Speaking at the Eurogamer Expo today, Far Cry 3 designer Jamie Keen said that the team is taking inspiration from a number of other open-world games including Red Dead Redemption.
“In order to keep a player engaged over a period of time there are certain other genres we have to look into to keep that engagement over a longer time. So we've been looking at things like MMOs, we've been looking at other open world titles,” he said to Eurogamer. “The Elder Scrolls series is a huge inspiration for us; games like Red Dead [Redemption] and other Rockstar games as well.”
Keen described these games as having “a really vast land mass” and admitted in contrast to those titles, most shooters lack open environments.
“So to keep that progression going, to keep those different spacings of where we place stuff in the world, it's important that we're breaking the boundaries of what an FPS normally is,” he said.
Keen said that the team is concerned about creating and populating an open sandbox world that doesn’t feel as repetitive as some of those he’s played, citing Skyrim’s overuse of the “arrow to the knee” line as something the team is avoiding.
“It's important too that you feel like the world isn't—we don't want you to feel like 'oh it's this encounter again, I've seen this one'. You know, 'arrow to the knee', for example. While the 'arrow to the knee' thing is actually quite cool, we don't necessarily want that.”
Unlike other shooters, which walk player down a closed path, Far Cry 3 is revealed to offer 250 different encounter types, which the player can experience throughout the game. In addition to these potential encounters, the game “remembers” which ones you’ve experienced so you won’t experience them often.
“You end up with this real feeling of diversity of things going on," he pledged. "And you will see the same encounter again, but hopefully there's enough of them that you won't remember it, probably.”
