Ubisoft painstakingly researched Bolivia and its culture for Ghost Recon Wildlands

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Ghost Recon Wildlands is shaping up to be quite an interesting and expansive game but how did Ubisoft manage to make it so? Well, during a recent interview on Ubisoft’s own blog, Benoit Martinez, Lead Artist and Technical Art Director at Ubisoft Paris, talked about the game. They went to Bolivia and collected a lot of reference material for the game. He said:

“The biggest challenge was to define our world. We went to Bolivia for a couple of weeks, and dispatched the team between the north, south, east, and west regions of the country. We were everywhere, from the Altiplano to the death road, jungle, islands, and everything in between. It was so important for us to learn about this country. We came back with something like 15,000 pictures and ten hours or more of video. It took us more time to sort out all the references from Bolivia than to take the actual pictures.”

Apart from that, the computer-controlled characters and flora of the region are accurately represented. They wanted the world to feel alive and the characters to have purpose. Martinez added:

“World logic and consistency were very important in defining the biomes, in defining the provinces, in defining the city, and defining the NPCs themselves. If we have a village somewhere, we need to make sure the agriculture is consistent with the landscape. We had to make sure there’s always a purpose for an NPC to leave somewhere, to do a specific activity, or to go to work.”

This is great news. I love it when developers do this level of research to create a game because an authentic atmosphere is rarely represented in games. It’s all exaggerated and many computer-controlled characters don’t have a purpose. They just walk around and do nothing. I can’t wait to get my hands on Ghost Recon Wildlands next year. Be sure to look out for our review next year.

Source: DualShockers

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