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Far Cry 5's audio - cult sounds for the masses
We recently visited Ubisoft Montreal for a behind-the-scenes visit around Far Cry 5. First stop: audio department - making a soundtrack for the crazy...
When Far Cry 3 had wrapped production, about four and a half years ago, Executive Producer Dan Hay wanted to set the sequel in the States, but he wrestled with how exactly to do it. Hay and his team had no clue, and so the pitch they gave ultimately became the Himalayan odyssey that was Far Cry 4. The idea persisted in the back of his mind, however. “Festered,” he tells me, as we sit in Ubisoft Montreal's expansive campus. “Gnawed.”
“Being a child of the early 80s, I have a strong remembrance of the Cold War” explains Hay. “At age twelve, I remember thinking: somebody up above us could just say 'fuck it' and press that button. I was also watching movies like Wargames and Terminator, plus at my school they were teaching us how to duck under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack. Really? Was that going to work?”
Hay never forgot the sense of powerlessness he felt then, though that era came to an end without incident with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. “Everybody sort of heaved this collective sigh of relief,” Hay recalls. “There was this feeling of 'we're safe', and that lasted through my 20s and 30s until about 10 years ago when I started to feel it again.” The moment when Hay pinpointed his phantom concern was during the 2007 subprime mortgage collapse. For many, it was the start of a deep-seeded distrust of the government.
I said go get the Dinki-Di, not that!
© Ubisoft
“I had a very simple picture after that,” says Hay. “I had an image of getting out of my car and looking down at a town in some Western part of the US. There was a population sign there that said Hope, though it was crossed out as if there was none left. The population had also been adjusted to be significantly less than what it was. That was our framework.”
Hay never forgot the sense of powerlessness he felt then, though that era came to an end without incident with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
The man responsible for this mess is the charismatic cult leader Joseph Seed. Assault one of his zealot-infested strongholds and the heavily-armed resistance you'll face will quickly sell the idea that he's seen as a messiah by the disenfranchised and the downtrodden. The challenge Far Cry 5 had to solve: how to telegraph that awe and influence to the player earlier. How can you establish a palpable force to a player who's roaming about, well off the grid, most likely otherwise engaged with fly fishing somewhere in Ubisoft's version of Montana. The cult, Project at Eden's Gate, and their Father figure need to be a worthy opponent that are felt long before they're seen. How then would one best distribute their propaganda in a vast wilderness where there's no phone or internet coverage, in a place where bears vastly outnumber billboards?
Trying out for Air Race, the wrong way
© Ubisoft
The answer: music. Gospel hymns to be exact. A wide open sandbox necessitates vehicles, cars equal radios, and in this vast valley the towers are controlled by – you guessed it – ya boy, DJ KrazySeed. Even if you do change that dial, you can expect to eavesdrop in on a ton of incidental henchman dialogue, too; Far Cry 5 is pushing 80,000 spoken lines, spread across 80 actors – that's roughly four times the last game. The audioscape of this particular Far Cry will sound like no other, thanks to the change to Vwise, an audio engine that offers more flexibility for mixing be it ambience, guns, vehicles, foley, or ear-worm cult ditties that are guaranteed to stick in your head (and maybe even turn you into a believer).
“We knew the cult needed its own sound,” explains Tony Gronick, Audio Director “but we honestly didn't know what that was going to be. My initial approach was post-rock, but it proved to be a little too 'droney', especially on an in-car radio that went against the drone of the engine. Christian rock didn't match the visuals of the characters either. Likewise, traditional hymns seemed to fit, though the lyrics didn't suit what this cult was about.”
Gronick and his team quickly realised that they'd have to write their own crazy. Songs that would match the manifesto that the cult believes in. But, most important of all, even if you were a listener with no knowledge of the cult, you'd need to find the music beautiful and inspiring. Once you swallowed that lure and entered into the cult, those lyrics would start to take on a double meanings.
I ordered a Red Bull, not a beer!
© Ubisoft
“When we first started prototyping the game I had a hard time believing these Americans would just reap the land, murdering and stealing,” says Gronick, “until I realised: right, they think they're doing God's work, their Father's work. When you put a choir and a cult hymn behind something like that, all of a sudden you know what's going through their minds. They have a purpose. And anybody not doing what they are is going against it.”
Permeating this virtual world with cult music adds a believability to Project at Eden's Gate that wasn't there before. Every car is tuned in. Cult held towns are dotted with speaker poles that spread the good word, be it wanted or not. Out in the fields, patrolling trucks with large speakers blare propaganda for miles. Failing some intervention from you, possibly with some explosive ordnance, the cult's greatest hits are inescapable.
Better yet, the musical style of them morph from region to region, thanks to the work of talented composer Dan Romer (whose work may have heard before in films like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Beasts of No Nation). Impressed with Romer's big screen efforts, Gronick says he was delighted to find that he was not only a songwriter and producer, but Romer had also played in bluegrass and country bands. He was given full range to do what he wanted, and was given access to some of the best choirs kicking about Nashville. Going off the results, it was a match made in heaven.
It's always difficult for a writer to sell music via mere text on the page, but trust me, Far Cry 5's soundtrack is going to be something special. Let me explain in a practical example: As a stone-cold FPS killer, very little stays my trigger finger after that aim-down-sights function initiates. Far Cry 5 managed it, however, with an impressive feature: there's a chance that any cultist unaware of your presence might break into song as they go about their day-to-day henching. Not the full hymn, mind you. Just a few bars that might go thusly:
“In the West shall rise a sinister creed. The rich will get what they want, the poor will lose what they need.”
How you react to those moments will vary greatly from person to person. For some, that'll just be a handy stealth mechanic cue, telling you that your incognito status continues and the singer is blissfully unaware that you're about to stove their head in with a nailed baseball bat. For others, hearing that song will oddly humanise what ought to be some Mr Nobody cannon fodder, in a way no game FPS has. Hell, you might even start to empathise with thy neighbour.
Personally, as a lover of small details and genre-pushing ideas, I can see myself being moved to pause, listen, and genuinely appreciate. Then I'll punctuate the performance with a .44 Magnum shot whose retort will pinball around the valley like God's own clap. That's my kind of sound design; my interpretation of a cult hit.
Whatever your ear candy preference, Far Cry 5 continues to deepen in layers. It's looking like the hottest game to play in 2018. Assuming the world hasn't been consumed by nuclear fire by then, of course.
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