"We started working on Far Cry 2 before Instincts had even decided if it was going to have mutant powers," Amancio explained. "We started fresh and our key was to have a realistic game, we didn't want any mutant powers. We obviously changed the setting to Africa; we wanted to keep the very iconic setting of Far Cry but we got rid of the desert island scene."
The setting was also changed, due in part to the fact that Lost has spoilt the untouched lush, jungle environments. "Frankly the desert island scene was becoming very crowded with Lost and stuff like that, so we tried to go with a setting that was really fresh. Africa came to mind. Plus it's so iconic; that image of the Savannah is very, very underexploited in videogames.
"Basically our mission was to create a sequel for the original, so everything that came out before wasn't our mandate and really had nothing to do with us.
"The first one was really the first shooter that felt like an open world environment, so we decided to push the bar further an actually have an open world, 50 square kilometres."
