What are you made of?

Background

Far Cry 4 was a first-person shooter game in which every decision the player made changed the course of the game. To launch the game, the challenge was to create a campaign that was equally interactive so that every viewer would have a completely different experience to anyone else.

Idea

Far Cry 4 was a game in which the player was forced to make decisions based on instinct. To be successful, the player had to be made of stern stuff.

The launch campaign, then, set out to invite potential players to see if they were made of the sort of stuff that would see them through the most hazardous of encounters.

Four rites of passage were established. 'An eye for an eye' was a fight to the death with a crazed killer; 'Rabbit Hole' was an impenetrable maze populated with enigmatic characters; 'Mind Blossom' a hallucinogenic trance and 'Escape' was a chase in which players were blindfolded and guided only by sound.

Each was an interactive film in which players had to make decisions rapidly.

Each decision triggered another sequence of events. In fact, there were 42 million different possibilities, which would take up to 100 days to explore, so that each gamer's experiences were unique.

Players were invited to experience the rites of passage one by one over a four week period from October 22nd to November 16th.

At the end of each interactive video, the player's personality was analysed by five criteria: toughness, violence, bravery, endurance and wisdom.

This then released exclusive content for Far Cry 4 via Uplay.

Results

There were 500,000 unique visitors to the platform in the first week of the campaign, rising to over 1 million within 3 weeks.

33% of visitors returned to the platform to experience another of the four rites of passage.

Within a month of launch, Far Cry 4 had become the #8 most-sold video game in the world.

Our Thoughts

My goodness, this incredibly complex and involving teaser campaign can’t have been cheap. But then the sums of money involved in producing a successful game these days are as gargantuan as a Hollywood blockbuster. All the same, throwing money at production is pointless unless there is a real idea, which there is here in the Personality Tests of each film. I can’t help feeling there may be more point to the campaign than to the actual game itself, which many bloggers have been saying is too cluttered. “There is simply too much to do...after 30 hours I’m getting too exhausted to be motivated to see it through to the end.”

This could be another fine example of the advertising being better than the product.