Interview with Game Designer, Clark Davies
Taken from the Ubi Blog - Source HERE
"If we do our job well," Clark Davies tells me when we sit down to chat, "people don't even know we were there."
Clark is a game designer on Far Cry 4, but the title might be a bit too vague to describe what he actually does. Firstly, he looks after the menus, the UI, the HUD, the interface and "everything that comes with it, like user friendliness, accessibility and tutorials". He's responsible for the clean, elegant menus you may have seen in gameplay demos. Secondly, he handles player progression, which means that features like skill trees and XP, game economy and the famed crafting system rest in his capable hands.
"There's a lot of balancing involved, especially because we're open-world. We need to make sure the player has lots to do, but isn't over-powered in one part and then under-powered in another. How do we keep you from just learning all the skills in the open world and then going back into the campaign and losing the challenge?"
For someone like me, the idea of having to consider these kinds of checks and balances is daunting (plus it sounds a bit like math), but it's Clark's day-to-day. And while it's by no means a thankless task, both the interface and the player's progression are ultimately so ingrained in the experience of the game that it goes unnoticed and only fleetingly used-- and that's the point.
"I would say the better job we do with the menus, the less time people spend with them. So the aim is that people get into the menus, they do what they want, but they get back into the game again as quickly as possible."
Jokingly, I ask if that means his ultimate goal is to cut himself out of the equation completely, but it turns out I'm not that far from the truth, if a little too literal. The biggest changes he's made from Far Cry 3 to Far Cry 4 are all about streamlining, smoothing and outright removing. He explains that "the crafting menu is all one screen. There's no extra hidden stuff, there's no extra layers to go through. We really figured that one out and made it a lot more accessible. Same thing with the skill tree; you won't find it on three pages with way too much information, it's easier to navigate."
To illustrate the example, we look at the syringe crafting menu from FC3 and compare it to 4. The differences, Clark says, will be clear to anyone's who's played both. "In the last game, syringes had to be manually assigned to controller buttons from inside a menu. You had to pause and manage all the inventory stuff in menus, but now it happens live, in-game, by pressing R1 from inside the weapon wheel."
It's an important change and something that, to me, fits the world of the game. Far Cry is about being reactive and living in the moment, so why shouldn't the crafting feel as natural as anything else?
But has all this crafting and player protection rubbed off? Has be become Ubisoft's own McGyver?
"I had an issue, once, with my phone. The connector port was full of fluff and I had to get the charger cable in. So I did McGyver a little tool out of stuff on my desk. I was really proud of myself," he laughs. "I've levelled up."