“This game will make you feel more connected to nature and to what being a human is,” Vincent Pontbriand, Far Cry Primal producer says in the latest behind-the-scenes video.
Wow. That is a big claim. But there’s no denying that members of the PCG team have had deep, almost spiritual experiences while playing.
“I saw Ben set fire to his wolf the other day. He just stood there and took it,” Tom tells me.
There’s a chance the Far Cry Primal devs have misjudged the gravitas of a mammoth-riding, owl-bombing, sabretooth-taming jaunt through the Stone Age, but it’s equally possible that they hope to convince us Primal isn’t Far Cry 4.5 by showing themselves going above and beyond.
They got a movement coach in to teach the actors to behave like cavemen (secrets preserved for posterity thanks to neanderthals’ cracking YouTube habit), three separate dialects of a proto-proto-Indo-European language were written in association with the University of Kentucky, and the actors were made to speak them till they got the hang of it.
And yet this is a game that Dan Hay, executive producer, describes as “almost something that was stripped of everything that was Far Cry and taken right down to its chassis”. To me, it looks like the most Far-Cry Far Cry game yet, combining bigger animals, angrier humans, settlement building, crafting, improbable weapons, breasts and remote-controlled owls into something that even the History Channel would be reluctant to pass off as authentic.
Still, it does look good fun, and if nothing else these videos are proving to be a fascinating study of what can be achieved with a Ubi-sized budget.
