Over the course of the next 15 years, the small-time spinoff studio innovated in unpredictable ways, handcrafted some of the industry’s most successful series, and became what is one of the most important game developers in existence.
Yannis Mallat did not join Ubisoft Montreal as its CEO, nor did he always work in the games industry. Before sending his resume to Ubisoft, Mallat spent time aiding African villages, improving their crops and production.
Several years of military service, one MBA, and seven Ubisoft interviews later, he became a third-party producer in 1999. Mallat worked with external development studios rather than in the creative trenches himself. “And I thank God for that,” he says, “because it was, for me personally, the best way to quickly learn the craft, to learn how to make games, without being exposed too much to the risks of them.”
Working on licensed games helped decrease Ubisoft Montreal’s risks as well. Pop culture typically sells regardless of quality, especially to children. Alongside Speed Busters, the studio’s first original title, the team grew to 150 people cutting their teeth on titles based DC comics, and Playmobil toys, as well as Tonic Trouble and a Donald Duck game.
Fortunately, the games were pretty good.Following these early successes, “we decided to devote the whole studio to internal development.” World domination and original products were, of course, the original goals, so Ubisoft made an important acquisition to reinforce its future. In August, 2000, Red Storm Entertainment came under the Ubisoft umbrella. The North Carolina-based developer had previously developed a series of superb tactical action games based on Tom Clancy’s novel, Rainbow Six. Along with the Clancy brand, Red Storm also brought the Epic Games-created Unreal Engine, an intuitive and flexible development framework now used to power an astonishing number and variety of games.
With the Clancy name and a powerful new creative tool in its hands, the next generation of gaming consoles looming, and a Montreal team hungry to create something to call its own, Ubisoft made the most of an extraordinary opportunity.
Development of The Drift was not going well at Ubisoft New York.
The world was in place, for sure. Earth, decorated in a 70s retro-future sci-fi style, had exploded into chunks, with major cities floating on islands in the sky. But the game itself was confused, perhaps because, like Montreal’s early games, its creation relied on the inexperience of nondevelopers.
It was a learning process. Despite some great ideas, The Drift was a third-person shooter without much soul. You could aim at two enemies at once and navigate the world with flying vehicles. Smart A.I. led to contextual crowd reactions in the game’s open spaces -- so if you, Buster the reluctant hero, sprinted through a group while wielding a gun, pedestrians reacted with appropriate dismay. That gun was a modular device, too, allowing players to grapple up ledges, change vision modes, and fire cameras into walls.
Sound familiar?
The Drift became a pitch for a James Bond game.
Individually, The Drift had elements of greatness that were, in some cases, ahead of their time in 1999. Cohesion and focus were problems. The Drift, as a game, was not enough. At a certain point, in a last ditch effort to save it, The Drift became a pitch for a James Bond game. Nothing came of the demo, a shot in the dark "attempt to impress the license holder," and Ubisoft put The Drift on ice. Amid these struggles, Ubisoft also decided to close the New York studio to start something new -- Gameloft, a mobile game developer -- and its projects and people were reallocated to Montreal.A year or so later, when Red Storm (and the Clancy name) came to Ubisoft, the ex-New York, now-Montreal team started exploring how its shelved game might sell with Clancy elements. A designer named Nathan Wolff started implementing spy stuff into The Drift. Surveillance cameras. Stealth. Non-direct combat. Ubisoft toyed with basing it on The Sum of All Fears. Ubisoft HQ saw incredible potential, and with Hideo Kojima’s next great game on the horizon, it issued a mandate to the Montreal team: “Make a Metal Gear Solid 2 killer.”“
No pressure.
So The Drift team and the rest of Ubisoft Montreal made a big decision. They would try something new, and they’d do it in the style of Tom Clancy. The pitch was, according to a developer, “What if the NSA couldn’t collect data by conventional means? Would it have access to a wetworks team or operative to do discrete dirty work?” Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell took off inside Ubisoft Montreal, and its star, secret agent Sam Fisher, was born.Using the Unreal Engine, Montreal leveraged real-time lighting to create a unique gameplay core: Levels were designed to challenge players to sneak through shadows and evade light, similar to Thief. This infused stealth into the heart of Splinter Cell, and gave its players a different way to get around (or through) threats than Metal Gear Solid. Montreal still cherry-picked something from Solid Snake, though. The iconic Konami character’s headband is a distinct, defining character trait that makes him enormously recognizable. Ubisoft wanted its lead to have a similarly striking visual identity pervading its gameplay. The glow of Sam Fisher’s night vision goggles instantly made history in the video game industry.
When it finally released, Splinter Cell was a smashing success, an instant modern classic, and the flagship title that defined Ubisoft Montreal. It achieved precisely what the team wanted: A modernized realization of Thief’s hardcore stealth. Following its release, a series of increasingly excellent sequels came from both Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Shanghai, who took turns knocking out new Splinter Cell games. They had nothing but hits. Shangai’s Pandora Tomorrow introduced Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer, which pitched sneaky secret agents against slower, stronger guns-for-hire. Its asymmetrical play redefined competitive play, and carried over to Montreal’s masterful follow-up, Chaos Theory.
Chaos Theory’s sprawling, complex campaign level designs, thoughtful improvements to Spies vs. Mercs, and terrific cooperative campaign all but perfected Splinter Cell stealth. But, as Chaos Theory’s creative director Clint Hocking puts it, “a lot of strange things happened.” During the project, Hocking explains on Tone Control, “the lead designer and the writer had left. The lead level designer left before the project shipped as well.”
After Chaos Theory was completed, “the core of the team vanished” to start up EA Montreal. This sent Hocking in a new direction, with a new team, heading up a new project, as Splinter Cell moved into bizarre new directions without him. Ubisoft Montreal, at this point in 2005, had grown to an enormous 1,400 employees.
Can Sam shoot two guys in the head in a quarter of a second? F**k yeah. It’s Sam.
Following Chaos theory, Shanghai's Splinter Cell: Double Agent presented Fisher, now bald, without his suit, and undercover inside a terrorist cell, making shocking moral choices. It’s widely considered the weirdest of the bunch. During that time, Ubisoft Montreal worked on its successor to Chaos Theory (and eventually Double Agent), Splinter Cell: Conviction. It was planned to reinvent the series, first and foremost by distancing itself from Splinter Cell-style stealth.“
Planned for an early 2008 release, Splinter Cell: Conviction was an open-world game in which Sam Fisher -- a fugitive with a new, shaggy beard -- hid in plain sight rather than in shadow. Sitting on a park bench, blending in with crowds, and generally acting like a normal dude helped him lie low. Acting suspicious around civilians and generally disrupting the status quo would draw the attention of on-the-prowl police officers. The goggles and gadgets were gone, leaving Fisher to use the environment against his enemies. Toppling tables, kicking cops down stairs, and throwing staplers or chairs became the main method of combative interaction. Conceptually, it was concerning but interesting. In execution, it was mostly just concerning.
Enter Maxime Béland.“I was just going to come in and focus on gameplay,” says Béland, a designer who joined a troubled Conviction midway through its production. “To be honest, after two days, I realized that this was not a fix-it job. It was a bigger job...there were too many design problems that were really hard. We didn’t have a solution.”
Béland emphasizes that Conviction had some great things.
