We wanted to give the sense that this world existed before the player stepped foot on it. We wanted somebody who would come in here, but you already had people in power, you already had people with an agenda, you had people that were working together that hated each other. Lucien: It was, and part of it was also the fact that we didn’t want somebody that would come in here and would be king. That feels like an integral part of the game, letting people decide their own fate. TSA: Along those lines, you’ll sometimes have a choice between two paths that you can take between, Amita and Sabal. As a result of that, he starts learning more about himself, and the players get to experience that at the same time, and they’re using the same mechanics to experience it, but ultimately, it’s going to be about how the player decides to play through the world, the same way that Ajay is making his mind up as to who he’s going to be to the Golden Path. What happens is that we take the player along for that journey.Ījay Ghale goes to this country, thinks that he’s there for one reason and he suddenly discovers that his family has a deeper connection to this place. So with Ajay Ghale, it wasn’t just a matter of dropping somebody into a country that they don’t understand, it was a matter of dropping them into a country that was somewhat familiar to their experiences, but then they find out more about themselves in discovering this country than they knew before. But in order to do that, you kind of have to kind of give them a little bit of a similar experience. One of the things we do is say that this game is going to be about the place, and we want Ajay Ghale to be the vehicle through which the player explores Kyrat. Lucien: Well, honestly, I think we made him shut up!
TSA: Yes! I remembered it correctly! But he was kind of a marmite character in some ways, and a number of people didn’t like him and his frat boy attitude, so how have you gone about making Ajay more relatable in Far Cry 4? TSA: Yeah, and one of the criticisms of Far Cry 3 came for the lead character, whose name I think was Jason Brody… So a lot of what you’re going to see in Far Cry 4 and in Kyrat, both narratively speaking, game design, level design, everything, is taking all of the strongest elements from Far Cry 3 and seeing how we can amp them up, how we can show players that we’ve been listening to what they’ve been saying and carry that forward.
There was a certain expectation that we had from the fans, from what they’d seen in videos, but rather than saying, “How can we match up with that experience?” we said, “How can we beat those expectations and blow them out of the water?” I mean, there were certain things that were legacy issues that we knew we had to carry forwards.