Far Cry 2

Fire spreads through a grid of hit-point cells, shaped by wind. An invisible grid of cells each has hit points; a flammable cell at zero ignites, burns for a limited time and damages neighbours. Dry grass burns easily, wet jungle resists, and wind weights the spread, so a molotov grows into an inferno.

Together with roving enemies, the fire is tuned to create peril rather than follow a generic template.

Siege walls are cut live with mesh slicing. A plane is projected through the model at impact, which is split into two new models with new edges and collision in one frame, avoiding thousands of pre-broken variants.

It only works on simple shapes, and broken pieces are usually hidden after a while.

Beyond Good & Evil's spiral keyboard holds more than a radial menu. The radial menu coils into a spiral; only the selected item and a few neighbours are enabled so the stick picks unambiguously, and spin speed sets scroll speed. It inspired a spiral echo menu for Zelda.

Mechanics, not setting, made Far Cry 2 harrowing and Far Cry 4 fun. Both share a setting and villain archetype, but Far Cry 2 has jamming weapons, breaking jeeps, malaria and respawns at save stations, while Far Cry 4 gives loads of ammo, enemy tracking and permanent clears.

Brown likens remaking Metroid II in modern Metroid style to remaking the oppressive Far Cry 2 to play like the action playgrounds of Far Cry 3 and 4: same form, different experience.

Friction was added on purpose to sell the lone mercenary fantasy. Weapons rust and jam, you need malaria medication, and the map is a paper you hold while the game keeps running.

Quote: "You feel outgunned, underpowered, scared, and alone."

Rayman Legends tracks the camera up only in set areas. The camera moves up only where the level extends beyond the frame. Rayman can also collapse a section behind you, which a Metroidvania cannot allow.

Icon-filled towers make the world a checklist. Assassin's Creed and Far Cry towers litter the map with activity icons, unlike Breath of the Wild's. A Far Cry New Dawn scavenger with an icon and tooltip reads as repeatable authored content and feels gamey.

Assassin's Creed's exploration mode with fewer waypoints helps, but options cannot turn it into Elden Ring because levels assume guidance.

A shotgun nerf broke defenders, fixed by a shorter round timer. Nerfing the overpowered shotgun weakened defenders, who rely on it. Shortening the round, which defenders win when time runs out, to three minutes restored balance.

Quote: "Fixing a problem in one place can create another problem elsewhere."

Blending RPG levels into stealth weakened the assassin fantasy. RPG levels remove instant stealth kills on tougher enemies.

Options are reused across games and published online. Far Cry 6 lifts many accessibility features from earlier Far Cry games, and Ubisoft publishes its options online so players can decide what to buy.

Far Cry 5 offers a simple colourblind option that turns red elements yellow.

Rayman Legends tracks the camera up only in set areas. The camera moves up only where the level extends beyond the frame. Rayman can also collapse a section behind you, which a Metroidvania cannot allow.

Play as Anyone grew from the theme and from earlier flavour text. Legion's theme is that a revolution comes from the collective action of many, so any of London's 9 million people can be recruited and played. It also turned the short profile snippets from hacking phones in Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 into full playable lives.

It replaced authored heroes Aiden Pierce and Marcus Holloway. The design question was "What if that wasn't just flavour text?" Director Clint Hocking previously worked on Far Cry 2 and coined "ludonarrative dissonance".

Each generated trait constrains the next, grounded in real census data. Location, via real London census data, shapes ethnicity, clothing and job; ethnicity and gender set name and voice; job sets workplace, perks and salary; salary sets the home. Heidi Khumalo, met in Lambeth, became a computer repairer whose job, salary and home all followed from those choices.

The census data keeps boroughs distinct: "The people in Brixton should seem very different to the people in Westminster, after all." Citizens keep schedules with jobs and family; Heidi sleeps, visits her grandmother in hospital, vandalises a little, then works in the electronics shop.

Full detail is generated only when the player pays attention. A passer-by starts with only gender, clothes and voice and vanishes from memory when you drive away. Salary, associates and schedule are filled in only when you profile, recruit or injure them, which keeps the game from running out of memory.

Characters are treated as "quantum in nature". A glazier recruited at an 8AM protest in Southwark keeps protesting an hour a day and also gets an antiques shop job.

Opinions and schedules react to what the player does. Each citizen's opinion of DedSec rises when you help them or beat up a competitor and drops when you assault them or kill an associate; at "hates DedSec" they never join. Events rewrite routines, so a recruit whose relative is killed may go mourn at a graveyard.

Many protagonists needed dozens of animation sets and about 20 voice recordings. Because anyone can be the lead, Ubisoft built dozens of animation sets so an old lady moves differently from a young man, and recorded the script about 20 times for accents including Irish, cockney, African-Caribbean and Eastern European.

Modulation tech creates further voice variants. A recruit becomes the main character and talks in cutscenes, unlike Pokemon or XCOM units.

Recruits are so alike that choosing one barely matters. Every citizen can hack, drive, shoot and do stealth takedowns, perks are mostly minor, and missions can be solved any of those ways. The game is so easy that permadeath rarely takes a character out of rotation, so there is no reason to follow schedules or manage opinions.