"The scene I’ll always remember is, there were cops with MP5s shooting at Sam,” he says. Sam responds by grabbing a book from a shelf and throwing it at the police. “I’m like, ‘Cool! The bookshelf is a generator of books.’ And they’re like, ‘No! Look, every book is modeled and the hand actually picks it up.’” Béland still has a slack-jawed awe. “Wow. That’s insane.”
It’s insane because each individual item in a game eats up a certain amount of console memory, and the less memory there is to use, the fewer things a game can actually do. At a certain point, the commitment to an in-game library (and similarly minded things, including an incredibly complex animation system) started negatively affecting the rest of Conviction. Béland recalls Fisher could disarm those MP5-wielding cops by chucking hardcovers at them, but couldn’t actually recover their guns. With everything else in Conviction, the console didn’t have memory to allow it.
“How does that work? So what do we do?”
Two months into triage, Béland cooked up the concept of Sam as a panther -- a quick, quiet killer. Lethality was often frowned upon in Splinter Cell games, so a psychotic Sam was a departure too. But at least he wasn’t hurling encyclopedias at SWAT. Ubisoft delayed Conviction’s release by nearly two years and promoted Béland.He was suddenly in charge of Conviction as its new creative director. By the end of his version of Conviction, things were very different. Half the team had moved on to other projects, whether because they bailed or were removed. The gameplay mechanics and story changed drastically. Navigation reverted back to climbing pipes instead of sitting on benches. Programmers had to create a new light-and-shadow system from scratch because Conviction didn’t have one.
Gameplay comes first for Béland. As a man who believes Fisher should be able to shoot from anywhere -- Sam is the world’s most elite operative, damn it -- he had a gameplay loop built around the panther concept: Mark and Execute allowed players to tag targets and take them down in slow-mo succession with the press of a single button. “It’s something that you see in movies all the time,” Beland explains. In playing games, “You don’t have the precision and the efficiency and the speed that you know Sam should have. Can Sam shoot two guys in the head in a quarter of a second? F**k yeah. It’s Sam.” Was it?Many fans felt betrayed by Béland’s interpretation of Splinter Cell. Why couldn’t Sam hide bodies? Why am I pouncing on guys and slaughtering them in droves? What’s up with all this shooting? At the same time, critics adored Conviction almost universally, praising its refined mechanics and satisfying, kinetic stealth. It sold a respectable 2 million copies. Béland had the great misfortune of piecing a crumbling Conviction back together. The game we got is more in line with classic Splinter Cell than it would have been, and it’s because Béland’s team rebuilt the basics from nearly nothing. Its action focus, to some, seemed simple-minded compared to the methodical, thoughtful pace of previous games. For others, it was the gateway to an intriguing but intimidating must-play series.
Ubisoft believed in Maxime Béland so deeply that it sent the franchise with him when he left Ubisoft Montreal. When Béland set up shop at Ubisoft Toronto, he took Fisher and his philosophies with him. What happened is almost atonement. Splinter Cell: Blacklist is a return to form, the classic sensibilities of the series -- brought to life by the unmistakable strengths of what Ubisoft Montreal achieved in Conviction. Where the series goes next is, presumably, in the hands of Béland’s new studio.
Around the time Splinter Cell started development, Ubisoft made another important, intelligent purchase. In 2001, Mattel and The Learning Company sold the creative rights to Myst, Chessmaster, and Prince of Persia to Ubisoft.
When Yannis Mallat found out about the acquisition, he approached his boss directly and demanded, “I want Prince of Persia. I want Prince of Persia. I want Prince of Persia! I won't move, I won't leave your office, until I have Prince of Persia.”
He got Prince of Persia.
Mallat’s obsession with the series stretched back to the 1989 original, a 2D side-scroller about a Persian prince rescuing the kidnapped love of his life. Climbing walls, dodging traps, and sword-fighting guards made up the most of its gameplay, which featured exceptional animation. Those values -- relatable motivation, athletic traversal, and lifelike movement -- drove the direction of a 3D reboot. With the help a creative director named Patrice Désilets and a tight-knit team built by Mallat, Ubisoft Montreal got to work on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Seven people -- a collective of artists, animators, engineers, and designers -- started the Prince of Persia project in May, 2001. With that small team, Mallat helped define the character’s movements and behaviors with a gameplay prototype. They wouldn’t finalize any level designs unless explorable areas suited the elegant climbing, swinging, and wall-running of the hero.Around July, Ubisoft Montreal showed their mock-up project to Prince of Persia’s original creator, Jordan Mechner, who retained partial rights to the property. Mechner fell head-over-heels in love with the project, and full-on production began on Prince of Persia. Ubisoft Montreal adopted the Jade Engine, which Ubisoft’s Montpellier studio was using to power its publisher’s other major 2003 release, Beyond Good & Evil. The Prince of Persia team took advantage of Jade Engine’s flexibility to integrate tech from other Ubisoft games, including Splinter Cell, while giving the title character more than 750 unique animations -- a true accomplishment at the time.
Jordan Mechner joined Sands of Time as a consultant, but quickly signed on to write the story, told during narrated gameplay as well as in cutscenes, before joining Ubisoft Montreal full-time as a designer. He's shared his screenplay publicly. At the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo, Mallat’s team debuted The Sands of Time to the world. The nimble prince’s acrobatic exploration, sword-fighting skills, and ability to manipulate time with a magic dagger, swept critics and consumers off their feet. The showcase proved to the team they had something special. It also struck them with paralyzing fear -- living up to these new expectations terrified Ubisoft Montreal.
Fear is a powerful motivator.
“It became an underdog success story of 2003,” Jordan Mechner later wrote. He was right. The Sands of time won numerous awards. It appeared on the French postage stamp.
Ubisoft sold more than 14 million copies.
Beyond Good & Evil released the same month. It was an abysmal financial failure.
The Sands of Time received many sequels, but none achieved the sense of historical wonder as the original. For that matter, the dramatic shift of tone in Warrior Within, its direct follow-up, corrupted what fans loved. Modern-day heavy metal music replaced the atmospheric melodies of the ancient Iran. Without explanation, the poetic and humble prince transformed into a spiteful and profane bastard. Warrior Within applied its anger to existing gameplay mechanics as well, although the newfound aggression fueled combat and traversal in different, arguably beneficial ways.
The third game, called The Two Thrones, evolved existing gameplay systems as well, but once again abandoned the human element that drew players to Sands of Time. Almost inexplicably, a “Dark Prince” persona overwhelmed the beloved hero, giving him more violent abilities, a decidedly evil Mr. Hyde demeanor, and the deeply unpleasant look of a demon.As action games go, Warrior Within and Two Thrones are still totally competent expansions of what Sands of Time’s gameplay systems did right. Neither captured the essence of what Mallat and Désilets’ team accomplished in 2003, however, which makes them contentious sequels even today.
Following Sands of Time, Ubisoft decided on numerous attempts to reboot Prince of Persia. In 2008, Ubisoft Montreal released a game simply titled Prince of Persia. It changed the character and art style, and focused on exciting navigation and exploration over combat. It was successful enough for a sequel, which was canceled shortly after production began. This cancellation followed the demise of a Prince of Persia game set in the modern day. Alongside its 2008 Prince of Persia, Ubisoft started production on a tie-in to its Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time film, a Disney movie loosely based on the infamous video game trilogy.
