Thirith on 14/7/2020 at 05:47

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Based on the trailer, I wonder if there might be more properly urban areas than I remember in previous Far Cry games. That kind of map variety could benefit the games.

Renault on 14/7/2020 at 16:36

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Hell, I'll buy it. It has Gus.

More Breaking Bad tie ins - I just read this somewhere, but I never put together that the guy who plays Nacho on Better Call Saul was Vas from Far Cry 3.

henke on 15/7/2020 at 08:20

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Y'know what EvaUnit02, yeah, I share your cynicism on this one. Casting Giancarlo seems like a calculated move to get people to go "ITS GUS! I GOTTA BUY IT NOW!" and I've seen plenty of people on twitter do just that. Why would anyone wanna create headcanon linking the story of a great show like Breaking Bad to a Ubisoft game whose storytelling is practically guaranteed to be a steaming pile of gaaaaaarbage. The last time a Ubisoft game had an engaging story was Beyond Good and Evil in 2004 and IT'S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN AGAIN.

But by all means do get excited about gameplay aspects like what the world is going to be like tho. These Far Cry games are always fun to play.

faetal on 15/7/2020 at 08:32

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I like the Far Cry games, but have yet to complete a single one of them. Last I played was 3, which lost my interest a bit after I'd stripped the entire ecosystem of fauna to create wallets and ammo bags and then killed the interesting antagonist. Never saw much about 4 to interest me and my indirect experience of 5 has largely been people complaining about how bullshit it is to perfectly execute a mission, only to be taken out 5 seconds from finishing the mission by a wild pig / bear / otter. That and the fact that I'm getting a bit burned out by the climb to high place to reveal map icons game loop means I'm highly unlikely to ever get around to this (unless it turns out to be unmissably good / formula-breaking).

Sulphur on 15/7/2020 at 08:45

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Y'know, the more I think about it, the less sense Far Cry makes as a series. I've tried to play Far Cry 4 because it features a gorgeous recreation of the hilly reaches of north eastern India, never mind the, ahem, non-political ideological war with non-religious symbology strewn all over the place. But I feel nothing but ennui playing it. The combat's okay! The systems are fine! There's a cute miniature chopper/autogyro thing. But I don't care about the villain, I don't care about the heroes, and I really don't care about the icon hunting, never mind the actual hunting. Am I just hard to please, or is the game just too empty for me?

Maybe it's both.

Part of the problem is Ubisoft's famous apolitical stance, which invites an extreme form of narrative dissonance when I play it. You can't play FC4 without seeing it bearing down on some of India and (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_Civil_War) Nepal's problems - and immediately dismiss it, because there's no way that this can be reduced to a pantomime villain in a pink suit as a representation of a 10-year war in a video game.

The other problem is Far Cry 2. Yeah, yeah, but hear me out. FC2 is not fun, but it had a point to make, it was definitely political, and it knew that the game making the point was going to undermine itself if the systems had no way to etch loss into the player. The buddy system gave the war a real cost because they would eventually die; the weapons jams and malaria drove home just how desperate the world you were waging this war in was; and yet, it also delivered many of the systems that FC3-FC5 have run with to date, from fire propagation to the ecology of animal attacks. What have those games added to FC2's design? I'd argue that they've tried to wedge 'fun' in and dull the seriousness while not moving the format forward in any useful way. I haven't played FC5, and I'm not going to, so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong - but I'm fairly sure that you can't, for instance, permanently lose a buddy in the course of play.

What's all this got to do with Far Cry 6? The formula's four games old now (FC1 was really just a neat linear Crytek shooter), and frankly it's beginning to grate. Here's yet another politically charged scenario with a literally incendiary trailer, but surely Ubisoft will refrain from making a point about this in yet another attempt to have its cake and eat it too. But I guess we can live with that. So what's really new here? If it's a new locale, what of it? If it's more quality of life upgrades, what do I care? If it's even more icon hunting, there are better games - some of them from Ubisoft, no less - that contextualise and put more effort into the side activities. So what, really, is new apart from a generational advance? I hope there's a decent answer to this question, because Far Cry as a franchise is just old, tired, and rote at this point.


edit: a correction to the above - FC4 is almost definitely based on Nepal, not North East India. The fact that the locals speak/curse in Hindi is pretty confusing given they speak Nepali in Nepal, but that's probably a consequence of how much effort Ubisoft put into getting bilingual voice acting talent for the game. Still, this decision sort of paints Indians and Nepalese with the same brush, and that's bound to give some people conniptions.