Far Cry 3

• 1. Introduction

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  Far Cry 3, a first-person shooter built by Ubisoft Montreal, once offered a free copy to anyone at the PAX East convention who received a permanent tribal tattoo. Shaving your head earned the same reward. It was a fitting stunt for a game about a young man who is slowly remade by an island.

  That man is Jason Brody, a tourist on vacation with friends. After a skydiving trip goes wrong, he must rescue those friends from pirates and then escape the place that captured them.

  The game sold roughly ten million copies and is still cited among the greatest ever made. It was also accused of racism and colonialism, and one critic called it a game that does everything and feels nothing. How does a shooter stay beautiful and uncomfortable at once? Who is the villain that players still talk about, and why does he vanish so early? And what did the game hand to the studios that came after it?

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• 2. Tools of the Island

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  Three animal-themed skill trees shape how Jason Brody grows: the Spider, the Heron and the Shark. The Spider improves stealth takedowns and hunting. The Shark improves assault takedowns and health. The Heron improves long-range takedowns and mobility. As skills are collected, a tribal tattoo on Jason's forearm grows to match.

  The Rook Islands, a fictional tropical archipelago somewhere in the Pacific, are held by pirates and mercenaries. Players may fight with assault rifles, sniper rifles, grenade launchers, rocket launchers, land mines and grenades. They may also sneak. A camera marks enemy positions for later, rocks distract guards, and silenced weapons and combat knives keep alarms from calling in reinforcements.

  Radio towers anchor the map. Climbing one and removing its scramblers opens part of the map, highlights points of interest, unlocks a new weapon and starts a supply-run mission, a timed delivery of medicines. Capturing an enemy outpost turns it into a rebel base with extra side missions, vendors and fast travel.

  Leopards and sharks live on the islands, and the game's artificial intelligence lets the wildlife interact with itself like a small ecosystem. Harvesting animal corpses supplies materials for crafting items such as weapon holsters and ammo pouches. Collected green plants become syringes that heal Jason.

  Dune buggies, all-terrain vehicles, cargo trucks, jet skis, boats and hang gliders carry him around, and a wingsuit turns up later. Unscripted attacks by wildlife or pirate patrols can interrupt any trip. Poker, knife throwing, shooting challenges, timed combat trials called Trials of the Rakyat, and collectible relics, letters and memory cards fill the spaces between missions.

  A later patch gave players the option to reset outposts, so that they could take them again.

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• 3. An Island With Reasons

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  In 2010, Far Cry 3 was partly restarted after several key creative staff left, including the original creative director and narrative director. A plan to join the game into one cohesive story with earlier Far Cry titles was dropped in the process. Pre-production had begun in 2008, and more than 90 people eventually worked on the game.

  Those people were spread across several Ubisoft studios. Montreal led the project and built the single-player game. Ubisoft Shanghai designed missions and the wildlife AI. Ubisoft Bucharest handled quality assurance, and Ubisoft Reflections helped design vehicles. Red Storm Entertainment made the PC version and the user interface, while West Studio drew early concept art.

  The game was the first in the series to use the Dunia 2 engine, a heavily modified version of the one behind Far Cry 2. It was meant to run better on consoles and to add more complex rendering, such as global illumination.

  The team was blunt about the previous game. Weapon degradation and malaria infection were removed because designers felt they made the game less fun. Producer Dan Hay said that the world of Far Cry 2 was barren and ignored what players did. The new goal was "an actual civilization" for players to meet.

  There were no distinct levels. Traditional design places each object on a carefully calculated grid. Instead, the team used an algorithm from the Dunia Engine to quickly generate the layout of a large area, then adjusted objects by hand and tested the result. Avoiding repeated patterns kept wildlife and enemy encounters fresh, even when players crossed the same ground twice.

  Some enemy outposts are industrial sites that the pirates would need in order to run the islands. The designers wanted every space to feel as though it had a reason to be there. To fight repetition, they built over 250 different hostile encounters and a system that remembers each one and recycles it only after long play.

