One of Far Cry 3's writers thinks that the gamers and the critics missed the point of what he was trying to say with the story of the game.
The game's writer Jeffrey Yohalem from Bioware discussed his motivation and the messages he was trying to convey. On the issue of how developers treat gamers when coming up with high game concepts: “What I’m hoping is that through talking about this game and the Internet talking about this game, is that all this stuff will come to light, and the audience will say next time, ‘We want more of this.’”
“This all comes from my sense that players shouldn’t be talked down to. For me, there’s a kind of caustic relationship that’s developed between players and developers. It’s really a bad, abusive relationship, because developers say ‘Players won’t get it anyway, so we’re just gonna do something that holds their hand.’ It doesn’t respect them, and then players say ‘I hate this,’ or ‘I hate that,’ or ‘This game sucks,’ and that hurts developers. So it’s like a cycle. It also feels like critics aren’t looking for meaning in the game, either. So it’s like all sides have just stopped listening to each other.”
On the game’s setting: “It’s set on an island in the South Pacific. So immediately the thing that comes to mind is the white colonial trope, the Avatar trope. I started with that, and it’s like, ‘Here’s what pop culture thinks about travelling to a new place,’ and the funny thing is, that’s an exaggeration of most games, they just don’t expose it.”
“For example, GTA is a colonization game. You come to New York, you colonize New York. Most open world games function that way. Ezio comes to Rome and colonizes Rome. To take that to its extreme, exaggerating those tropes is how you reveal them. The exaggeration of that trope is what happens in Far Cry 3.”, says Yohalem, who is concerned that gamers and critics missed this commentary on the open world genre.