This is where things get really messy.Disney delayed the Sands of Time movie, which derailed development of the movie-to-video game adaptation. This gave Ubisoft Montreal more time to make a better game, but the publishing side wanted to get the game out the door as soon as possible. As such, the Sands of Time movie-game team of nearly 100 people shifted creative directions to make its own new Prince of Persia game.
Called The Forgotten Sands, this 2010 release served two purposes. First, it was intended to be yet another reboot for the franchise. Forgotten Sands was also supposed to be a return to form. As such, Ubisoft Montreal made it a sequel to the 2003 Sands of Time game. Forgotten Sands received respectable critical acclaim, and is, as of press time, the last Prince of Persia game.
Mallat says the franchise isn’t going anywhere, however. It’s just paused. “I’m not scared at all for Prince of Persia fans,” he says. Creative director Patrice Désilets wasn’t involved in those post-2003 sequels, however, as he was working on his own Prince of Persia reboot following Sands of Time’s success.
In January 2004, while envisioning what next-generation console hardware could do for the franchise, Désilets arrived at a new concept with a tiny team of 12.Prince of Persia: Assassins remained in the Middle East, but zeroed in on an order of Muslim assassins from the 12th century -- the Hashshashin struck fear into their enemies with public executions. The player, as a member of this society, acted as the bodyguard of a young Persian prince. Ambitions grew larger. With the popularity of online multiplayer soaring, Ubisoft Montreal wondered what cooperative multiplayer could do for Prince of Persia.
In a prototype demonstration, built after six months of work, Prince of Persia: Assassins showcased a white-robed hero stabbing Templar knights, tussling with civilians, and escaping a market on horseback with the aid of another assassin. Murder, multiplayer, hitmen, and horseback riding didn’t fit the philosophies of Prince of Persia at all, never mind that you wouldn’t play as the prince. But Prince of Persia: Assassins held enormous potential. “At that point,” former designer Philippe Morin says, “it was obvious to everybody it wasn’t going to be Prince of Persia.”
In a risky move, Ubisoft turned the project into an uncertain new brand. Morin, Mallat and Désilets’ new game shed the reliable, beloved Prince of Persia name.
And so, Assassin’s Creed was born.
Humility is something Assassin’s Creed has lost.
At the time of its 2004 inception, Assassin’s Creed was conceived as a multi-generation adventure game. On the PlayStation 2, it featured a different character killing across Cyprus island (which later appeared in 2009’s PlayStation Portable spinoff, Bloodlines). Similar to Prince of Persia, it would be a fairly funneled action-adventure experience. When Ubisoft Montreal decided to dedicate the entirety of its Assassin’s Creed efforts to the upcoming PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the PS2 version died, with bits and pieces of its design making its way into a more ambitious, original game. The next generation version aimed for a more open-ended approach to its exploration and action.
“The idea of making an open world game came up around September 2004,” says ex-Ubisoft designer Philippe Morin, “not long after producer Jade Raymond came on board.” Structurally, Assassin’s Creed was “purely linear, but you had some freedom,” Morin says. As the team learned the hardware, the world size scaled to match the ambition. Players would be able to climb buildings in Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus, and Masyaf while riding horses across an expansive open plain between cities. More interesting than the scope of its universe, however, was the dedication to interactive and reactive crowds. The protagonist, Altair ibn-La’Ahad, could hide in public crowds, push civilians out of the way, and draw attention if he became careless.
Sound familiar?For a brief time, Ubisoft Montreal considered expanding these great ideas into the multiplayer space. “We talked about it twice in pre-production,” says Morin, “and twice we came up with the same conclusion.” In the end, cooperative multiplayer was removed from Assassin’s Creed because it flat-out didn’t work. “Back then,” he continues, “online was not as big as it is today. That means co-op had to be split-screen” as well as online. Because Assassin’s Creed emphasized vertical exploration, horizontal split-screen wasn’t an option. However, “when you make it vertical, you lose the crowd.”
For three years, Ubisoft Montreal worked on developing a new franchise with Assassin’s Creed. Its historical setting -- the real-world 12th century -- made up the majority of the gameplay, but proved to be a bit misleading. Assassin’s Creed’s story revolves around present times, with the modern day assassin Desmond Miles living out genetic memories via a sci-fi MacGuffin called The Animus. Using the machine, he could experience the life of Altair. The sci-fi element was not well-received when Assassin’s Creed released in 2007.
The critical reception ranged from admired to despised. The gargantuan, believable place in human history, alongside the impressive character animations and free-running exploration, impressed critics. Assassin’s Creed’s slow-burn story, tedious objectives, empty modern-day story sequences, and lack of variety kept it from greatness. Weakness didn’t seem to matter when Assassin’s Creed hit retail shelves. It came out of the sales gate strong, thus guaranteeing itself a sequel.
By the time Ubisoft Montreal revealed Assassin’s Creed II in 2009, the original game had sold nearly 10 million copies. Rather than rehash a financial sure-thing, though, Ubisoft Montreal treated the success like a failure. It recognized and addressed the first game’s significant problems, and it did it in half the time -- Assassin’s Creed II took just two years compared to the original’s four.
When development began on Assassin’s Creed II, it retained the franchise’s core ideas -- historical, open-world exploration and modern-day sci-fi -- while refreshing on everything else. Desmond dove into his ancestral memories in Renaissance Italy. Altair was out, replaced by Ezio Auditore, a naive, womanizing Florentine turned vengeful assassin. Revenge is an easy premise for players to latch onto. The subject matter works across all mediums, and is an easy thing to relate to. When Ezio’s family is wrongfully hanged, we can relate to his motivation to avenge them, particularly as his jovial naiveté fades and he begins using his charm to create violence. His simple quest unravels as he discovers a war between Templars and the assassin brotherhood and corruption in the Catholic church. Consequently, the things players do, the places they go, and the means by which they can achieve their goals created a deeper, more varied gameplay experience. Assassin’s Creed II embodies the greatest ideas of the original, but Ubisoft Montreal elaborated on and built upon them. Its excellence in exploration brings Ezio to exciting areas littered with ancient secrets, spectacular realizations of real-world landmarks, and the freedom to approach an assassination assignment in different ways.
Again, Montreal tinkered with a multiplayer mode that didn’t make the cut.
The world of Assassin’s Creed II, most important of all, added density, which the first game was sorely missing. Each area -- from Ezio’s villa in Monteriggioni to the Venetian canals and Florentine rooftops -- has a true sense of place, giving players the feeling of exploring history during Italy’s Renaissance. This success also carried over to Desmond Miles’ modern-day gameplay in Assassin’s Creed II, miraculously, as well as Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed Revelations, the two Ezio-centric sequels. Desmond, using a similar skill set to Ezio, could interact with his team, traverse environments, and fight nefarious dudes. Assassin's Creed IIreintroduced Altair to the story, which Revelations would eventually pay off in a way that, strangely enough, makes one revere the original Assassin’s Creed after all.
The Assassin’s Creed II trilogy is emblematic of Ubisoft Montreal’s willingness to eat crow, make good on undelivered promises, and continue to deliver on a great idea. Assassin’s Creed III is representative of its bravery to throw away a sure thing.Where Assassin’s Creed III took the greatest risk was, like the original, hoodwinking the audience. The opening hours star Haytham Kenway rather than his son, the star of every piece of promotional material, the Native American Ratonhnhaké:ton who becomes the assassin Connor Kenway. Haytham’s involvement with America’s founding fathers and the Templar organization created a compelling setup -- again, revenge -- when a young Connor starts hunting him down.