  Actions leave marks on this world. When Jason liberates a hostile camp, the influence of the villain Vaas gradually shrinks. Side quests teach players about the history and inhabitants of the islands. Improved driving and fast travel points made crossing the map easier, and nothing forced players to hurry through the main quests.

  The team called the island the "second most important character" in the game. Lead designer Jamie Keen described it as both "alluring and repulsive" and said players would "feel seduced by the place and all the people in it". Apocalypse Now and Lost were inspirations. So were Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption, admired for how they reward progression. Returning to an island, as the first Far Cry had done, was a narrative choice made early. It suited the story, allowed variety and suggested isolation and discovery.

  Yet the figure players would remember from that island began life as a very different character.

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• 4. The Villain Who Changed

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  The first primary villain was called Bull, a bald, muscular man designed to look like "a 300-pound, six-foot-tall bullmastiff dog". Then Michael Mando auditioned. His physicality was very different from what the developers had planned, so they redesigned the character. Bull's physical fierceness became an emotive and volatile personality.

  A second version, named Pyro, had a heavily mutilated body. Those features were later removed, because Mando's portrayal let the character's personality come through in subtle mannerisms. The result was Vaas Montenegro, imagined as charming but menacing.

  Hay compared Vaas to Darth Vader. Both appear briefly, yet grab attention and stay in the memory. Hay called him "very much in your face", which helped establish Jason as a victim early on.

  In the story, Vaas is a pirate lord who captures Jason and his friends and plans to sell them into slavery. Jason escapes with the help of his older brother Grant, whom Vaas kills. Later, Jason learns that Vaas is the brother of the priestess Citra. He betrayed the native Rakyat after becoming addicted to drugs brought by his employer, Hoyt Volker, a South African slave trader and drug lord.

  Vaas dies at the midpoint of the game. Writer Jeffrey Yohalem said this was inspired by the novel To the Lighthouse, whose protagonist dies halfway through while the rest of the plot explores her absence. Jason first fights several duplicates of Vaas in a delusional, dream-like state. He then stabs the real one with the Dragon Knife, a Rakyat relic.

  The team used motion capture so that actors could convey more complicated emotions on screen. Elias Toufexis was first chosen to voice Jason, but Gianpaolo Venuta replaced him two years later.

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• 5. A Story That Watches You

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  Level designer Mark Thompson said that in a Far Cry game, morality is never absolute and there is always "a moral gray space". The team deliberately avoided a morality system that would judge the player. The writers looked to The Deer Hunter and Deliverance, because a shooter involves killing many characters and they wanted a story that embraced that fact.

  Jason's friends are held by Rakyat and pirates alike, and his path runs from Bangkok vacation to warrior. Dennis, an adopted member of the Rakyat, gives him the Tatau, the tattoos of a warrior, after seeing his potential. Jason is later initiated into the tribe by Citra. As he kills more, he starts to enjoy it and grows more distant from his friends.

  His search for his younger brother Riley leads him to Hoyt's island, where he must beat Riley on camera to keep a ruse alive. Hoyt murders the operative Sam Becker. Jason kills Hoyt in a knife fight and loses half a finger.

  Then Citra drugs him and tells him she believes he is a warrior of Rakyat legend. Jason must choose between saving his friends and joining her in killing them. If he frees them, Citra steps in front of Dennis's blade and dies in his arms. Jason narrates that killing has turned him into a monster but that somewhere in his heart he is better than this. If he kills his girlfriend Liza instead, Citra stabs him, tells him their child will lead the Rakyat to glory and says that he "won".

  Hay said the story was about the cost of becoming a hero. Jason grows tolerant of violence and begins to parallel his pirate enemies, and he starts to experience post-traumatic stress disorder. His hallucination sequences, which Yohalem wrote with the dreamlike levels of Prince of Persia in mind, reflect a destabilizing psyche. Thompson called them introspective sequences in which Jason's conscience questions the player.

