Far Cry 2 then is creating 50 square km of a fictional country in the heart of Africa - a failed state where the civilian population has fled or is in the process of fleeing, and warmongering leaders battle it out for control. It’s certainly a game near the knuckle of current world politics. “We didn’t want to set Far Cry 2 in a real country for a couple of reasons, one being that we didn’t want the player to go to a real country then not have it be a country by the time the game ships, or something crazy like that!” continues Hocking. “A more important reason is that Africa is a huge continent and it has a massive amount of ecological and geological diversity. What was important to us was to capture the whole range of these - we want to have Serengeti-style grassland, savannah plains, central African Congo-style jungle, North African sandy desert; all the different ecosystems you see over the continent.”

So it was then that camera operators, sound technicians and artists were dispatched to Kenya and parts of Tanzania; stable countries judged to have the most diverse locations on offer - the Serengeti Plain with the Masai Mara to its north with its typical savannah grassland and hundreds upon thousands upon millions of animals. The team touched down on Kenyan soil during the migration of the wildebeest - three or four million of them on the move - only a fraction of which, unfortunately, will be making their presence known in the final game.

“We were super busy,” picks up Alexandre. “We’d wake up at 5am, eat really quickly then hop into the land cruiser and go out on a scouting run. We brought cameras, and took about seven gigs worth of pictures. Our days were spent just rolling on dusty trails, seeing animals and going from place to place taking photos.”

With a cameraman dispatched into the skies in a hot air balloon with a hi-def camera getting them all manner of birds-eye shots of the landscape, the aim was to get up close and personal with a slice of raw Africa. They experienced a near collision with a giraffe which, Alexandre reflects, “was so large that it looked like it was running in slow motion,” and at another point an elephant decided to charge their vehicle with little to no warning.