The trouble for Connor is that his father could be hiding anywhere in the dawning United States, a space so expansive that Ubisoft Montreal built a new, next-gen-ready engine to make it work. The AnvilNext engine brought the American frontier, New York City, Boston, and Revolutionary War battlefields to life. Its animation system gave Connor a fluidity of movement Ezio couldn’t tame, particularly when traversing trees and hunting wildlife. It lent seawater a natural, undulating unpredictability while sailing the sea and sinking enemy boats. Montreal tried many new things with Anvil Next and Assassin’s Creed III. Some of them worked, some of them didn’t.
Like the original, its admirable ambition would pave the way for the future of the franchise. Its main character is just one player in a larger-scale story that carried through Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. The ability to navigate nature, hunt wildlife, and sail the sea became integral to Black Flag’s hero -- Connor’s grandfather, Edward Kenway.As of 2014, Assassin’s Creed is unquestionably the most successful, recognizable Ubisoft property ever. Each sequel sells more than the last. The series borders on cultural phenomenon, with its reach extending from comics and apparel to an upcoming film, novels, and almost unmissable marketing presence. Its 60 million sales more than triple that of Prince of Persia. It has become an industry titan.
If anyone is responsible for the absence and apparent death of Prince of Persia, it’s Altair ibn-La’Ahad.
Ubisoft Montreal’s first Rainbow Six game was innocuous enough.
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield didn’t stray far from the tactical shooter’s established formula of planning attack routes before missions, infiltrating an area with multiple strike teams, one-shot kills, and rescuing hostages. The signatures of the Red Storm-created shooter series were no longer original by 2003, but they’d never been done better than they were in Raven Shield. Montreal may have played it safe, but it worked. The console port of Rainbow Six 3, however, is where things started to go a little off the rails.
Maxime Béland, a game designer at the time, remembers having to change defining characteristics of the PC series to make it work on Xbox. The thinking at the time, Béland says, “was like, ‘Well, it’s a console game, so I think we need to remove the planning phase.’ Oh, s**t! And then it was like, ‘I think it’s not going to be multiple teams. I think you’re going to be playing as one guy, and he’s going to be Ding Chavez.’” Chavez played front and center in the Rainbow Six novel as well as previous games, but a Rainbow Six game where you’re forced into a single character’s role was heresy. When Béland’s Rainbow Six Vegas was announced, it was almost unrecognizable as Rainbow Six.Vegas had third-person cover-shooting. The main character was some new guy, a non-Clancy-created character, and Ding Chavez was just a commanding voice on his radio. Its setting was Las Vegas, a single city as opposed to the global locales of previous games. All of this is the result of an early, abandoned concept that came together differently than intended.
“The mandate was to make an open world game,” Béland says. “That’s why it’s set in one city.”
It would be Béland’s first game for the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3 generation, and Vegas came at a time when Ubisoft wanted everything in its library to go open world. The trouble, he explains, is that “having a lot of gameplay in that environment is harder. The city’s not hostile to you. That’s why games like Far Cry work, is they put you on an island where the world is hostile to you.” Less than a year later, the direction changed. An open-world Rainbow Six Vegas just wasn’t working. “Everyone wanted a part of the pie of GTA,” Béland says. “But I was, from the get go, I didn’t see it. I didn’t believe in it, so it was hard for me to make it happen.”
Part of that was that the story just didn’t make sense in the context of what Rainbow is as a team. Béland summarizes it beautifully: Rainbow is the SWAT team of the world. “Rainbow is about traveling the world to different locations. The American government, if something is happening on their soil, they have people. And it’s not Rainbow. Rainbow is for the world. It’s when you get geopolitics involved.” In just one place, one city, exploration doesn’t work for them.
I thought I was working on the Waterworld of video games.
So the project scaled back, refocused, and made itself as believable as possible. “I think what we were able to do with Vegas was really cool,” says Béland. “You know, if you’re willing to accept the fact that there’s like 800 terrorists that assault Vegas and only three guys that step in and save everybody.” Béland, laughing, says “There’s a military base super close to Vegas also. It’s like, if there’s a terrorists attack Vegas, you’ve got martial law that kicks in, it’s over. You’re going to have thousands and thousands of soldiers in the street, not three guys in a chopper.”“
But having those three guys in a chopper is a monumental thing, something producer Alex Parizeau remembers most. “I think one of the coolest things I was proud of at the time was to have the team in the chopper, with all their customization stuff, fly in the chopper, land on your map, rappel down from the chopper, and proceed to the gameplay.” When the team finally saw that introduction in full, it “was the first time we had a prototype that felt really next-gen.” Parizeau joined the Vegas team after 10 months, and by then Montreal had killed the concept of an open world and reigned in its Rainbow Six. He was one of many new hires on a team of 140 -- nearly triple the typical Ubisoft Montreal team size at the time. The growing team was a major concern for Parizeau. “For a while I thought I was working on the Waterworld of video games. ‘There are way too many people here. This is never going to be profitable.’”
That team paid off in the long run. Vegas introduced numerous innovations to the genre, not the least of which was tactical cover. “We came up with cover probably the same time Gears came up with cover,” Béland says. “Kill.Switch was the only reference we had.”
Ubisoft Montreal allegedly prototyped the next Rainbow Six as a turn-based tactics game
Gears of War released just two weeks prior to Vegas, and is (justifiably) credited with having perfected cover-based tactical combat. Equally forward-thinking, however, is the approach Montreal took to multiplayer. The gear and weapon customization -- a rewarding result of earning experience points in each match -- would later become the standard in shooters such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. Parizeau’s personal favorite achievement is the single-player campaign’s AI teammates. “I’m trying to think of another game this generation that shipped with team AI that you control that are useful, but not too much to steal all the gameplay,” he says. “Enough control options that if you want to rappel with you down a building, storm in together, set them up so they flash and go in and take the other two guys, we had marking...I don’t think any other game approached this level of coordination with two AI teammates. That was a daily battle.”“
Another designer said Vegas, while exceptional in many ways, didn’t soar until the 11th hour. In the final weeks of development, the team decided to cripple the player’s health and amplify the power of enemy firearms -- suddenly, this pretty good shooter became a pretty incredible tactical experience. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 came shortly after, and while it was similarly great, it didn’t make the same sensational splash as the original. After a brief period of darkness, the series re-emerged with Rainbow 6: Patriots, which put a different spin on things. And not just because it ditched the word “Six.” Its goals were, like Vegas, different than the series’ tradition. It aimed for spectacular scripted events, emotional resonance -- both in the heat of battle and in its home-grown-terrorism plot -- and thunderous action.
It started stranger, a developer told me. Early on, Ubisoft Montreal allegedly prototyped the next Rainbow Six as a turn-based tactics game. Later, the plot apparently hinged on robots, of all things, with enemies hacking into machines that fought Rainbow operatives. The goal with Patriots, eventually, was to make Rainbow feel more personal, more like Clancy’s original novel, where a very real threat affects very human characters.
