Daniel Berlin is
a game designer working on Far Cry 3’s Multiplayer section. He previously worked on World in Conflict and World
in Conflict: Soviet Assault. Before getting into the gaming industry, he worked as a
tattoo artist for two years, and studied political systems at the Malmö
University. His biggest source of
inspiration comes from reading books, and watching movies & TV shows.
His favorite part of game development is seeing how ideas
gradually turn in to fully-fledged features. After our chance to play the game,
I whisked Berlin away from the jungle to a more secure location to get his
thoughts on the game, and try to get juicy information on how Far Cry 3 is
trying to redefine the multiplayer First Person Shooter scene.
Hey Daniel, thank you
for having me here. Could you tell me more about you, and what do you do with
Massive?
I’m a game designer, and I write features, look around and
point out things. So basically everything that has to do with game scenario…
… And what is your
main focus in Far Cry 3?
My main focus is the multiplayer and its features that you
saw, like the Battle Cry, reviving teammates, the kill cam, etc.
So from what I’ve
seen basically, there are a lot of elements that are known from First Person
Shooters such as Call of Duty, Battlefield and so on. What’s going to set Far
Cry 3 apart from the rest of the genre’s games? I mean, these types of titles
are really hard and demanding in the market so what’s going to be its selling
point to newcomers who aren’t loyal fans of the Far Cry series?
Yeah, so what you are asking is what are we going to bring
in other than what gamers are playing in know multiplayer first person
shooters?
Pretty much…
…. Well to start with, you can say that you have a very
unique setting. We’re moving away from the grays and the browns, and going back
into the original franchise, because I feel like a lot of gamers are
complaining on sites and forums that it [the game scene] all looks the same, so
we want to bring the Far Cry colors in, and what was the most awesome part of
the first Far Cry, that lush jungle.
It’s also the fact that we are not [a] military [shooter]. There
are a lot of military games around. So we don’t have any rules or elements we
need to stick to like a chain of command and stuff like that. You will not see
an end of match sequence where I can beat up my opponent in a military shooter,
like a Sergeant in the US army punching a Russian Private. So with the whole
rule set gone, we can do what we want, and calling in heavy ordinance is not
going to be like army airplane flying over and dropping cluster bomb for
example, it’s going to be a guy with a bottle of homemade chemical weapons.
This is the real essence of Far Cry.
It is also the way we to push for team-play and have it
open, so that everyone can do team interactions at any time, alongside the rest
are the main key factors for us.
The video you guys
showed us gave us an idea of what your team is preparing for the pre-release
period, that cross-platform promotion. A lot of franchises did that previously,
like Gears of War with their beta, pushing people in a way to get into the Beta
or Demo, and making them feel that they are accomplishing something. What’s
going to be the main feature of that period?
I think that the Intel decoding feature is a unique thing for Far Cry. What
happens basically is that after you finish a multiplayer match, you might find
a flash drive with encoded information. The thing is it takes time to decode
the Intel outside the game, kind of like waiting for it the next day and you’re
like “what is it, what is it!”.
There’s a lot of fun stuff, like let’s say I’m decoding an
Intel, I can get a speed up token to send to my friend so he can decode his
Intel faster. Or for example one of the Intel [pieces] I decoded is a rocket
launcher, and I don’t want it, I can always send it to my friend.
So we have this social aspect of the game, following you
everywhere, on your smartphone, office computer, where you can log in and
customize your character…
So you’re pushing
people to interact together to unlock stronger weapons…
… Yes, what you unlock are basically the strongest weapons
in the game. You can still unlock them normally when you level up through the
game, but decoding Intel can get you customized weapons, more powerful than the
normal ones. And of course you can gift them, for example if you play with your
same friends, you can boost each other during sessions. You’ll be like “hey I
have an AK47 I can spare, you want it?”,and your friend would reply by giving
you a speed up token. In the end you would boost each other.
Is it going to be via
iOS app, or other platforms such as Android are going to be included…
… Well it’s technically not announced yet, so I can’t really
tell you anything as of now.
Well how about the
Team Support weapons? How are those going to work? Are there more weapons than
the three we got to experiment with (scout, psyche gas, barrel bomb)?
Yes definitely there are more of those. They’re basically
categorized into Tier 1, 2 and 3 and you get to set those. Right now we showed
you Tier 1’s Scout, Tier 2’s Psyche Gas and Tier 3’s Barrel Bomb. Each offers a
certain kind of tactics; so for example the barrel bomb is basically a massive
explosion that spreads a fire that can affect foes even after the explosion. So
yes, as you level up, you’ll unlock further weapons, but I can’t give away
details about these. I don’t want to ruin the surprise.
How did the whole
Firestorm mode idea come to you? Far Cry 2 influenced it, as you mentioned it
during the conference...
… Well yeah, but that was not the main thing. It’s the Fire
element that we picked. The actual mechanics of the game mode is new, and it’s
a bit of legacy of a previous title we made [World in Conflict].
In World in Conflict you would see that if you need to
capture a node, and that same one is connected to two others, and then you need
to grab all three to win the area. So when drawing the idea on our whiteboard
back at the studio, we actually drew the node structure of World in Conflict,
and we were like, ok it needs to be connected in the same way in Firestorm.
Alright then, that
will be all Daniel. I am excited to see the final products, and we hope to see
you once again in the future.
So that’s it, guys. Far Cry 3 looks and plays amazingly, and
I wish I could show you more of it, but that’s all the time I had in London. I
would like to personally thank Ubisoft’s UK Marketing Manager Hayley Johnstone
for hosting us at the Far Cry 3 multiplayer event. See you next time, don't forget to check part one of the Far Cry 3 hand on, and stay
tuned to At7addak for more news, previews, reviews and juicy rumors from the
gaming world.
Ozimandus has been reviewing games and gadgets since 2003. He's not afraid of speaking his mind, and loves to share his love of everything geeky.