On the eve of Far Cry 4’s release, we were fortunate enough to get an interview with Matt West, who is Ubisoft Toronto’s Level Design Director, and responsible for directing the level design for the Shangri La portions of the game. In this interview he speaks on myth-building and the lore players will discover in the game, the team’s influences in designing Shangri La, why Shangri La is soaked in red, the challenges surrounding balancing aesthetics with functionality and crafting a fun yet challenging gameplay experience.
Can you speak to what the team at Ubisoft Toronto was responsible for in Far Cry 4?
The team here was responsible for delivering what I will call the “Shangri La Experience,” which is almost like a parallel world in a way to the world of Kyrat.
When we were first in discussion with the team in Montreal, we realized they had developed this incredibly deep, broad world with a real pulse, and real breathing inhabitants. It was a bit of a challenge at first to find a way to integrate something separate that wouldn’t get in the way of that, but one thing that we were all really interested in was a mythology.
We were brainstorming one day and realized that every ancient culture in the world develops its own myths and legends, what if we do that for Kyrat. So what we’re responsible for is delivering the framework of this legend so we can put the player in the position of describing the legend for us. We’re trying to create a toolset for players to enter and say: “let me tell you the story of Kalinag, who was the first warrior from Kyrat to ever find and return from the fabled realm of Shangri La.”
Before we discuss the level design, can you elaborate more on the story of Kalinag and the myths of Kyrat?
The legend goes that Kalinag was one of the favored warriors of the king of Kyrat. Every year the king would send one of his favorite warriors to try to find this mythical paradise of Shangri La, and Kalinag was the first warrior to find Shangri La and, importantly, return. He was not the first person to enter, but the first person to return. He was initially supposed to find it and return to the king, but Kalinag, upon gathering his wits when he arrives, looks around at the world of Shangri La and decides he needs to stay, and is approached by the tiger who is actually Shangri La’s protector.
The tiger recognizes the strength in this Kyrati warrior, and decides to ally himself with Kalinag. The two of them proceed to tackle the usurper, The Rakshasa, who has moved into Shangri La and taken it over and brought with him a bunch of demons from an evil realm. So the story the player is experiencing and telling us is how Kalinag and the protector fought and eventually triumphed over The Rakshasa and were able to cleanse the realm of evil.
When Kalinag does return, he tells his story to a painter, who paints it on a thangka, which is a type of tapestry. At some point in history, the thangka is ripped apart into five different pieces that are spread throughout the world of Kyrat. It becomes the players’ mandate to find each piece, and for each will explore different piece of the legend of Shangri La.
I’m curious since Shangri La is, in world mythology, a place of idyllic peace, can you speak to how The Rakshasa came to enter and infest it?
It comes almost from a form of jealously. Shangri La is a beautiful, peaceful paradise that is by its nature pure. The Rakshasa is a being or entity from an evil spirit realm that is almost a reflection of what Shangri La is, a literal manifestation of negativity. The Rakshasa looks at Shangri La and hates it because of its goodness and wants to take it over. Players will see that the attempt to take over Shangri La isn’t just martial support, they are actually trying to populate the space with the same negative energy from the place where they come from. It’s almost like they’re trying to annex it and get rid of all the beauty and purity.
Right, and trapping the bells of enlightenment is part of that, they have to tie them down to ensure they’re not doing their function?
That’s absolutely right, the goddess Kyra first achieved enlightenment by meditating in front of the bells, and these bells when they ring spread enlightenment and purity and goodness, so the first step of The Rakshasa was to chain these bells to the ground, because if these bells do ring it will chase away the impurity that these demons represent.
I imagine you drew a lot of your influences from Tibetan culture, can you speak to all of the influences you used when you designed Shangri La?
We actually looked at reference material from a number of different places, Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan being the three biggest ones. On both the level design and level art side we were inspired by a lot of the architecture, the trappings of spirituality from each of these places. But we made a fairly early decision that we needed Kyrat and by extension Shangri La to be different from all of these places because we wanted Shangri La to be a subset of the mythology of Kyrat, and Kyrat itself is a construct of the team in Montreal. So it’s inspired by cultures in that part of the world, but that inspiration was our starting off point, and after we created the myth or legend, the myth became our primary inspiration for the creation of things.
The inspiration that we drew from the rest of the world also influenced us in the nuts and bolts of creation. So for instance on the level design side I looked at how much verticality there was in places of meditation so we could ensure that there was a consistency in that when you reach one of the objective locations in Shangri La you have vertical gameplay opportunities, which Far Cry is known for, but it would still feel consistent with the kind of inspiration that we had for the world.