Only outliers matter: a few overpowered recruits and those with uniformed access to buildings. The official site still promised recruits who give an advantage in the mission ahead.

Legion never committed to the right-operative or the unique-crew pitch. The game is arguably at its best when you pick the worst character, like a living statue or a pensioner with a bad back, but each backstory stops mattering once they join DedSec. The protagonist becomes "one amorphous blob" with a different face and slightly different inflection.

The goofy crews clash with the serious plot. Brown suggests doubling down either on distinct characters for distinct jobs or on crazier characters with a matching story.

Friction pushed players away from the signature feature. Recruitment missions are repetitive and switching characters means long loading times, which "actively discourages the player from bothering with it at all".

Innovation only becomes great design when the game depends on it. The expensive system gets no support from structure, story or moment-to-moment play, leaving a typical open world game where you can change the main character "for some reason".

Quote: "innovation without implementation is basically... nothing."

Sound and motor needs get visual cues and assists. Watch Dogs: Legion and Assassin's Creed borrowed a captioning system from Far Cry New Dawn that shows where noises come from. Watch Dogs offers auto-drive and an adjustable hacking cursor size.

Ubisoft offers dozens of options across Watch Dogs, Assassin's Creed and Immortals and is praised as a leader alongside Sony and Microsoft.

Fairness as the player sees it beats realism. Guard hearing is halved offscreen, Sam's HUD has a sound visualiser, and the last known position appears as a ghostly white Sam Fisher so searches read clearly.

Siege crosses win rate with pick rate to sort operators. Operators fall into four buckets in a win rate by pick rate matrix, each handled differently.

The team calls itself data informed, not data driven, treating data as one source among several.

Far Cry quietly limits how many enemies shoot at once. Only a few enemies can fire at the same time, a hidden tilt toward the player that makes fights feel fair without being noticed.

Far Cry 5 is also cited among shooters whose cover and regenerating health flatten decisions compared with DOOM.

Blacklist guards see with a cone, peripheral box and rear zone. Guards have a main view cone, a wider peripheral box and a small zone behind them, and raycast to eight bones on Sam Fisher, spotting him only if enough are visible.

Fairness as the player sees it beats realism. Guard hearing is halved offscreen, Sam's HUD has a sound visualiser, and the last known position appears as a ghostly white Sam Fisher so searches read clearly.

Subtitles on by default stuck for 97% of players. Ubisoft tested default subtitles in Far Cry New Dawn and 97% kept them on; Ubisoft also reports 60 percent of players played with subtitles on.

Assassin's Creed Origins uses large subtitles readable from across a room, toggles speaker names and background, and adds a black box behind text for contrast.

Options are reused across games and published online. Far Cry 6 lifts many accessibility features from earlier Far Cry games, and Ubisoft publishes its options online so players can decide what to buy.

Far Cry 5 offers a simple colourblind option that turns red elements yellow.

Icon-filled towers make the world a checklist. Assassin's Creed and Far Cry towers litter the map with activity icons, unlike Breath of the Wild's. A Far Cry New Dawn scavenger with an icon and tooltip reads as repeatable authored content and feels gamey.

Assassin's Creed's exploration mode with fewer waypoints helps, but options cannot turn it into Elden Ring because levels assume guidance.

A shotgun nerf broke defenders, fixed by a shorter round timer. Nerfing the overpowered shotgun weakened defenders, who rely on it. Shortening the round, which defenders win when time runs out, to three minutes restored balance.

Quote: "Fixing a problem in one place can create another problem elsewhere."

Siege crosses win rate with pick rate to sort operators. Operators fall into four buckets in a win rate by pick rate matrix, each handled differently.

The team calls itself data informed, not data driven, treating data as one source among several.

Ubisoft checks flashes with Harding and keeps objectives on screen. Ubisoft uploads recorded gameplay to the Harding flash and pattern analyser. Assassin's Creed Odyssey restates cutscene objectives in a few plain sentences with highlighted key words that stay up for the whole mission.

Origins made players unable to afford every skill, forcing specialisation. Mark Brown specialised in the hunter and seer branches, built around stealth and tricking camp AI. Neglecting warrior left Bayek weak one-on-one, so he ran from fights and found new approaches.

Quote: "I definitely wasn't able to afford all of the skills by the end of the game."

Unlocking then testing each skill created a self-feeding loop. Each new Origins ability was tested on a few camps and missions, and that play earned the experience for the next one.

Far Cry 3 made players hunt for a specific upgrade. A better holster needed pelts from a specific animal, so the player paused the main quest to find its breeding ground on the map, while the sprint slide simply arrived with skill points.

Quote: "I wanted an upgrade and had to figure out how to get it"

Black Flag's treasure maps reward studying the landscape. A crude drawing of a landmass, rock or tree must be matched in the world with no markers. Odyssey opens on a gory 300-style battle for a high-action start.

Its murder mystery side-quests fall flat: walk up and accuse, lose points if wrong, retry.

Small, unpredictable, recoverable setbacks keep players improvising. Hocking wanted jammed guns, malaria attacks and cars breaking down mid-getaway to bounce players from execution back to planning in one continuous playthrough. A big health bar, many syringes and the buddy system soften the losses, so players don't reload.