  Yohalem wanted to contrast player and character. Players enjoy themselves, while Jason is on a terrible journey of killing. Exploring and ignoring the urgency of the rescue was meant to mirror the player's own mindset. According to Yohalem, the game asks whether players are willing to "kill these characters in the game in order to finish your entertainment". He drew on Pulp Fiction, A History of Violence, Requiem For a Dream and Exit Through The Gift Shop.

  After the oppressive atmosphere of Far Cry 2, Yohalem wanted the opposite. He said the world was "so sweet, it's like getting an overdose on drugs", and asked why players would trap themselves in a beautiful virtual world instead of spending time with real people.

  The story was widely criticized for racism and colonialism. Yohalem defended it as "the opposite of Avatar", arguing that the local people did not need Jason and that he was being manipulated into doing what they wanted. He urged players to treat the game like a riddle.

  Quotes from Alice in Wonderland were added late in development as a hint at that subtext.

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• 6. Insanity Online

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  David Polfeldt, managing director of Massive Entertainment, said his studio had only worked on real-time strategy games such as World in Conflict. Joining Far Cry 3 early gave the team a chance to diversify its portfolio. Massive built the multiplayer.

  Magnus Jensen, the creative director of that portion, said the multiplayer carries the single-player theme of insanity. Competitive players can use supernatural elements against enemies, and cooperative characters are "as unhinged as any of the characters" in the main game. The team also mixed in elements common to independent and social games.

  The cooperative campaign takes place six months before Jason arrives. Four strangers find work on the cruise ship MS Astrid: Callum, an ex-Scottish gangster; Tisha, a discharged US Army combat medic; Leonard, a retired corrupt Philadelphia police officer; and Mikhail, a former Russian hitman. The captain sells them out to pirates in exchange for the ship's payroll, and the four pursue him across the Rook Islands.

  Cooperative play supports four players across five classes: Warrior, Rusher, Deadeye, Saboteur and Bodyguard. Each class can have customized loadouts and weapons. A "battle cry" boosts the team's health, accuracy and running speed.

  Competitive modes include Team Deathmatch and Domination, in which two teams capture control points. Transmission is a Domination variant where the points are radio transmitters that change location. In Firestorm, a team must ignite two fuel dumps held by the opponents while protecting its own. Kills, revivals and battle cries earn Team Support Points, which unlock perks such as "psyche gas", making enemies hallucinate players as shadows. A map editor lets users build and share custom maps.

  Critics were cooler. Sterling of Destructoid said the competitive side lacked new ideas and compared it to Call of Duty, while liking cooperative play as a Left 4 Dead cousin. Tom Francis of PC Gamer called the cooperative mode "fun" but missed a server browser. Bramwell of Eurogamer called the multiplayer the least interesting part of the game. Dyer of IGN was harshest, calling it uninspired and criticizing confusing map design.

  The multiplayer functionality was shut down on the 1st of September 2022.

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• 7. Selling the Holiday

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  The game was announced in June 2011, at Ubisoft's press conference at E3 2011. A closed beta for the multiplayer went to players who bought Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier at GameStop before the 22nd of May 2012. A companion app, Far Cry The Outpost, let players on iOS and Android manage multiplayer loadouts. A UK-exclusive app, Insanity Mirror, imagined how players would look if trapped on an island.

  In September 2012, a Facebook app called Holiday From Hell let players design their own postcards. The first 2,000 participants had theirs printed and delivered free by Royal Mail. At PAX Prime, attendees could shave their heads into a mohawk to look like Vaas.

  Ubisoft also commissioned Minecraft enthusiast Michael Lambert and artists Axel Janssen and Yohann Delcourt to build a texture pack and custom adventure map that mimic the game's setting and characters. Both were released on the 26th of October 2012. A four-part webseries, Far Cry: The Experience, starred Mando as Vaas and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as himself.

  The release was originally set for the 4th of September 2012. It was delayed to give the team more time, to the 29th of November in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the 30th of November in the UK and the 4th of December in the US. Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions came out. A Wii U version never appeared, because that system was not part of development. On launch day, server issues briefly made the Windows version unplayable.

