Far Cry 6’s developers are really going above and beyond to make sure you know the game is a living, breathing open world that will ebb and flow around the main character of Dani Rojas. The developers have put a high premium on emergent gameplay that unfolds on its own, and a new interview shows how much work they’ve put into a world that’s “running by itself.”
Gamereactor spoke with world director Ben Hall, who said the main way the developers have worked to make Yara feel alive is to make sure that the various people and animals on the island had their own routines, and that Dani has a chance to observe without causing chaos. Hall has talked about the holstering in other recent interviews, explaining that the point is to make Dani feel like a real guerrilla warrior who does recon and uses the resources around them to achieve their goals. Here he expands on how going holstered in the world will help Dani:
“Therefore, you can actually see the military, maybe they’re harassing some of the guerrillas that they have found and then you as a player can choose whether is the right moment for you to get involved with that and try and help those people. Helping them might end up getting you some really useful information that is going to help you progress on your journey or on your path. Or you can actually decide that right now I am not ready for that, I am not tooled-up for that, I do not have the right tool for that job. So I am just gonna kind of keep to myself and bypass that.”
The developers have also made it so that dealing with animals may also have unexpected consequences for Dani. The point is to make a world that can be independent of Dani sometimes: “So you are, as a character, as Dani Rojas, you’re in this world, you’re a local Yaran, but we did not want the world to feel like it revolved around Dani. It was really important to make sure that there are other people and other things happening in the world.”