On the gameplay side, our biggest inspiration was the outposts from Far Cry 3. The outposts from a gameplay standpoint are fantastic, I’m one of the many people who absolutely loved the outposts in Far Cry 3, because they support three different play styles: the long distance sniper, the break down the door, and the stealthy takedown and drag the body away. So that was a strong influence for us in the creation of our spaces. Although the Shangri La sequences have a distinct beginning and end, the how and why and moment to moment stuff is all up to the player, so you can sneak around and perform stealthy takedowns, or sick the protector on enemies, and once the tiger runs into one of our objective spaces, all hell breaks lose.
What would you say was the most challenging aspect of your level design?
I think it’s finding the balance between the staples of gameplay: narrative, by which I mean the legend of Kalinag, and the look of everything. With a game like Far Cry that has quite a few systems in its gameplay, it’s important that there are strong visual clues for the player. So for example, I talked about having verticality in our objective spaces, we struggled quite a while with finding how to communicate the vertical options to the player that was consistent with the striking visual style.
I think we found good solutions to some of that stuff, but some of them were the last things we sorted out: Okay, we’ve got a space, we’ve got a ton of verticality, a player who uses it will just be able to storm through the environment, how do we make sure the players can see it? I would say that was the biggest challenge for us, but was probably also our biggest success. We saw success in our playtesting that players understand the options available to them, and I have zero concern on whether we had to compromise anything on the look of Shangri La in order to accomplish this.
Speaking of the look, a lot of people have been commenting on the red motif, obviously in some sense this to distinguish Shangri La from the “real world,” but can you speak on how the team decided to go for this look?
In the legend of Shangri La, when the goddess Kyra came to Shangri La to meditate, she was attempting to reach Nirvana. When she was sitting before one of the bells, she was getting frustrated with how long it takes to reach enlightenment, and I always think of it for her as a moment of weakness, and in that moment of impatience she reached out and spun the bell sharply, and one of the carvings on the bell pricked her finger, and she started to bleed. The blood poured down the pedestal and over the land, and not only soaked all of the land but the water as well. Once the water supply became red with Kyra’s blood, everything in Shangri La became soaked in red.
So we know that Kalinag has a lot of abilities, like being able to slow down time, and making use of the tiger protector, so how did that factor into your level design?
By being able to slow down time, it meant that all of our enemies needed to have different foot speeds so that they challenge the player in different ways. We wanted there to be really strong differences between all of our AI classes so that the bow has different usage profile against all of these enemies, but this decision has some strong layout implications.
One of the creatures is what we call the Beast, a demonic version of a dog, that instead of biting you runs up to you and explodes. The Lurker demons can summon beasts, though sometimes they’re there just on their own. So the interesting thing about beasts is they’re an extremely fast moving unit, and that really challenges the player to use their slow motion carefully, but at the same time they don’t make sharp turns and instantly accelerate back to top speed, which would look goofy, so we had to create environments that had some open spaces with some running room to support the beast.
At the same time, you also have a unit like the Scorcher, the big heavy unit that breathes fire. He’s an arrow sponge, so he’ll just shrug bow attacks off and keep coming. He has the opposite problem; he’s very slow moving, so in open spaces his threat level diminished. So we had to introduce some verticality to the spaces in order for the player to be able to attack them from above. You can use the tiger protector to distract the scorcher and then stab them from behind, but the pro-star way is to find a spot to get above them and perform the death from above takedown on them right away. So we had to find ways to incorporate verticality and closer spaces that would work for the scorchers.
So there was a finding of balance. Once we settled on the specific composition of AI characters in each space, then we would know what skill set the player would need to win, and then we would have a rough blueprint to create a layout to support that.
Ajay is supposed to gain new abilities from completing Shangri La sequences, can you speak to what abilities he’ll gain?
I can only say that he will unlock abilities, but I’m not allowed to actually talk about which ones he may gain.
What are you and your team most proud of in your level design?
One of the things I’m most proud of is that we achieved something fairly early on in our development process, which is that we wanted the Shangri La missions to be fairly tough. Since they are optional missions, we wanted to make sure there was a strong reward for finishing them, but you have to earn them. I feel that they are challenging, but without being frustrating. You always want to walk that line; at the level of frustration where players don’t understand why they’re dying and not succeeding, level design has failed. At the moment players understand what they need to do and it comes down to execution, that’s where level design really shines, and I feel that we achieved that with Shangri La.
Thank you for taking the time to speak with me, and I’m looking forward to playing Far Cry 4!
My pleasure.