shortt and his team did a lot of research to ensure Primal’s world felt fresh and new. The idea for a stone age Far Cry game had been floating around for a while, but replicating a very specific period in that stone age required a level of authenticity that meant re-skinning Far Cry 4 was not an option. “We had to do a lot of research”, said Shortt. “We had to figure out what the period was, and decided that 10,000 BC was a good period - that’s the mesolithic period - because that’s when humans went from more nomadic tribes to settling down and establishing villages. As a result of that, they started more wars, they started more conflicts, because they’re settling in the same regions and fighting over resources.”
On the fictional tribe, it's language, and acting.
Although Primal’s central tribe - the Wenja - is fictional, their behaviour has been shaped by anthropology. “We reached out to a lot of experts,” said Shortt. “There was a professor who was actually from Montreal. He knew homo sapiens and neanderthals, he’d gone to France and visited the old caves and studied all of that, so we brought him in and he was able to give us perspective on all these people.”
This research was also the basis for Primal’s invented language - also called Wenja -which came about after the team decided using English ‘popped’ harshly in the context of the game. Consequently, all of Far Cry Primal’s dialogue is subtitled. “So we created the setting, the flora, the megafauna,” said Shortt, “and then when it came to actually telling the story it just felt wrong to say “ok we’re going to do it in modern language.’ Because it was going to pop. You were going to feel it. So we did some tests, and it did pop. It wasn’t right. So we thought, ‘hell, let's make a language.’
Primal’s dialect was born from proto-indo European; considered the root of all language. It sounds very authentic on the ear, and I was surprised when I was told it was made up. Out of all the topics I discuss with Shortt, it’s this language that he gets the most enthusiastic about - after all, the initial idea to create a language from nothing must have felt like a pipe dream.
“I remember the first session I went to with the actors, and I’d just come in off the plane - they were doing it in Toronto - and I’d arrived and I walked into the studio and they were already going, all of the actors. And all I heard was Wenja. Even as [the teacher, linguist Brenna Bird] was teaching it to them, she was speaking in Wenja, and they were speaking back to her in Wenja. And it was a hugely exciting moment for me. We’d gone from this idea of making a language, and here it was, a real language. They’d taken it seriously. They’ve adapted a real language that you can start to recognise words and phrases as you’re playing the game. It was amazing seeing the actors embrace that.”
More at the link----->http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/01/27/dont-call-far-cry-primal-far-cry-45