Far Cry Primal takes the Far Cry franchise back into the Stone Age, essentially inventing two new languages to tell a story of one man's quest to bring his tribe back from the brink of extinction.
A new trailer released today by publisher Ubisoft focuses on Takkar, the protagonist of Far Cry Primal. Takkar is a member of the Wenja, a hunting tribe in the beautiful but perilous land of Oros. In fact, he's one of the few Wenja left in Oros, following an attack by the rival Udam tribe that wiped out most of the group. It's up to Takkar to master the fearsome beasts of Oros — including saber-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths — as he attempts to keep the Wenja people alive, unite them once again, and defend them against the Udam and Izila tribes.
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Ubisoft also released a behind-the-scenes video today focusing on the characters and languages in Far Cry Primal. Developers from Ubisoft Montreal explain in the video that Takkar makes progress by exploring Oros to find and free surviving members of the Wenja tribe. In the main story missions, he encounters "specialists" who provide him with new skills, tools and weapons.
The video also features two language professors from the University of Kentucky. They worked with Ubisoft Montreal to come up with a more primitive version of the Proto-Indo-European language for the game. Proto-Indo-European is the linguistic forebear of some dead languages, such as Latin and Sanskrit, as well as many that are spoken today, like English and Russian. In Far Cry Primal, the Wenja and Udam tribes speak in what one of the professors called "Proto-Proto-Indo-European," while the Izila — a more advanced people in the game's fiction — speak a more advanced version of that language. You can watch that video below.
Far Cry Primal is set for release Feb. 23 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and March 1 on Windows PC.