Following Ubisoft’s debut of Rainbow 6: Patriots in November 2011, its promotion went suspiciously silent. Its 2013 release date seemed increasingly uncertain. This is, according to an anonymous developer, largely due to troubles with the Anvil Engine, which had never been used for a first-person shooter. In an effort to cut the costs of using middleware development tools, Ubisoft started using its own proprietary technology to power its games. The tech behind Assassin’s Creed pushed back on the Rainbow 6: Patriots developers, wasting much of the team’s time. The frame rate instability was nearly unsalvageable. The team of 120 couldn’t create their game quickly enough, and thus spent the majority of development time creating the original proof of concept demo we saw, and a follow-up E3 demo we didn’t.
The level designs were done and the story was written, but Patriots, broken, wasn’t going anywhere.
Eventually, Patriots was so heavily delayed that it moved to next-gen platforms. Another anonymous developer says Patriots is on (at least) its fifth creative director, with the project repeatedly failing to progress and its staff moving onto other projects.
The team working on Rainbow following that drama was, according to the developer, almost entirely different than it was in 2011. Ubisoft Montreal refused to talk about Rainbow 6: Patriots for a long time -- perhaps because the game that it was no longer existed.
Yannis Mallat would only say that the series “has a place in the studio,” and Ubisoft’s Tony Key told IGN that “We’re absolutely making another Rainbow 6.”
Whether it took the same risks as Vegas or Patriots, or is even the same game, remained a mystery until the official reveal of Rainbow Six Siege -- a "multiplayer first" game for the new generation of consoles -- in 2014.
Ubisoft Montreal has a habit of meddling.
The original Far Cry, developed by Crytek, was a first-person shooter unlike any at the time. Its open spaces and diverging paths gave players the freedom to approach combat encounters with options most other action games didn’t offer. It was also a little on the silly side, with an Island of Dr. Moreau vibe influencing its corrupted tropical paradise setting, as well as its mutated monkey enemies.
We talked about everything from f***ing Mars to the Arctic.
When Ubisoft Montreal remade Far Cry for consoles, it swapped liberty for linearity, and compensated with newer, weirder elements, such as giving the main character animalistic skills like seeing in the dark.“
When the time came to make a proper sequel, Ubisoft offered Far Cry 2 to creative director Clint Hocking, who had recently wrapped up Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory toward the end of 2005. The plan was to expand on Far Cry’s freedom. In leveraging Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3’s next-generation technology, Ubisoft’s goal was to create a library of sustainable franchises all set in open worlds. Hocking embraced the concept and applied his own out-there ideas for Far Cry 2.
“We didn’t want to go to a tropical island,” Hocking explains on Tone Control. “We knew all of the sequels on console were going to be on tropical islands, and we also strongly suspected Crytek was making something on a tropical island…. Why not get away from that?”
During the conceptual stage, Hocking says, “We talked about everything from f***ing Mars to the Arctic.”Far Cry 2 abandoned its island origins in favor of a politically tumultuous African state suffering a vicious civil war. It was a risky move. Short of a handful of dramatic World War II shooters, few games had attempted to take on such serious subject matter. Even fewer approached sensitive, contemporary subjects inspired by blood diamonds and Darfur, and had the balls to dress it up as a parable for colonialism. Far Cry just needed a narrative designer to bring this experimental world to life.
Hocking recruited Patrick Redding to Ubisoft Montreal in 2004. This was long before Far Cry 2, but they were old friends from the west coast, and they frequently shared beers over discussions of systemic, emergent, and dynamic stories. Both men are extremely thoughtful, articulate literary types, Hocking with his masters in creative writing, Redding with his regular references to Conrad, Milton, Wells, and more. They seem like a natural fit for each other.
“Clint used to say that Red Harvest was the last great story prototype,” Redding says. “It’s the idea of the protagonist, who’s an anti-hero, entering into a world where there’s this territorial conflict going on between equally morally bankrupt parties. Then he plays both of them against each other to bring the whole world down, engulf the whole world in flames.”
This is the essence of Far Cry 2. Its story’s many moving pieces include a notorious arms dealer, The Jackal, supplying two warring African factions, both of whom employ the player to strike blows against the other. Along the way, the player makes friends with other mercenaries who assist in combat, bring them back from the brink of death, and provide more challenging (and lucrative) options during missions. They can also die on the fly, whether because you can’t protect them, choose not to save them, or accidentally overdose them with medical syrettes.
“It can yield these dramatic, melancholy moments, where you’re like, ‘Damn it, I’ve got one syrette left. I’m not going to use it on you.’ Blam.” Moments like these, created by pure happenstance as a result of Far Cry 2’s complex array of intertwined systems, accomplish exactly what Redding and Hocking discussed over drinks.“The best parts have almost nothing to do with our story per se, the overarching fiction,” says Redding. “It has to do with the fact that the game world and the game systems tend to take you partway through the conventional planning process a player goes through, when they’re in an action game and they see an objective and they’re trying to make their way to that objective. Then it adds the element of ‘Man plans, God laughs.’”
Man plans, God laughs.
You can wind up having a perfect plan falling to pieces in a heartbeat, thanks in large part to Far Cry 2’s ruthless difficulty. Weapons jam, and sometimes explode, leaving them permanently broken. The enemies and environment are equally hostile toward the player, who, upon entering Africa, acquires a lethal case of malaria that must be regularly treated with hard-to-find pills. Fires propagate across large spaces, with wind carrying flames across dry land. This is as advantageous a tactic as it is dangerous -- an inferno rages where it wants, and you’re as likely to get caught in it as you are to trap your foes.“
“When something horrendously catastrophic happens out of the systems of the game, out of the game simulation, that changes everything” Redding says. “It changes the conditions. It forces you to react on your feet, puts you in danger, but also potentially – if you’re good – gives you opportunities to do something even more interesting and creative. It’s that interplay between player expression and the narrative potential of the game systems that we wanted to explore.”
Those systems were (and remain) divisive among players. Far Cry 2 is punishing and not for the patient. It has its own set of rules, different from that of any other shooter, including previous incarnations of Far Cry. The elements of unpredictability that led to some of Far Cry 2’s greatest moments were also the cause of its critical rift -- some loved it, some loathed it. It is not an easy game to fall for. Many industry people tell me that Far Cry 2 is a sensitive subject inside the walls of Ubisoft Montreal, and isn’t a project that the senior staff speaks of with reverence.Redding emphasizes that Ubisoft editorial – the French team that makes Ubisoft’s big-picture creative calls – knew what it was getting into. “They understood up front that we were trying to do something risky, and they gave us a lot of latitude and a lot of support. I think it was editorial that arrived at this idea that, ‘Listen, right now you are talking a lot about some fairly deep systems and some threshold behaviors that the player may have a hard time seeing. You might want to talk about something in these terms.’”
This became Far Cry 2’s Infamy system, which influenced the way the world to reacted to your reputation. In the beginning, enemies trash-talk you, the outsider, the nobody. The more brutal you behave, the more fearful they become when you roll through their roadside checkpoint.
