Shack: So there are primary story missions?

Clint Hocking: Yeah, there's a set of story missions that you have to finish. And then there's all the exploration stuff, unlocking all the safe houses. Every safehouse is occupied by the enemy, you need to kill the guys that are there and capture it.

All of the PGPs--PGPs, that's a production term--all of the checkpoints along the roads.. [laughs] checkpoints. We call them PGPs because it means perimeter guard post, but checkpoint unfortunately means a "save the game" point--roadblock, let's call it a roadblock. Those things, you need to scout them all because they tell you what kind of ammunition they have there. So you're walking around in the jungle and you're like, "I'm low on fuel for my flamethrower," so you pop open your map. "But I've hit all these roadblocks, and I happen to know that this one here has fuel." So I take this vehicle and I drive 250 meters west, kill the six guys in the place, refill my flamethrower, and then go and do the mission.

Plus there are assassination side quests, there are side quests to raid convoys to unlock new weapons, there's collecting the diamonds that you use to buy weapons and all of that stuff. So there's a whole pile of stuff that's totally optional.

But the main missions, there's--I don't remember the exact number, I don't even want to try to quote you a number--I think it's something like 26. But maybe it's 36, and maybe it's 19, I can't remember. But yeah, there's a set of story missions, and then there's what we call the "mission library," which is really the meat of working the two factions against eachother. It's kind of a minigame in itself. Which one do you like better, and which one do you like working for more, and which one is going to come out ahead?

Because the one that wins in the mission library determines how the next set of slightly more linear missions plays out, in terms of which side is going to try to wipe out the other side, and what they're going to try to do with you, and who's going to live and who's going to die, and who's going to be exposed for you to assassinate, and that kind of stuff. And that kind of cuts there, and then there's a few more story missions to establish the second, what we call "mission library," where all of the missions are non-linear and interconnected and impacting eachother. And then there's a resolution to that, and then there's a third act, and it ends.

So yeah, it's very hard for us to show this stuff. Like I said, it maybe takes a tester eight hours to do a walkthrough, which is a super long time. But to just play the game beginning to end quickly, like if you have to review it or something, you're probably talking.. I'm gonna guess and say it's 25 hours just to play it right through without doing anything optional. It's going to be 25 hours.

Shack: That's a long game.

Clint Hocking: Yeah, I think so. I wish we'd made it shorter in hindsight. Because it's so hard for us to test everything--the game is so massive. I'll be driving around, I'll get in a chase, and I'll have to take a turn that I haven't taken in a long time. I'll end up off-road, my vehicle will break down, I'll kill the guys chasing me, and I'll be like, "..where the fuck am I?" I'll be like looking around in my game that I've been working on for three years.

And then I'll start walking a little bit, I'll take out my map, and go, "Oh, there's a little watering hole around these rocks." And I'll walk around the corner, I'll find a little shack there, I'll walk inside, find some exploration diamonds, climb up on the roof and watch the sun setting and watch some zebras and be like, "This is rad." Except I just wasted 45 minutes when I was supposed to be actually testing this stuff. So yeah, sometimes I wish we made it a bit smaller, but what can you do.

Shack: So as far as the soldiers go, and how they freely rove from camp to camp, do they ever respawn, or..?

Clint Hocking: They do repopulate. Obviously when we run out of memory we have to respawn stuff that has been destroyed. But other than that, if you--a good example is a safehouse. If you go to a location and kill everybody and then go sit on a hill 200 meters away and wait, the guys will never respawn because we haven't run out of memory. But if you were to walk 10 meters from there and go into a safehouse, and fast-forward time 24 hours, they would all be back.

Yeah, you won't actually see guys popping into the world of course, but if you pass time, that's when we do our loading.

Shack: I've heard about a system in the game where the player actually loses control of the character for a time. Can you go into detail on that?

Clint Hocking: Yeah, we dialed back on that significantly, just because it was too hard for us to get it in with all of the testing that we needed to do. It was supposed to be kind of a high level system where the player would eventually, literally lose control of his actions more and more frequently. And that wasn't easy to test, and it was turning out ot be very risky for being fun, so we cut it.

But what does happen is your reputation still grows, and your reputation in the high level still determines how frequently guys are wounded, how guys behave in combat. They're more afraid of you if your reputation is very high, they're like, "Holy fuck it's that guy, get the fuck out of here." They're really defensive and they're afraid of you. So all of that stuff changes over the course of the game.

As your reputation mounts you're going to end up walking out of a battlefield with like 16 guys holding their guts in calling for help. In the beginning of the game guys don't get wounded as often because they're not afraid, it's psychological. But if your reputation gets too high, the people who are providing you with medicine to treat your malaria symptoms start saying, "Dude, you're a psycho. We don't want to give you medicine to treat your malaria, you're a motherfucker who's butchering people." So you have to balance your reputation against your malaria symptoms. That's sort of the high level progression of the game.

We didn't really have a name for [the cut system], but your reputation was called your "infamy." It's still called that in the menus and everything. When you go to check your reputation, your sickness, your sort of journal that updates you on your story progress and all of that, it's still called your "infamy." It's like your reputation in the world. And yeah, as you become more infamous people stop liking you.

Shack: So as far as multiplayer goes, there will be user-created maps on the console, right?

Clint Hocking: Yep, user maps for console, for Xbox 360 and PS3. User maps for PC as well. The map editors are different for PC, the PC one is a lot more PC-like. It's like a Windows-based kind of look and feel. The one for consoles is kind of like the one that was built for Far Cry Instincts. The kind of bare-bones skeleton of that, and how usable it was, became the template.

We rebuilt it--it's not the same thing because we had to rebuild it for the new engine. But yeah, it's super user friendly, it's super powerful. It's a lot more powerful than the Instincts one was, just because we have a lot better tools for manipulating terrain and stuff like that.

Shack: And how will these be shared exactly?

Clint Hocking: They'll share them over PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, and on PC they'll share them just over the web. And then there'll be community management, and ranking and rating of maps. The main problem with Instincts was like, there were 10,000 maps out there, and 9,850 of them are a flat piece of sand with a cube floating in the air, and a ladder and a shotgun.

Shack: AwesomeMap 10.

Clint Hocking: Oh yeah. Well even worse, it would be called like, [adopting evil voice], "Devil's Gorge."

Shack: [laughs] Oh yeah.

Clint Hocking: You'd be like, "That sounds good--download." So yeah, we have the ranking and rating stuff, so hopefully--I mean, we don't know because we haven't really done a complete load test on it--but hopefully you'll be able to pop on you get the thing, maybe a couple days later, and there'll be dozens, if not hundreds of maps for you to download. And you'll just go, "I want the five-star ones." And that will rule.