Far Cry Primal is shaping up to be a truly amazing and worthy addition to the Far Cry series… that is, as long as you play the game mostly for its single player component. Because official word from Ubisoft, as reported by WCCF Tech, suggests that the game isn’t going to have co-op this time around. However, it’s going to have something even better instead—real-life reconstructions of very ancient, very real languages. Talk about flavor!

Far Cry Primal: No Co-Op, But It’s Got That Stone Age Feel

The word about co-op in Far Cry Primal first turned up on Steam, and WCCF Tech dug it up… no mean feat, because the Steam forums are terrible. Short version: The game is single-player only, a choice Ubisoft apparently made early in development so the company could “focus our efforts on the single-player experience.” I played co-op all of once in Far Cry 4, so it’s no skin off my nose, but I’m sure many are disappointed by the news… especially since the game is full price.

But don’t get too upset, because Far Cry Primal is making up for the absence of multiplayer with all kinds of other crazy stuff… like beast taming, and brutal violence, and all kinds of crazy things like that. It all sounds very exciting—simultaneously a departure for the Far Cry series and a very natural (de)evolution. For a series that’s always been about brutal violence, it makes sense to jump back to the state of nature before even a veneer of order first appeared.

And Ubisoft is doing everything it can to make that world feel natural. What we’ve seen of the game naturally looks very different from Far Cry 4 and its other predecessors. For one, that vast primeval forest is looking vast indeed, as are the other unspoiled natural features in the game. For another, well… the game’s protagonists aren’t going to speak English. They’re going to speak some loose variant of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral language of… well… most European and lots and lots of Asian languages. The actual language of actual Stone Age people, once upon a time. An even earlier version of the language is being created specifically for the game by a team of ancient linguists.

And that’s a real special treat: Usually, linguists-for-hire have to make up nonsense languages like Dothraki. Gross. This time, they’re reconstructing a hypothetical real language that used to exist… that many of our real ancestors once spoke. It’s much more grounded than a fantasy language, and much more exciting.

I can’t wait to kill mammoths and many, many, humans in Far Cry Primal. But now I have something else to be excited about: the language. I was worried that Ubisoft would have trouble filling out a vast ancient world. I was wrong to be worried. The company is going all out. I can’t wait to see it—and to listen.