  Pre-order bonuses included The Lost Expeditions pack, with the single-player missions The Forgotten Experiment and Ignition in the Deep. GameStop pre-orders added the Monkey Business Pack, with four missions. The European Insane Edition bundled all launch downloadable content with a Vaas bobblehead and a survival skill manual for use in real situations of danger.

  Pre-order sales fell below Ubisoft's expectations. Even so, in the US, it was the sixth-bestselling game according to NPD Group, and the second-biggest December launch in the region. In January 2013 it was the second-bestselling game, behind Black Ops II. In the UK, it was the ninth-biggest launch of 2012. It was the second-bestselling retail game in its first week, behind Call of Duty: Black Ops II, then toppled that game at Christmas.

  More than 4.5 million copies shipped to retailers in December 2012. In October 2014, Ubisoft announced that approximately 10 million copies had been sold.

  Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a standalone expansion, arrived in May 2013. It parodies 1980s action films, cartoons and games, set on a retro-futuristic island, with the cyborg Sergeant Rex "Power" Colt as hero. Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon were later bundled with Far Cry 2 and Far Cry Classic in Far Cry: The Wild Expedition.

  The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Classic Edition went to some Far Cry 5 buyers from the 29th of May 2018, and was sold on its own from the 26th of June 2018. It ran at a higher resolution, but capped at 30 frames per second. In January 2026, a patch raised that to 60 frames per second on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S.

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• 8. Verdict and Legacy

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  Destructoid's Sterling called the story "tightly written" and "stylishly presented", and Matt Bertz of Game Informer called it "compelling". Mando's Vaas won the loudest praise. Ryan Taljonick of GamesRadar said his presence made some missions memorable, and Mitch Dyer of IGN found Jason relatable because of his many flaws.

  Other critics were harsher. Kevin VanOrd of GameSpot questioned the heavy emphasis on drug use, and some faulted both Jason's quick rise as a fighter and Vaas's early death. Bob Mackey of 1Up.com felt the promised cultural commentary never arrived. Tom Francis of PC Gamer called the linear main quest a "guided tour of all the clumsiest ways to mash story and videogames together until both of them break". Arthur Gies of Polygon called the story clichéd. Reviewers also criticized its handling of misogyny and homophobia, and its use of the white savior trope.

  The island, however, earned acclaim. Tom Bramwell of Eurogamer said it was the main reason he became captivated, citing its varied activities and rich history. VanOrd wrote that "Far Cry 3 isn't so much about the story as it is about its world". Dyer praised an "astonishing sense of place". Gies liked how emergent events flowed through the systems, and Taljonick noted that this created personal stories unique to each player.

  Gameplay drew mostly good notices. VanOrd called stealth "a blast" and liked the gunplay and driving. Bertz and Taljonick welcomed fast travel and the removal of weapon malfunctions. Complaints included repetitive side objectives, respawning enemies, and a wealth of content that Gies warned could be "intimidating".

  The game was nominated for multiple year-end accolades, including Game of the Year and Best Shooter from several gaming publications. The lists include the D.I.C.E. Awards, the British Academy Games Awards and the Golden Joystick Awards, where one category was Best Gaming Moment, for "The Definition of Insanity". Vaas Montenegro and Mando's performance appear in several of the nominations.

  Its success lifted the franchise into a blockbuster series with a strong identity. Dom Peppiatt of GamesRadar wrote that Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon strengthened Ubisoft's hold on open-world first-person shooters. Towers and wildlife hunting later appeared in other Ubisoft games. Alex Avard of GamesRadar+ called it a "formative game-changer" that set a blueprint for open world design across the industry.

  Kevin Fox Jr. of Paste Magazine agreed it was one of the most influential titles of the 2010s, but meant it as a charge. He saw its genre-mixing design and its apolitical, unsophisticated storytelling as sources for modern games, and called the result "the increasingly safe, increasingly rent-seeking omni-genre, the do-everything, feel-nothing game".

  Ubisoft first planned a direct sequel starring Jason, with other supporting characters and the resurrection of Vaas. That idea was quickly abandoned. Far Cry 4 arrived on the 18th of November 2014 instead, with a new cast, set in Kyrat, a country in South Asia.

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