Why can't "Halo" make me feel what "Passage" made me feel? It's clearly not a question of budget. It's either unwillingness to do it or inability to do it. And I'm not saying that the guys who make "Halo" couldn't do that if they tried. The point is they didn't try -- to me they didn't try.

-- Clint Hocking To MTV Multiplayer, January 15, 2008

After talking to "Far Cry 2" creative director Clint Hocking about explosive barrels, and fears of slumping PC first-person-shooter sales, there was only one more big topic for me to tackle with him: not selling out creatively.

Hey, I know how it is. I work for a big company. I know what expectations people have when you get involved with a big-budget enterprise. Folks begin to doubt that any interest you have in anything that's indie or alternative has no chance of showing up in your work.

So I challenged Hocking on this. He loves indie games, or so I'd heard. How does that square with making a big-budget first-person-shooter. He took me up on it and we wound up talking about emotion and death, and how "Halo," "Gears of War" come up short in a particular way that he says "Far Cry 2" won't.

(NOTE: I strongly suggest you play the five-minute indie game "Passage" before reading on, unless you don't mind Hocking spoiling it for you.)

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During my demo of "Far Cry 2" last week, I asked the game's creative director about a few things. I covered the exploding barrels part of the conversation. Later this week you'll read how we talked about death.

But today I want to share our chat about making a PC game at a time that high-end first-person shooters aren't selling the way people would expect.

The following exchange occurred as he demonstrated the game:

Multiplayer: What's it like making a PC game these days in light of the sales figures for "Unreal Tournament III" and "Crysis"?

Clint Hocking, creative director, "Far Cry 2": I don't know if you're aware, but we originally planned to make it as a PC game. We really wanted to tell the PC gaming crowd that "Far Cry" is a PC title and we're not going to screw up the whole brand by making a crappy console game. We want to make a PC title that is worthy of being called "Far Cry 2."

Multiplayer: Respect the complexity of it's PC heritage and all that…

Hocking But at the same time, you're right. We need to be profitable. We built the game we built it from scratch. And we built the engine from scratch as well. The engine team, their job was to port the engine over [to consoles.] Because they didn't have any data with which to figure out how to do it, they used our ["Far Cry 2" game] data. We didn't ever expect them to be able to put this thing on console.

The engine team got a console engine running using our data. We came back from Leipzig [Games Convention in August] after telling the world we were going to be PC exclusive. They said, "Look what we did." We said, "Holy f---, we just lied to a whole bunch of people by accident."

It turned out that they had the same game running on console.

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We said: "What the hell, we don't want exploding barrels, but we have to have them. How are we going to make them not suck?"

-- Clint Hocking To MTV Multiplayer, January 15, 2008

Behold, Multiplayer readers, "Far Cry 2"! It's coming later this year and has many notable features.

It's a PC first-person shooter from Ubisoft Montreal, a major game for the fall of 2008. It takes place across more than 50 square kilometers of African savanna and jungle. It's designed to be so open, you're only forced to accomplish one goal: kill the game's main bad guy, however you can possibly manage it. Much of the story is generated on the fly. Much of the game world is destructible and flammable. It's coming to consoles too.

And, as I learned when Ubisoft creative director and generally innovative game designer Clint Hocking showed me the game, it has… explosive barrels.

All that innovation and they still do the barrel thing?

As Hocking gave me a demo of the game last Tuesday hewalked the game's main character through a town full of wary rival soldiers, many of them resting next to piles of ammo or close to big red drums. I stopped Hocking in his tracks and said…

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Over the next few days I'll share with you some of the more interesting things I heard and saw at a recent Ubisoft video game showcase. First up is a treat for you "Lost" fans: details of "Lost: Via Domus," the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC game coming out February 26.

If you don't watch "Lost," skip this post. Really, you're not going to get much out of it.

If you do watch "Lost," keep reading. But expect a typical "Lost" experience as you read this: answers that lead to questions that lead to evasions. At least I got some intel on the big four-toed foot statue!

I was shown "Lost: Via Domus" on Xbox 360 at a penthouse suite Ubisoft reserved in midtown Manhattan. The man demo-ing me the game was Kevin Shortt, whose two-sided French/English business card identified him as a script writer/ story designer and a scénariste. He was a co-writer on the game, which was developed in Ubisoft's Montreal studio.

On Tuesday afternoon Shortt controlled the demo. I tried to control myself. "Lost" series co-creators J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof have told him secrets. He knows what the black smoke actually does. That's big. And it's something I need to know. I had to press him. And on some other stuff too.

See, non-"Lost" fans? I told you not to bother reading. For the rest of you, it's spoiler-free (just not tease-free), so keep going…
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