Far Cry 6: Lost Between Worlds

This DLC started as a bunch of relatively simple gameplay concepts. A list of over 100 ideas was compiled by the team and then winnowed down to 15 or so. Each designer looked through the final list and selected one or two of the ideas to work with, we then prototyped and pitched our concept as a full level and mission. I chose “heat explosion” it was a piece of gameplay from a previous DLC where the player has a bomb that will explode if it overheats but could be “cooled” in water adding time back on the timer.

My original idea was to take the heat bomb and turn it into a time trial, the player would pickup the macguffin and need to get to the end of the level before it ran out of energy. On the level design side, I knew I needed to make sure the player’s goal was easy to see and understand, so it was on the top of a pillar in the middle of the level. They would wind their way around the pillar always traveling upwards towards it. The challenges would come from the traversal at height and a bit of combat. It is an inverse relationship between the two, so combat is frontloaded to challenge the early stage of the level, with the end being less combat and more traversal against the clock.

The time trial concept did not make it to the final product, mostly due to the rogue-lite nature of the DLC. Initially it wasn’t known what order the levels would be played in, and when my trial was chosen to end the first path it meant the challenge needed to be present but more as a pressure element rather than forcing the player to learn new skills or mechanics. It was the first “test” they were facing, and it couldn’t be too hard otherwise they might get frustrated and stop playing but it needed to feel climactic enough to entice them to continue.

To ensure the challenge level would be fair, I added many more “charging” points, so the player could take a breath and figure out what to do next. The time of day was changed to night and the macguffin would be charged by special lights. Nighttime was a fun adjustment because now the level was harder to navigate since the player couldn’t see as easily but it meant the lights would stand out more. The difficulty took a lot of tuning since now I could use light to help guide the player and they could easily see where the next charging point was but the combat and traversal were automatically more difficult in the dark.

Through a lot of iteration and careful scripting I found what I think is the perfect balance. The first area presents a fun little combat or stealth challenge followed by a bit of traversal pressure to get to the next charge point. Then the player is giving some choice, they can use multiple paths to get across the floating dam, with a fun zipline sequence to the next area. Each charging point after the initial area was placed so a fast player could skip one or two and still be safe, but a slow player wouldn’t get penalized to harshly. The final section on the highway is meant to combine our two challenges, parkour or traversal with the potential for combat. A player who is observant with a sniper rifle can easily dispatch the enemy before doing the traversal, but if they are in a rush they can get caught in tough spot. This leads to the final charging point before a run that’s just long enough to stress them out before a jump that looks a bit too far (but isn’t) hopefully making them feel like they just made it in time.

I learned a lot while making this level, the iterative process to hone the challenge and sense of pressure. The careful scripting required to take it from a relatively simple concept to a climactic mission at the end of a group of missions. It was also very fun to make, we had a lot of freedom to use whatever tools in the toolbox we could find to make our ideas and because of the alien set dressing we could do wacky things like force you to charge a crystal-bomb using weird floating light crystals on a floating highway while fighting alien crystal jaguars.

Watch Dogs Legion

I joined Watch Dogs Legion as a missions qc, so I became very familiar with the single player missions and when I joined the level design team I thought, “yes I can use all the things I’ve learned to make a great single player mission.” Of course I was placed on the online team. Turns out I love multiplayer games and the co-op missions were intended to be fun above all else, as it should be.

I worked on many mission pitches and prototypes, some were scrapped but 4 made it through production and into the seasonal releases. The toolbox we were given on the multiplayer team was far more limited than I expected because of the way multiplayer replication worked on the engine side and we essentially couldn’t modify the world. So Enemy AI and a few custom gameplay features became our main focus. I dove into the AI, learning everything I could about their design and behaviour. I focused on using the different archetypes to challenge the players, sometimes the players would fight waves of drones forcing them to keep moving to avoid all the different flying enemies that are almost always moving. Sometimes they would face waves of shotgun wielding rushers and snipers.

In my favourite mission, the Netflix Money Heist mission, the players fought waves of enemies while downloading crypto inside a bank, the unique element of this combat were the turrets that for the first time could be powered using the hacking puzzle gameplay, so the players could turn the turrets on and off to help them against the waves. In the final part of that mission the players face a very heavy AI presence, which feels nearly overwhelming or unfair until the other faction shows up, which turns the whole area into a faction war, one of the only times in the game we explicitly script something like that. In the base game faction wars are very uncommon, which I thought was a shame.

The final DLC I got to work on for Watch Dogs Legion was the zombie mode, Legion of the Dead. Which I believe was started when an animator or programmer made a “zombie” for fun, and the higher ups thought it was awesome. Soon enough we were discussing how we could make an extraction game mode featuring zombies in a 28 Days Later London. I was tasked with figuring out what a ‘mission’ would be in this game mode. After some prototyping; holding off waves, watching enemy AI get devoured etc, we came up with the “path” idea. The concept was inspired by Left 4 Dead, where the players start in one part of the map and need to reach an iconic landmark on the other side of the city. The London Eye was the first end point I chose, and multiple starting points were tested. Through iteration I found about a kilometer and a half was a good distance from start to extraction point. As the prototype progressed pickups and lootboxes were created so we had a way to guide players to either useful or interesting POI’s. Start and end points were chosen based how many interesting POIs were along the way that could either offer parkour exploration, or fun AI setups.

Watch Dogs Legion was the first game I shipped, and it taught me innumerable lessons. I really loved working on it, co-op missions are so fun to make and test. Working with a small set of tools taught me how to dig into simple systems to get the most out of them, to really get creative and find fun ways to combine systems and levels in different ways and that zombie’s really do make anything more fun.