FAR CRY 5

ROLE
Level Designer — Ubisoft Montréal

Owned multiple regions and POIs within a large open world
Designed traversal, encounter spaces, and player flow
Worked within systemic sandbox constraints

SCOPE
Open-world regions, landmarks, traversal spaces

PRODUCTION
Full ownership from conception to ship

My work on Far Cry 5 focused on building spaces that support systemic gameplay at scale. This meant designing regions and POIs that remain readable, navigable, and interesting under a wide range of player approaches, while integrating naturally with the game’s sandbox systems.

DUTCH ISLAND

Dutch Island serves as the player’s first unscripted space, designed to introduce Far Cry 5’s systemic gameplay in a controlled but open environment, encouraging exploration, experimentation, and emergent combat. This is the first exposure of systems to the player after scripted sequence.

Isolated island geography to contain player behavior while preserving freedom
Clear shoreline and elevation changes to teach traversal and sightlines
Gradual encounter density to ease players into systemic combat and wildlife interactions

SCOPE:

Full layout design (island landscape, 2 military outposts)
World logic (encounters, wildlife integration, treasure hunt)
Questline design (structure, resistance system integration, scripting)

WORLD DESIGN

During the conception phase, I had to design the Island based on references from Colorado, USA. The landscape and world logic is based on some national park in the US, especially for the building design.

The narrative context was a island being invaded by cultists. Through the environment story telling and NPC setups, we managed to merge quest narration with the level design

Due to performance and Sony compliance restriction, we had to make the Island in a specific size

System Challenges:

The NPC budget was struggling with the systems due to the closeness of the POIs
With the tech team, we designed a custom encounter director so it would enable and disable contents based on player’s position and LOS, a restriction that didn’t occur in the rest of the game.

MANDATE

POI & Locations

Here are a few places that I designed and structured. I did the layout of most POIs. I received LD support after L2 (Past Gameplay and content validation) for the wild life and quests (the island was used for the end of the game as well)

Contributors: