Where are first-person shooters going? Will they always be glorified interactive Michael Bay movies, or can we expect deeper experiences as visuals improve, AI deepens and designers become more confident with creating functioning open world environments?

Last week, we ran a preview of Ubisoft's promising sequel, Far Cry 3, which follows Jason Brody, a man of mystery who finds himself deserted on an island teeming with modern-day pirates. As with the other titles in the series it's an open-world shooter, providing players with multiple routes through the lush tropical setting.

But what implications does this design approach have on the game content, and as shooters become more realistic, how will gameplay change? To find out, we spoke with the creative director on the series, Jason VandenBerghe, who has some interesting ideas on how games will need to adapt in the coming years ...



So in Far Cry 3, the hero washes up on an island and finds a bunch of thugs with AK-47s. Who are these people and why are they killing people and dumping them in the sea?

Ha! We're not talking too much about the narrative right now. But this time, you're playing a guy named Jason Brody – we wanted to create a modern hero, someone who's grown up in this age of technology, someone who's connected to the world we're in right now – a native of the 21st century – and you'll learn more about that as you go. You see he's got a camera with him and that implies certain things. But when he picks up the AK-47, it's not the first time he's handled a rifle, and not the first time he's killed. You're going to get more detail about who he is.

So you're using the island as it's often employed in literature, as a place of self discovery?

When I come on and work with a brand I really want to understand what makes it tick. What's the emotion we're going for? And to me, Far Cry is all about a fantasy I call Man Alone. It's Robinson Crusoe, it's Castaway, it's any environment where I'm cut off from civilisation and I have to rely on myself to survive. When I'm confronted by the darkness – whether that's monsters, bad guys or solitude – I've got to overcome that by learning more about who I am. That is a powerful human myth and it's one of the reasons the original Far Cry hit so hard. I want to make sure that's what we're delivering in Far Cry 3.

The rather insane pirate leader you come across, Vaas, is interesting. You don't tend to meet actual individuals in shooters these days – it's all rapidly respawning archetypes …

You've nailed it. I think game designers have gotten into a bad habit of starting and ending with archetypes in their writing – it's a mistake. When we started Far Cry 3, we thought, fuck archetypes, we want to talk about realistic people. So we sat down and brainstormed all these different characters; we didn't think about context, we just said we'll talk about how we'll use them later. We built them around two or three sentences that we really fell in love with, then we cast actors. And then, what we didn't do is say "here's your character, do your line like that". We told the actors "we cast you because we really liked your performance, we think you're really talented – now what would YOU do in this situation?" We just asked them to dump their darkness on the floor.

Actors love that.

Yeah! We said, show us your inner insanity – then you get that, you get Vaas. That only happens if you trust your actors – if you have a development team that's willing to take a risk, to let the actor guide you, to let the mo-cap director make on the spot decisions that are going to affect game design … I think the results speak for themselves.

That sounds like a pretty standard approach for many directors in the movie industry. Is it really not happening in game cinematics?

The reason why we don't see that in games very often is because we've become very accustomed to using actors as a crank that we turn to produce drama. That's okay if what you're looking for is straight melodrama, if you're not looking for a real performance – but we need more than that. We want to achieve this sense of … This character is not an archetype. He's bad but he's human – that's what we're looking for and it's very hard to get to. It requires a creative discipline, you have to make sure you're not feeding opinions to the actor.

And on the subject of believable characters, developers often make the mistake of thinking that good AI is all about technology, about making them crouch behind cover at the right times. But there's more to it surely?

Yeah, it's bullshit. What we want in our AI is believable human combatants – we want to believe that they're people with guns who are trying to kill me. At the end of the E3 demo, when the player is taking off in the helicopter, there's a guy running in from around a corner, and if he does that right – and it's systemic so it doesn't always play out the right way – but the guy will have this "oh shit!" moment, he'll be completely startled. We have a lot of stuff where guys make mistakes. AI enemies that make human errors are much more interesting to play against. We've been investing heavily in that kind of thinking. And once we have those differences in behaviour we can modify those for different types of people. And then, suddenly, instead of AI classes, instead of having archetypes, it's more like, well here are the guys who aren't trained very well, these guys are trained pretty well and these are the guys who are really deadly – and the player can see it, you can see it in the way they move.

Far Cry 3

In Far Cry 2, you have to take a certain amount of responsibility for the local population, you have to be heroic. Is this the case in Far Cry 3?

That's actually an essential part of the Man Alone concept. I think the reason the Robinson Crusoe fantasy works is that Crusoe is a nice guy – if he was a crazy homicidal maniac who decided he just wanted to hide the bodies, well that's interesting, but that's not a heroic fantasy. With our guy, he's going to have opportunities to be heroic and that's what you're there to do – you have to decide, am I this hero? And what are the consequences of those actions? But we're not also going to be saying, do you want to be evil? That's not where we're going with Far Cry 3.

What do you think about this idea of single-player and multi-player experiences merging into one? It seams to be becoming a favourite theme, especially after the cult success of Demon's Souls and the whole "Autolog" concept…

It's fascinating to me. You can see a point in the future where it all blurs together and we're no longer selecting between the two on the front end menu. If you're looking into the future and seeing that, you're not alone – there are a lot of teams working on that. It's a neat thing, it's cool. In some ways, I'm reminded of the days when we no longer had to worry about installing games on to a PC – those levels of technical constraint. I just want to play the fucking game! This split, this dichotomy is like the appendix left over from that era. I think it'll resolve itself in the future. That says nothing about Far Cry 3 though!

Do you share ideas with the Assassin's Creed team?

Yeah, in fact, the creative director on Far Cry 3 was the game director on Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and the lead designer on AC2, he's a fantastic talent, I'm blessed to be working him. He's bringing in a lot of the tricks of the trade, but he's not trying to 'Assassin-ify' Far Cry! We also have Jeffrey Yohalem, the writer from Brotherhood who is fantastic. That's one of the great things about working in Montreal – you have access to all this world-class talent.



And you also have a strong philosophy of game design at Ubisoft …

Yeah, Ubisoft is a world leader in terms of its understanding of the science and art of game design – and how to blend those two together. The tools we have … I've worked at EA and Activision, and the understanding of what makes good games here is 10 times greater here. It's still really difficult to get them built – great understanding doesn't necessarily guarantee you're going to get it right, but it certainly helps.

It seems as though the system at Ubisoft isn't about dictating to teams how they should make games, it's about getting the teams to ask questions about the title they're creating, and about what they want to achieve …

That's absolutely right. I draw it back to the fact that this is a French company. The French have a comprehensive reverence for the artistic process and the need to create a safe space for designers to work in. They respect and like designers – there's a willingness to create tools to help rather than saying what you should do is THIS. I think it makes it unique as a company. And you'll find that culture throughout Ubisoft. It would be cool, a few years down the line, to be able to write a book about it. It's a neat environment. Unique in the industry.

Are there any games inspiring you at the moment?

It's tough to pick. One of the great things about the games industry is that we constantly learn and absorb from each other, we're having this constant conversation, it's really healthy. Specifically for Far Cry, the conversation we're having is around performance capture – what's happening with LA Noire, at Modern Warfare, the way we are able to put believable human beings in games right now – it think we're finally past the uncanny valley, we've crossed it!

Well some games have, maybe ...

A few are still stumbling around. We've got at least one rope over! If we can get another rope across, we can build a bridge, then we can get everyone over to the other side.

This is the most elaborate metaphor I've heard in an interview for quite some time.

Ha! So we're standing on the other side saying okay, what do we do now? Now, that we can capture a human performance by a real actor, now we can put a believable human face in the game, what do we do with that? How do we integrate that with games? We all remember the disaster of trying to create interactive movies – we don't want to repeat those mistakes, we want to ensure that gameplay is king. When we say interactive narrative we need the emphasis to be on interactive. That's the bleeding edge. Also, with Far Cry, via our open world and our streaming technology, we're continually asking, well, how do you make a world where the player can go anywhere? That's an intense conversation and it's been happening for a long period of time.

Another thing that's fascinating to me is how involved this industry is with linear shooters. Man, they're really dedicated to it – it's very strange to me.

Far Cry 3 ... new characters and fresh motivations. And lynchings

It's a safe recipe, I suppose, people look at Black Ops and think ooh, 20m units, I'll have a piece of that.

I guess it seems safe to people, but if you look at the number of failed linear shooters, it doesn't seem very safe to me. I think it's safe to ship another Modern Warfare, and shipping a Battlefield is a good idea, but how many others are you going to play? Clearly, it's a big market, but that is one style of play, and I don't find that to be particularly game-like – they don't feel like games to me. The reason I'm so excited to be working on Far Cry is that it's a game, it's really a game. It's not pretending to be something else, it's not trying to take you on an action movie adventure – we're creating a game that has a compelling narrative inside of it. It feels like we're doing the thing that other media can't do instead of trying to interpret the success of movies in an interactive way.

It does seem that a real fear has developed in the industry about letting players explore and ultimately get lost in an environment ...

The sales are smaller, aren't they? Oh wait… Except for Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption ..., and, oh wait a minute, actually there's a gigantic market for players to do that! I think we're fooling ourselves. I'll put it this way – it's more frightening to game developers to try to imagine a game where the player is driving the experience. Because what if they fail? What if they don't like it? If we give them that responsibility they might fuck it up, and that means they might not like your game.

While corridor-based first-person shooters don't give players any responsibility?

Exactly. If I can create a storyboard of a game, and I put that storyboard in front of a focus test, and they say "dude, that sounds awesome!" then I'm pretty confident I've got something good. But if you can't storyboard it, you just have to trust it – and trust doesn't go together very well with millions of dollars of investment.

I'm hoping though, that this is something that can be resolved over the next few years. I'm hoping that the corridor shooter is just a trend and that open world will win ...

My honest opinion, and I'm no prophet, is that the corridor shooter represents a period of time – we were fascinated with it for a decade, because we were focused on technology, on pure rendering speed. Now we're at the point where it's going to keep looking better, but not that much better. We're almost at the point where games are starting to look like this world. Soon we're no longer going to be able to say "hey this game looks better than the last one" and have people buy it. Now we're having to explore the gameplay feel. We are always going to have those linear experiences – people enjoy a rollercoaster, it's fun. But what we're also seeing now is the re-emergence of the other half of the market – which I like to call video games.

So within that, isn't there a growing importance to treat human characters differently? In an era of full performance capture, and increasingly "realistic" AI, do developers have to start giving us a sense of moral culpability within the game world? Should every person we shoot with that world matter?

It's already happening. As we begin to put believable human characters in a game, the instant human response is, now I feel weird about shooting him: I didn't when he was a cartoon, but now that he's a real guy, I have an emotion when I put a gun to his head ...

Last year, there was an interesting conversation among the academics on Gamasutra, about the difference between player morality and player ethics in gaming. It was pointed out that if you're measuring player responses, if you're providing consequences for the choices that they make, if you're saying to them "hey do you want to be good or evil?" – players will never in that situation, play their true value. They will play the morality that they want the world to believe they have.

So we have to learn how to provide ethical choices for players and to do that we have to not measure their consequences - it has to be just between you and the game. It's incredibly hard to do - it's risky, it's mature and it requires a level of emotional sophistication. It's something we hope to do in Far Cry 3. We'll see. But what we're talking about here is the next decade. The next decade of development is going to be about, what are the consequences of controlling real people in these situations? The typical brazen approach to humanity and characterisation won't work, just as it doesn't in film, because they're real people. We can still go ahead and create games that don't work that way, but they'll have to have a different look…

Also, at the moment, with games that do offer a certain amount of moral choice, the player is often thinking "okay, which is the right choice here?" which will I be rewarded for?

Exactly – they're gaming it. If you provide a consequence, they're always going to play the game. The only times in games I've made an actual moral decision were in situations where there were no consequences to my action. If I'm on a mission and there are civilians around, and if I can shoot those civilians and I'm not being measured, you know what? I never do. I never shoot them. That's who I am. I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm saying I'm referencing my own inner ethics in the game - it's teaching me who I am as a person. That's fucking cool. We have potential here ...

• Far Cry 3 is due out in spring 2012 on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360