Far Cry 3 lead dev: consoles lack the "grandeur" of PCs

Jamie Keen, lead developer on Far Cry 3 has been speaking exclusively to PC gamer about the evolution of the series since Far Cry 2 and the difficulties of developing for multiple platforms.

I saw Jamie play through the same demo we saw running at E3. It seems that, despite the on-screen controller-prompts, the demo was running on a meaty PC. We guessed that from the framerate and anti aliasing too, but thought it was worth mentioning.

According to Jamie, scalability doesn't necessarily mean compromise: "The consoles simply don't have the same kind of grandeur that PCs can have. Especially a top end PC. This is an E3 demo so we're going to have everything really really, really dialled up. But it's going to be scalable. And that's the good thing – we are starting off with something that's scaleable to begin with.

"Right now we're just trying to show this stuff – we want to show the range and put our best foot forward. But then that's just the nature of development. The specs of a console are different to the specs of the top end PC, so it's not that we're able to avoid," continued the developer.

"We really listen to what the community is after. There's a hit list of things that we need to get right this time. Not that anything we did was really bad last time, it's just that there's going to be develop to make sure that we deliver the experience."

Story, and the player's interaction with the world are high on the developer's priority list: "I think the other thing is narrative. The narrative within Far Cry 2 was a great, but it was slightly at arms length. But what we really want to do with Far Cry 3 is we want to make sure that you feel this really human scale thing. Something you make your own way through, that you can really interact with... we want to take you on a voyage of discovery."

For more on Far Cry 3, read our E3 preview.