Vaas is later revealed to be a drug-addicted wayward member of the local community of the Rook Islands, the setting of Far Cry 3, who betrayed his people and aligned himself with the crime boss Hoyt Volker.

Conceived and designed by Ubisoft's development team as a villainous character who is comparable in stature to Star Wars's Darth Vader, Vaas is portrayed in all relevant media by Canadian actor Michael Mando.

Yohalem wanted Vaas to represent a cautionary tale about what could potentially happen to player characters who found themselves caught up in their most indulgent, violent impulses; when interviewed by IGN about his thought process behind Vaas, Yohalem explained that video game developers always talk about 30-second loops, a line of thought within the video game industry which states that players should be put into a situation where what they are doing every 30 seconds is so satisfying that they never want to stop.

[2] Yohalem opined that Vaas' monologue about the definition of insanity is in accord with the philosophies behind Far Cry 3's design, as it "perfectly encapsulates" the dark side of the concept of a gameplay loop which the writing team attempted to deconstruct.

[6] Yohalem added that Vaas' implied death at the game's midpoint was inspired by the novel To the Lighthouse, in which the protagonist dies midway through the story and the rest of the plot explores her absence.

[8] To achieve their goal of creating nuanced characters, Ubisoft's development team made extensive use of performance and motion capture, so that actors could convey more complicated emotions on-screen.

[9] According to Anne Gibeault, associate producer for cinematics in the Montreal studio, a character's face and hands convey the most essential part of the animation process.

To perform his role as Vaas, Mando's gestures and facial expressions were translated into animation through carbon-fiber helmets, with cameras mounted about two feet from his face to record every squint, frown, or smile.

[2] Mando had already undergone rehearsals and some footage of his performances were filmed by the time Ubisoft made the short-lived decision to discard the character he had come up with, as it was incompatible with the visual design that the creative team had in mind.

[2] According to Mando, their goal was not to deliberately create a character who appeals to audiences and is insane for the sake of it, but rather a personality who is looking for truth in that moment and who happens to be crazy.

During one incident, Jason attempts to rescue his girlfriend Liza Snow from a pirate compound and is caught in a trap set up by Vaas, but manages to escape with her through a combination of luck and sheer grit.

Vaas wakes up in a hallucination, and is guided by the voice of his sister, Citra Talugmai, to reconstruct her Silver Dragon Blade to win her approval as she claims that it is the only way he can escape his mind.

[21] Ubisoft released a limited edition run of lithographic print art of Vaas by artist Ben Oliver for customers who preordered either Assassin's Creed III and Far Cry 3 from the GAME concessions stand at the Eurogamer Expo.

[22] European players could also purchase the Insane Edition of the game, which included all pre-order bonuses and all other forms of launch downloadable content (DLC), along with a Vaas bobblehead and a survival skill manual for usage in real situations of danger.

[37][38] Ron Whitaker from The Escapist observed that Vaas, "a loud, vivid character that people enjoyed", had caught on with video game fandom as a popular choice for cosplay activities by the mid-2010s.

[2] Tim Edwards from PCGamesN called Vaas one of the video games industry's "most interesting collaborations", and lauded Mando's portrayal of the character as the most believable virtual performance since the debut of Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2, which he highly enjoyed.

[46] Vaas placed 7th on a 2018 list of the best villains in video games published by GamesRadar, with staff noting that he has become the "poster boy" for the Far Cry franchise despite only appearing in its third mainline entry at the time of publication.

[53] Dr. Kelli Dunlap from iThrive Games Foundation concurred that Vaas' characterization evokes a problematic stereotype and compared him to Heath Ledger's version of the Joker as well as Final Fantasy VI's Kefka, all of whom in her view lacked depth in terms of character development because their motivations are entirely defined by their psychotic tendencies.

[56][20] The speculation behind the theory was fueled by Mando's tease of his return to the series via a Reddit post, Diego having a similarly placed scar as Vaas in his live-action appearance, and the observation that both characters wear a red top.

[57][58][59][10] The fan theory was debunked in 2021 with the announcement of Rite of Passage, which unambiguously differentiates Diego from Vaas as two distinct characters,[60] as well as a direct confirmation from Far Cry 6 narrative director Navid Khavari in a statement published by TheGamer in May 2021.

[61] Although Vaas and Citra are presented as members of the Rakyat (a word that means "the people" in Indonesian and Malay[62]) tribe on the fictional Rook Islands, there has been some confusion over the depiction of his intended cultural identity.

[64] Charlie Stewart of Game Rant also remarked on the character's accent and noted that while the Rook Islands are based largely on Indonesia, Vaas' way of talking implies that he grew up speaking Latin American Spanish, unlike his sister, who sounds the same as the rest of the native population.

[67] Johnny Galvatron interpreted the character as a foreign invader and not as a member of the Rakyat tribe,[68] while Edward Ross took Vaas to be Indonesian in his book Gamish: A Graphic History of Gaming.

[69] Angga Prawadika Aji, a lecturer at the Airlangga University in Indonesia, opined that the skin color of the pirate group led by Vaas implied their identity to be native Rooks Islanders.

[71] When defending the game against allegations of promoting a white savior narrative, Yohalem stated that the foreign player character Jason Brody was not originally intended by Citra to be the one to be part of the tribe's ritual.

[74] Ryan Parreno of Gameranx expressed that it was "uncomfortable" that Ubisoft wished to in part recreate Vaas's "unintentionally seductive qualities" for the villain Pagan Min in the sequel game while still trying to avoid a white savior narrative by having the new main character be Asian.

[69] Georgia Hinterleitner states that while Far Cry 3 has several mad antagonists, Vaas is the most prominent of them, and that while he himself claims to be mainly interested in his kidnapping victims for money, "it becomes almost immediately clear that his criminal activities double as a convenient outlet for his deeply warped personality".

She adds that his madness manifests in his propensity for lengthy (which she calls "at times barely coherent") monologues, his tendency to lapse into intractable fits of anger at minor provocations, and the pleasure he finds in the sadistic games he plays with Jason, such as letting him flee in order to hunt him for sport.

Hinterleitner compares Vaas to Kefka Palazzo in Final Fantasy VI, as their unstable natures are both based on very old and common ideas of mental illness which establish a direct link between madness, evil, and violence.

[82] This sentiment is mirrored by the game's cinematics director, Robert Darryl Purdy, who described Vaas as an "alpha male", a dominant individual who exploits a bad situation to his benefit, with no bounds and no one to stop him.