Quote: "It is exactly because the loss is small and unpredictable that players don't attempt to reload the game to escape it."

Subtitles on by default stuck for 97% of players. Ubisoft tested default subtitles in Far Cry New Dawn and 97% kept them on; Ubisoft also reports 60 percent of players played with subtitles on.

Assassin's Creed Origins uses large subtitles readable from across a room, toggles speaker names and background, and adds a black box behind text for contrast.

Options are reused across games and published online. Far Cry 6 lifts many accessibility features from earlier Far Cry games, and Ubisoft publishes its options online so players can decide what to buy.

Far Cry 5 offers a simple colourblind option that turns red elements yellow.

Subtitles on by default stuck for 97% of players. Ubisoft tested default subtitles in Far Cry New Dawn and 97% kept them on; Ubisoft also reports 60 percent of players played with subtitles on.

Assassin's Creed Origins uses large subtitles readable from across a room, toggles speaker names and background, and adds a black box behind text for contrast.

Early counters let players wait out every fight. Early games let you stand with your sword up countering one enemy after another. Bonus damage for attacking just as the previous hit lands rewards timing over memorised combos.

Fire spreads through a grid of hit-point cells, shaped by wind. An invisible grid of cells each has hit points; a flammable cell at zero ignites, burns for a limited time and damages neighbours. Dry grass burns easily, wet jungle resists, and wind weights the spread, so a molotov grows into an inferno.

Together with roving enemies, the fire is tuned to create peril rather than follow a generic template.

Entities that listen and broadcast create unscripted encounters. In Far Cry the tiger listens for the player, bait, fire and enemies, so a tiger meeting a guard triggers a mauling with no script. Because guards know about more than the player, you can free a caged animal onto them.

A rule fires when an input matches an output and the entities can see or touch each other.

Open-ended camps beat linear scripted missions. Far Cry's main missions are less fun than its camps, which give a goal and don't care how it is achieved.

Assassin's Creed Origins camps feel remarkably like Far Cry 4's, a generic template rather than a tuned experience.

Shared faction rules let players build their own escapes. In Watch Dogs 2, Mark Brown led the cops into gang territory, hid on a rooftop while they fought, then slipped away and lost his wanted level.

Quote: "That felt great, and a lot more interesting than just shooting a bunch of cops."

Mechanics, not setting, made Far Cry 2 harrowing and Far Cry 4 fun. Both share a setting and villain archetype, but Far Cry 2 has jamming weapons, breaking jeeps, malaria and respawns at save stations, while Far Cry 4 gives loads of ammo, enemy tracking and permanent clears.

Brown likens remaking Metroid II in modern Metroid style to remaking the oppressive Far Cry 2 to play like the action playgrounds of Far Cry 3 and 4: same form, different experience.

Black Flag's treasure maps reward studying the landscape. A crude drawing of a landmass, rock or tree must be matched in the world with no markers. Odyssey opens on a gory 300-style battle for a high-action start.

Its murder mystery side-quests fall flat: walk up and accuse, lose points if wrong, retry.

Hocking's intentionality: predictable AI lets players make plans. Hocking coined "intentionality" for players planning around consistent AI reactions. Actions should be predictable while consequences stay unpredictable, as with Halo's Grunts, which always flee but to unknown places.

Hocking drew on immersive sims for Far Cry 2, describing Deus Ex as creating "a chain of influence that cascaded between the narrative and the WASD keys".

Far Cry quietly limits how many enemies shoot at once. Only a few enemies can fire at the same time, a hidden tilt toward the player that makes fights feel fair without being noticed.

Far Cry 5 is also cited among shooters whose cover and regenerating health flatten decisions compared with DOOM.

Icon-filled towers make the world a checklist. Assassin's Creed and Far Cry towers litter the map with activity icons, unlike Breath of the Wild's. A Far Cry New Dawn scavenger with an icon and tooltip reads as repeatable authored content and feels gamey.

Assassin's Creed's exploration mode with fewer waypoints helps, but options cannot turn it into Elden Ring because levels assume guidance.

Hocking's intentionality: predictable AI lets players make plans. Hocking coined "intentionality" for players planning around consistent AI reactions. Actions should be predictable while consequences stay unpredictable, as with Halo's Grunts, which always flee but to unknown places.

Hocking drew on immersive sims for Far Cry 2, describing Deus Ex as creating "a chain of influence that cascaded between the narrative and the WASD keys".

Assassin's Creed 2's mid-jump grasp gives experts control. Ezio can reach out mid-jump to snatch ledges and ropes, which beginners can ignore. Syndicate's grappling hook instead skips climbing.

Ubisoft Reflections' Grow Home maps each trigger to one hand with real-time animation, so climbing is rhythmic and tense on thin branches.

Black Flag's treasure maps reward studying the landscape. A crude drawing of a landmass, rock or tree must be matched in the world with no markers. Odyssey opens on a gory 300-style battle for a high-action start.

Its murder mystery side-quests fall flat: walk up and accuse, lose points if wrong, retry.