Telling stories and creating character arcs in Far Cry 6's open world

gamedeveloper.com:

Whenever a high-level Ubisoft franchise receives another installment, the game usually has a pretty huge hook.

In 2020’s Watch Dogs Legion, the developer proudly touted the mechanic wherein nearly every NPC is playable and can be recruited into a resistance movement to free London from a techno-dystopia. 2021’s Far Cry 6 was built on the premise of becoming a guerrilla fighter on a fictional South American island saving their home from its dictator president, Anton Castillo.

Both of those central premises have to support their respective games at all times, especially since they’re both open-world titles. At GDC 2023, Ubisoft Toronto’s lead writer Heli Kennedy (Far Cry 6) and narrative designer Brandon Hennessy (Watch Dogs Legion) talked about the challenges they faced and methods they used to keep the plots vital and character arcs significant in their respective games.

This piece specifically focuses on 2021's Far Cry 6, with another on Watch Dogs Legion releasing soon.

For Far Cry 6, Kennedy talked about how the main writing challenge was balancing the size of Yara (the game’s setting) with the arc of its protagonist, Dani Rojas. While Dani’s story was about the rise of a resistance leader, Yara itself had to tell a story of its own. The island is divided into multiple territories, and the aim was for each of them to have their own distinct theme and purpose that fed into Yara’s history as a whole. As noted in Kennedy’s slides: “Yara is filled with people fighting their own revolutions. [...] 'Revolution' had to be present in every facet of a country that was hundreds of years old.”

One way that Far Cry 6 keeps the plot and its characters central is by employing a new (for the series) cinematic language. Where previous