“We used to joke that the only way we were ever going to be allowed to make a game like this is if our planning process effectively burned the bridges behind us as we went, so there was no way for us to retreat,” says Redding. He pauses and laughs. “I can make that joke now.”At the time, the Ubisoft Montreal Far Cry team was treading unexplored territory. Assassin’s Creed was in parallel development, taking huge leaps toward showing what next-gen, open-world games could be. “There were many, many blank spots in our knowledge and understanding of how the game was going to function,” Redding explains. “We didn’t have a complete functioning walkthrough of that game until so late that it was impossible for us to even evaluate whether the scope was too big, whether it was comprehensible,” Redding says.
It wasn’t until then, right at the end, that Far Cry 2 was even representative of itself, what it could be, what it would become. When the team saw the final version of Far Cry 2, its geology, its dynamic fire systems, artificial intelligence behaviors, the way wildlife strolled across the savannah, that the vision really locked itself in. “It really was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Africa,’” says Redding. “Everything about the way the sun looked in the sky, the way the trees moved, the sounds you heard, the way the grass moved and burned, was perfect.”
He humbly takes back the claim of perfection, but considering the time, it was as close as a team could get. Far Cry 2 took heat for its rather empty open world – something fans adore exploring, soaking in, and sneaking around – and it’s something the sequel would address head on.
But after Far Cry 2, there was a strange silence.
Behind the scenes, things were changing at Ubisoft Montreal.The Far Cry 3 we know is not the Far Cry 3 that could have been. When it entered pre-production in 2008, the setting and hero were different. So was the creative staff. This sort of thing happens in game development, and it happens often at Ubisoft Montreal. Some things don’t work. People leave. Goals change. Ubisoft adapts.
Somewhere along the way, the vision for Far Cry 3 turned inside out. WestStudio, an external concept art house, helped Ubisoft Montreal realize a visual direction for the return to Far Cry’s seaside origins. A ravaged resort, golf course, and theme park appeared amid scenic beaches and a dense jungle populated by masked pirates. The thematic essence of this first-draft Far Cry 3 remained in the eventual 2012 release, but a few important things happened during its development cycle.
Following Far Cry 2, Clint Hocking never appeared to have been involved in the sequel; he went on to create something new at Ubisoft Montreal, but it never got off the ground and he eventually departed for LucasArts. Redding moved over to Ubisoft’s new Toronto studio to start work on Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Far Cry 3’s narrative director, Raphael van Lierop, left Ubisoft for Relic Entertainment. Josh Mosqueira, Far Cry 3’s creative director, took a position at Blizzard. By 2010, the Far Cry creative team was effectively gutted.
By hiring new blood and shifting talent within its Montreal studio, Ubisoft filled those holes. This new team, with inspiration from the pre-production leftovers, moved forward with its own island, story, cast of characters, and game design ideas.
The Far Cry 3 we know is not the Far Cry 3 that could have been – but those responsible for what it became are justifiably proud of their vision and execution, even in the face of controversy and criticism.Before a game world becomes a believable place, the pieces need to facilitate interesting gameplay. One bearer of that burden is Mark Thompson, level design director on Far Cry 3.
“We don't have the concept of discrete levels like you'd imagine in a linear game, where you have these 10 sections of game broken up into 10 separate worlds or whatever,” he says. Despite Far Cry 3’s segregated mission spaces, “there isn't really a concept of any one level” because of the diverse systems that bring the world to life. No space can exist for one specific idea. Randomly occurring animal spawns and enemy encounters need room to breathe at every inch of Rook Island. A space you might think of as a level “can't have cover set out in an excruciatingly perfect setup for one mission,” Thompson explains, “because you have to be able to come back and explore it and still have a dynamic firefight that a level designer has never seen before.”
The trouble with all of this, as Thompson puts it, is that gameplay systems “aren’t very organic.” Traditionally, a game space is built on grids. Objects within it rely on specific metrics, so they need to be exactly X size and exactly Y distance apart. Cover systems are built for perfect square blocks, so when “you throw all of that into a jungle it’s like, ‘Holy s--t, this is never going to work.’”Thompson and his team experimented to make a natural world work within these unnatural limitations. It got as specific as generating different rocks to see which types would produce dynamic cover, “because we can't hand-draw cover points.” Part of Ubisoft Montreal’s solution was in Far Cry 2’s Dunia Engine. It had a “recipe,” so an artist dictated the vegetation or geometry needed in a space, “then an algorithm takes our recipe and quickly generates large areas.” As a result, the Far Cry team could “turn and burn on this stuff super-fast. If we wanted to, we could build an outpost in like 20 minutes, and then we could test it” and make quick changes on the fly. “In a day we can iterate on the same outpost like three times, just moving around the pieces or putting a different animal in the cage or just removing the cage altogether, change the different units, put a sniper on top or replace him with a heavy on the ground.”
In a simplified sense, the development process behind Far Cry 3 reflects the procedural scenarios players come across. Deliberation definitely exists, and it’s an important factor, but it’s the unpredictability that makes the world, and reacting to it, such an engaging experience. The variation that comes with this kind of craft lends a layer of realism to Rook Island – it is extremely difficult to recognize repeat formations, if they exist anywhere at all.
The open world in Far Cry 2 was missing the most meat.
That is among the most important things for Thompson, who wants you to feel like “you’re in a space that exists for a reason” rather than in an area that was constructed. The level of detail in certain spots borders on mundane, but it helps sell the certainty of Far Cry 3’s universe. An enemy-occupied lumber mill serves as one of numerous pirate outposts players can reclaim. For Thompson’s team, the thought process was, "Okay, so they take in the raw timber here, it gets processed here, it gets cut and treated here, and then it gets shipped out,” he explains. “We make sure that the level designers and the artists understand that workflow so that when they build that space, they build it in a logical way.”“
The features of this island are curated in such a way that they reflect the history accurately. “Maybe 10 percent of players pick up on that stuff,” Thompson speculates. The lumberjack and millwright contingent of his audience must be larger than most of us might have suspected.
“For me,” Thompson says, “it’s important that the spaces are credible and believable. The things that happen in them are obviously…they’re a stretch.”For the Far Cry faithful, an island is equal to the savanna; it’s just a place that enables your chaos. More likely, Far Cry 3’s small but significant changes to Far Cry 2’s formula – whether you loved or loathed it – made a significant impression on players. Far Cry 3 producer Dan Hay says the story enabled the return of the buddy system, and that there were “opportunities when we started talking about doing co-op,” but the narrative drive demanded a sense of isolation. “We want you to remember what it was like to be that kid,” Hay says. “You were in that tent, it got dark, you heard the sound of a twig snapping, and your imagination did more damage than we could do. That was the goal.”
Thompson says Ubisoft Montreal experimented with numerous ideas “just to see if they were worth fixing or worth just forgetting about altogether.” Weapon degradation was an interesting variable that ultimately “hindered the fun a little bit too much.” Thompson continues, “The open world in Far Cry 2 was missing the most meat…it was really just the bones. That was where we wanted to expand as much as possible, so that there was more than just respawning checkpoints and one kind of collectible. We wanted to have the idea of an actual civilization.”
