Far Cry: New Dawn’s associate narrative director James Nadiger has participated in an interview with GameIndustry.biz. With the recent releases and upcoming titles both featuring their approach to the post-catastrophe world, Ubisoft has decided to show a picture of the different apocalypse with the latest Far Cry title.
As the team was approaching the endings of Far Cry 5, one of which turned out to be a literal doomsday scenario, the developers grew really excited. It was an opportunity to return to Hope Country 17 years later and see how old friends and old enemies have changed and what the world looks like.
“The cool thing about apocalypse fiction — not just in games, but across all media — is everyone gets to put their own spin on it,” he says. “Some of them go very far into sci-fi, fantasy land, while some keep it more realistic. For New Dawn, what sets us apart almost immediately is what we’ve done with our environment.”
Based on the interview, Ubisoft has consulted with meteorologists on projections of different nuclear scenarios to figure out how much devastation would allow for nature to “bounce back in a big way”.
“I don’t remember the exact number [of bombs we based on] but if there’s too many bombs, there’s no chance for anyone to survive or for plants and animals to recover. You can recover from radiation or nuclear disasters fairly quickly — if you look at things Chernobyl, or at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, where bombs went off, radiation came out, but life continued to soldier on.”