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In case you missed it, Far Cry Primal (opens in new tab) is trying something a bit different this year: ditching the modern setting for a caveman-based adventure. And while the animal taming (opens in new tab), knife throwing action isn’t strictly historically accurate, the language has actually been carefully crafted to tie in with what early man might have been saying at the time.
“As we started to dig into the Stone Age, we found all these very interesting things. And, one of the difficult aspects is reconciling the reality of the history and our impression of how primitive man was at the time,” explains creative director Jean-Christophe Guyot. An obvious issue here that the team ran into straight away during casting was the language. “They were [speaking] in English… and it felt very not immersive,” he explains. That led to conversations with with anthropologists and film people who’d dealt with similar issues and, ultimately, linguists who specialised in “proto-European language.”
However, even that wasn’t quite right: “They started to give us auditions with this kind of language,” explains Jean-Christophe, “and even that felt a little bit too modern, because it’s 7,000 years before our current era.” The game needed an even earlier variation which say the team working with linguists to devolve what they currently had. “We worked with them, and they projected how it would be simplified if we would go back even further,” says Jean-Christophe. “So that’s how we really created the language of the Wenja (the game’s main tribe) and we created three variants of it, one for each tribe. The linguists, they’re amazing. And they’re super excited, because this is a language that has not been spoken for thousands of years. For them, it’s their science, it’s something that they’re super attached to, so they were super enthusiastic.”