Hay cites this as Far Cry 3’s most important accomplishment. “The greatest success is probably the living world…. You always wonder, when you’re making a game this big and this deep and this rich, ‘have you got the right recipe? Do you have the right pieces?’ It’s like alchemy. It isn’t all going to come together in just the right way.” The marriage of linear campaign missions and open-ended exploration, Hay explains, was a tricky hurdle he’s “immensely proud” of overcoming. “The thing that we got right was the open world and your ability to just go out and play at your own pace without punishment.”For lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem, that freedom needed to have a meaningful effect on the story of Jason Brody, Far Cry 3’s protagonist. If a young man setting out to rescue his kidnapped friends ignores them for the fun of exploring an open-ended island, how does a team of writers and designers reconcile the player’s urge to ignore the threat? Yohalem says that “everything you do in this game world is curated and intentional.” He wants players to examine what their in-game actions say about themselves. If you’re ignoring the goal of rescuing those close to you for the sake of finding treasure, hunting animals, or killing pirates, what does that say about you?
Many might argue that the charisma of Brody’s friends negated any concern for their well-being. Liza, Jason’s girlfriend, is often condescending of a man she allegedly loves. The bleached-blonde stoner friend Oliver is a frat-boy stereotype who can’t be bothered to remove the sticker from his flat-brimmed ball cap. Keith (and his mullet) spends so little time talking to anyone that he’s defined only by his drunken idiocy in flashbacks. Why should you care to rescue these people? At what point do you give up on them and leave them to die?
“At the start of the game you're very aligned with Jason, even if you think his friends are douchebags,” Thompson says. “You still want to rescue them because you understand the connection with friends and family.” Dan Hay continues down a similar path, explaining that Brody’s friends are meant to reflect a self-centered slice of youth. Eventually, you mature, grow up, and “realize that some of [your friends] were just using you, or some of these folks didn’t have a clue what the hell they were doing, or they were just scared.”Referring to one of Far Cry 3’s endings, in which players can choose to kill Jason’s friends and live among the island natives, Yohalem asks, “You might still not like [them] at all, but at the same time, can you kill that person? I think that if you can't, I feel like that should say something really beautiful about you, and about all of us. If you can, then it's also interesting to examine why you can. Is it because it's in a game context? Is it because of something inside of you? Games allow us to have that kind of examination.”
Discomfort plays into Far Cry 3’s examination of its players as well. Much of it caused controversial ripples throughout its audience. Over the course of Jason’s story, he sees and takes part in vivid acts of obscene violence, including torturing his own brother during an undercover ruse. The intent is to disgust the player while showing that Jason’s increasing obsession with violence has crossed a line. However, this scene, among others, could be interpreted as exploitative – in a game where violence is fun, certain moments of harm don’t necessarily change the tone. In a similar potential disregard for sensitivity, when Brody rescues his friend Keith from a sexually abusive captor, the story moves on and forgets about the character and the consequences. Maybe a rape victim becoming a silent recluse should tell the audience something about abuse. Perhaps Far Cry 3 didn’t have the time to care about the aftermath.
“We didn't do any of it lightly,” Thompson says of Far Cry’s controversial content. “We didn't do any of it just for titillation, just for the sake of it. However it's received, everything we did was with good intentions.” He explains that each subject was thought about carefully, and included only if it was “an important part of the story and needed to be there.”Other controversy surrounding Far Cry 3 centers on race – Jason Brody, a young, white male, reclaims the island for a group of dark-skinned natives who couldn’t do it without him. Their leader, Citra, falls in love with him rather than any other tribal warrior; in one of Far Cry 3’s two endings, he is the only man worthy of impregnating her. Hay refers me to Yohalem and “the idea of being self-aware” when I ask him about what, if any racial implication exist within Far Cry 3.Nothing concerning race occurred to me while playing Far Cry 3. When I tell this to Yohalem, his immediate response is, “That says something about you, doesn’t it?” He elaborates, “When you approach a work you approach it with an angle. All of us do. It's human,” and Far Cry 3 aims to “show your angle. On some level you can look at it and yourself and go, ‘huh, that’s interesting that I felt this way.’” In his eyes, those who perceive elements of racism, or even race, are “interested in these issues,” and project their concerns onto the material they’re consuming.
Deliberate or not, Far Cry 3 positions a Caucasian male as triumphant amid a group of floundering minorities. The weight of what that means, apparently, is on you.
At a more basic narrative level, one of Far Cry 3’s greatest points of contention is the death of Vaas, the pirate warlord who’s positioned as the primary antagonist from the first frame of gameplay. He was equal parts charismatic and crazy -- but that wasn't always the case. Actor Michael Mando’s expressive performance instilled such a potent whimsy to a frightening and wholly likable villain that Ubisoft Montreal changed Vaas' character concept to match the performance. Consequently, when Jason kills Vaas, the lunatic’s limited on-screen presence felt like a disservice to his enormous potential. When lamenting the limited screen time of Far Cry 3’s cast, Hay wishes for more Willis, more Buck, more Hoyt, more Daisy. He brings up nearly all of the side characters. He never says Vaas.
When I ask him about it, Hay launches into a speech about, of all things, the emotional resonance of Darth Vader:
“You think about that opening scene in Star Wars. What you think is a huge ship is going by overhead, and then it is absolutely dwarfed by a massive ship. Then everything inside it is white and the Rebels are holding against the door. It blows up. They just had a firefight going on, and when it’s all over, in walks this guy who’s head-to-toe in shiny black. That moment is galvanized in your memory as a kid forever. For us, giving that taste of Vaas and making sure that it’s short and that it’s sweet and that it is about craving more of it…that was a focus for us.”
Yohalem, meanwhile, calls upon 20th century literature to explain Vaas’ early exit. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, “the main character dies in the middle, kind of parenthetically. The whole book is going and you get to these parentheses in this middle portion, and she's dead.” From there, “the rest of the book is about the absence of her. That is so daring. And we did it. I think that it's hard for some people, but at the same time, you also want that kind of a character to take a bow when everyone wants him the most.” The absence applies not only to Jason’s story, but Far Cry 3 as a whole. It leaves the player in a space where there’s no immediate goal, no problem to solve. It leaves you wondering what to do. “You never feel that in a game,” says Yohalem.Later, after the credits roll on Far Cry 3, you’re thrown back into the island with the freedom to explore, collect, and kill what’s left. This defies both endings: one in which Jason leaves the island, and the other where he dies on it. What’s more jarring than the fictional contradictions is that Brody’s back without motivation.
“Well, now you have this whole island, and you have this thing without any of the human side,” Yohalem explains. “The play is gone, but you have the empty stage, and you have all these things to experiment with. But the question is, are you missing [something]? What do you feel like with that missing? Do you miss it?”
I did.
“But that's fascinating, right? Because you want to go have fun,” he says. “When you're in the story, you go off wanting to do all the cool stuff on the island, instead of helping your friends. It's like you're avoiding work, because you don't like them.” When the motive vanishes, avoiding it becomes less appealing. Suddenly the absence of a directive is what compels you. This falls in line with the parallel Yohalem and the rest of the Far Cry 3 team fought for: the unity between gameplay and story. Like the death of Vaas, the departure (and return) of Jason gives you something to work toward because there’s little else. How players react to that, Yohalem admits, is once again on the player; they may miss that altogether.
Why the f**k do we continue to make reality?
“As long as you're open to looking at it, then it's fascinating,” says Yohalem, “because then it's like a massage where someone touches your back in a way you've never felt before…it's a sensation, which is what being alive is about. If you forget that you're going to die for a second, because you're examining what being alive is about, then art has done its job.”“
At that point, it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the jungle or Africa. What matters is how you react to what that place and its people make you feel. Whether you celebrate its disgusting tone or feel sick to your stomach because of it, Far Cry 3 made its mark precisely as intended.
