How Far Cry 3 strives to move away from 'little boy fantasies'

"Sometimes it's basically Jason's psyche starting to break down a little bit," Mark Thompson, the game's level design director tells Polygon. "The walls between reality and his mind start to crumble a little bit.

"It's kind of in reaction to what he's doing, he's becoming a killer and has this blood on his hands. And sometimes his subconscious sort of raises up and goes ‘Hey Jason, what's going on here? What are you doing? What are you becoming?' So we have these kind of introspective sequences."

As the person controlling Jason, making him do all of those terrible things to survive an even more terrible place, you don't really ever know why he sometimes drifts away. It could be the drugs. It could be Jason's mind.

"The message we communicate in these sequences, we always, we leave it open," Thompson said. "We don't want to give people the answer. We let them figure it out. It comes back to having respect for the audience. We don't want to just tell them on the nose what's happening in the story. We want to give them some pieces of the puzzle and we want to let them put it together and really give them a chance to make their own interpretations."

That approach to Jason's mental state in Far Cry 3 is the clearest sign of Ubisoft Montreal's take on a medium that they see evolving past what Thompson calls "little boy fantasies" and moving on to more complex, nuanced content.

Fans of Far Cry are used to it: The fact that this series of games, a series now on its third iteration, is never really linked to one another. But those new to the games, perhaps drawn to the interesting settings, open world or strange stories, may be surprised to hear that.

Thompson says the thing that makes a Far Cry game a Far Cry game goes well beyond simple plot lines and character names.

"Far Cry isn't about a specific narrative or character, it's more of the idea of a location that's at the edge of civilization, that doesn't really have rules," he said. "There never is a sense of something being right or wrong or someone being a good guy or a bad guy. There is always a moral gray space in between."

"For sure we'll still have the summer blockbusters, but there is a space for a more nuanced narrative, something that isn't afraid to tackle issues that video games haven't been tackling because they've been focusing on power fantasies and fantasies about being the ultimate soldier."

Thompson points to Die Hard. A great movie, he says, but why didn't they ever show the audience the impact of John McClane's relatively few killings.

"We never see the scenes six months after the event when [McClane] wakes up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat seeing Hans Gruber falling from Nakatomi Plaza."

What about Jason then and all of those people he is destined to kill? Thompson said we will see the changes in Jason's character in many ways, but none of them will be straightforward. We will see them in the way his friends look at him when he finally rescues them. And we will see those changes in the metal fractures, the breaks from sanity caused by Jason's growing post traumatic stress disorder.

Post traumatic stress disorder "is an important part of what Jason goes through on the island," he said. "We want to address all of the issues that would happen to a normal person who is put through this kind of situation."

What then of Jason's six months later? Will the game then revisit the psyche of a character on the other side of a video game, in his long nights of cold sweats? Thompson doesn't really say. After all, the ending of an unreleased game is sacrosanct. Instead he tells me that it's at the top of their mind, that they developed Far Cry 3 with the idea of constantly toying with people's expectations and challenging assumptions.

Far Cry 3's developers seem to understand that the complexities of gamer tastes continue to change.

"I think games are evolving out of little boy fantasies," Thompson said. "We're moving on to something else. You know, narratives that are a little bit more sophisticated ... it's something that other mediums have been doing for a long, long time."