Perhaps learning from the criticisms that Far Cry 4 followed the formula of its predecessor a little too closely, developer Ubisoft Montreal decided to veer off in a new direction with the Stone Age-themed Far Cry Primal. In a recent developer blog, Creative Director Jean-Cristophe Guyo explained what the studio hopes to accomplish with the new setting.

“To choose a location, we really decided to zoom into the Mesolithic Period,” Guyot said. “That’s the transition between man as a hunter-gatherer and as a settler. It’s the moment where you start to own land, and start to have conflict.”

Guyot explained that Ubisoft deliberately chose the Carpathian Mountains, specifically the region near modern day Slovakia, as the setting for the game based on their potential as a conflict point between migrating tribes.

“It’s a collision of several waves of immigration,” Guyot said. “The initial one was stuck in the ice age, and there’s this concept of archaic homo sapiens that we based the Udam on. They got stuck in the mountains during the ice age, and they are starting to become extinct. They are having a problem breeding, so they are resorting to cannibalism in order to get strength from the other tribes.”

Imagining early man

Ubisoft is no stranger to reimagining history. In the Assassin’s Creed franchise, the studio has recreated numerous historical periods, including the Third Crusade, the Italian Renaissance, Colonial America, Revolutionary France, and several others. But despite spanning a range of several hundred years, the Assassin’s Creed games occurred during recorded history, allowing the developers to draw on documents and artwork created during those periods.

Meanwhile, Far Cry Primal takes place tens of thousands of years before the first written word, so Ubisoft had to turn to academic experts to keep its setting as authentic as it could.

This included working with linguists to create an invented language for the game’s voice acting that is based on Proto-Indo-European, the mother language that evolved into most of the modern European languages, including English.

“When we first started recording, it felt very modern,” Guyot said. “It was like listening to a language coming from Eastern Europe or something. It was very verbose. So we worked with them to regress this language to something that would be even earlier than that.”

The tribes in Far Cry Primal actually speak three different invented languages, and Ubisoft also created distinct cultures and religions for each.

You can read Ubisoft’s full developer blog post here.

Image courtesy of Ubisoft Entertainment SA