Toward the end of Far Cry 3’s production, Ubisoft Montreal solicited its studio for add-on content ideas. Rather than continue Jason Brody’s story, though, Hay asked for “something unexpected.”
Dean Evans was the only one to step up, and his pitch video left the French executives awed and slackjawed. “We were all getting a bit tired,” says Evans, whose history includes conceptualizing Assassin's Creed III and having the dream role of Violence Consultant on Splinter Cell: Conviction. “Why the f**k do we continue to make reality?”Everything about Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon orbited around the concept of ‘80s action movies and VHS tapes with an coat of HD paint. Even the pitch video looked aged, and its goofy tone -- Evans’ name is spelled wrong, and he’s credited as working for “Ubisofts” -- laid the groundwork for an action-packed, neon-washed shooter in love with its own out-there sense of humor.
“People want crazy, weird shit,” says Evans. Ubisoft HQ agreed, adored the absurdity of Evans’ preposterous pitch, and gave his team an equally nonsensical deadline. The creative director and his team had just six months to make their VHS-era ‘80s action movie fantasy a playable reality.
A sane creative director would recycle objects and animations from Far Cry 3, cribbing characters and scenery to save development time, thus allowing the designers to focus their efforts on new systems. Pirates and trashy outposts didn’t fit with Evans’ vision of a robotic, retro-futuristic world populated by dragons shooting lasers from their mouths.“So we approached it like a mod,” Evans says, and the Blood Dragon team started nearly from scratch, redesigning enemies, weapons, sounds, locations, and more while reusing a handful of old assets.
The result was an awesome game that shed the DNA of Far Cry 3's crafting, but retained the excellence of its open world. It was odd, but lovable, and stayed true to Far Cry's tradition of doing something different with every release.
It'll be a tough act to follow.
Ubisoft Montreal is a multicultural monster.
Early on, when it was smaller and mostly French-speaking Canadians, Ubisoft Montreal had cultural issues. Some American developers felt isolated and kept to themselves. They struggled to communicate with their Quebecois team members, which created, as one creator put it, “anguish” on struggling early projects. Success led to growth, which meant more hires, which created diversity. Many of its employees are bilingual and speak English better than I do.
The staff of more than 2,700 has outgrown its usual space. Montreal’s home, an aged, brick building once used to manufacture clothing, features creaky wooden floors and high ceilings with exposed pipes and ventilation. It's bizarre to see people creating next-gen games in a century-old space.
A few staffers exchange pleasant hellos in the hallways, but most seem unaware of who, exactly, they're smiling at. With thousands of people working on dozens of different projects across five different Montreal sites, it's no wonder they don't all know each other.
Some employees have moved over to a satellite studio, a second building where the trans-media division and The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot team operates. Others operate out of the motion capture studio. In January 2013, Ubisoft acquired developer THQ Montreal (helmed by ex-Ubi creative director Patrice Désilets. He and Ubisoft are currently embroiled in a fierce legal battle over the canceled game Désilets’ team was working on with THQ). Dean Evans' next project is happening in this third Ubisoft Montreal building.
Despite these gaping divides, the culture of Ubisoft Montreal connects these people.In the summer of 2011, the staff worried about Assassin's Creed III, a title deep in development but missing important pieces. The team opened the floor in hopes of finding good ideas, and made an enticing offer to the entire staff: We want to create 50 new things -- if you have something we like, we'll give you every Friday off for the whole summer to make something for Assassin's Creed III. When all was said and done, the development team added 50 new things to its game -- art tweaks, character skills, weapon traits, and more. Everyone had their chance to contribute to what would eventually become an enormously successful sales leader.
On a larger scale, Ubisoft Montreal hosts the annual Ubisoft Developer Conference, which invites 200 Ubisoft creators from every global arm of the company to share and present their forward-thinking plan with everyone else. If that doesn't tell you that Ubisoft Montreal is the nervous center of this global publishing giant, nothing will.
This place is an idea factory. Sometimes it kills proposals gone wrong. Other times it uses good ones to strengthen characters, build better worlds, or spawn entirely new franchises.
This is true of most places, but Ubisoft Montreal permits an almost unheard of level of flexibility for senior staff. Developers can step away from big-budget production to work on personal projects -- all they need is an idea and approval, and Ubisoft grants the time, money, and people needed to grow it into something usable. Patrick Plourde, who acted as Far Cry 3’s creative director, is the most recent example of this. His project, Child of Light, is a smaller-scale digital game with fewer than 40 contributors. Rather than move onto Far Cry 4, Plourde was allowed to chase a dream, and bring his best people with him.
On a smaller but no less significant scale, much of Far Cry 3's tone relied on someone's out-of-the-blue idea. A writer cooked up a quick speech and pitched it. The reveal of Far Cry 3 later hinged on this spiel, defined its villain, and asked us the iconic question, "Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?"
If you want something bigger, look toward The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, a dungeon-crawling role-playing game and Ubisoft Montreal's first free-to-play PC release, embodies this special quality as well. It began as a three-person pet project, an experiment exploring free-to-play options. Management liked it. They staffed the project, and now Ubisoft has a years-long support plan.Mallat attributes the success of this to Ubisoft Montreal's "bottom-up" culture. "We don't top-down things that much," he says. "This makes room for the self-culture of the people who join to emerge and build the identity of the studio."
When Ubisoft opened a Toronto, Ontario studio in 2010, it only made sense to try to replicate the Montreal magic. "It has its own identity, it's not the same at all," he explains, but between Toronto and Montreal, "there is a common way of thinking, common values."
Failure is good.
Part of this stems from the way it's staffed. "I had to cut an arm off here," Mallat says. He recruited Montreal veterans Maxime Béland and Alex Parizeau to head up the studio with producer Jade Raymond, three major Montreal players who moved over to Toronto and brought Splinter Cell with them.“
Rather than hiring 200 inexperienced college kids, Mallat and his new team leaders began hiring experienced designers, programmers, and artists. Now Splinter Cell has grown up and moved out of mom and dad's basement to live on its own, with Montreal contributing to Toronto's Splinter Cell: Blacklist -- it’s responsible for the superb Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer. Toronto also put work into Rainbow 6: Patriots’ multiplayer maps, which were complete prior to whatever happened to that game, and is contributing to an unannounced Assassin’s Creed project, among others.
Ubisoft is a cyclical company. Developers feed and thrive off each other whether they’re collaborating in the same building or from across the globe.
“We give those people insane challenges,” Mallat says. “That's all we do, in fact. I'm not an expert, at all. They know better than I do what will work, what they have in their belly, what technological path we need to follow.” Montreal trusts its people because it knows that when something doesn’t work, it’ll figure it out. It’ll improvise, adapt, and almost inevitably succeed.
“Sometimes we fail, but then failure is good, because we learn a lot.”
He pauses and turns to a colleague. “It's funny. I was thinking about that this morning. You know, on the wall, how we display our games that shipped?” Mallat points out into the hallway just outside his office, where an enormous frame encases Ubisoft's most successful games.
“There are fewer of them, but we should also display the games that did not ship.”
I can think of no other company with the guts to frame its failures. Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He's trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50. Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD.
Original art by Pandamusk, who is also on Twitter at @pandamusk.
