Did I ever tell you the definition of insanity?
It’s doing the exact . . . same bleeping thing . . . over and over again expecting . . . bleep to change.
That. Is. Crazy.
~ Vaas, Far Cry 3, who may as well have been discussing the problems with Ubisoft’s formulaic video game franchise.
I used to love Far Cry.
In fact, the very first Far Cry—back when it was made by Crytek—was one of the first games I played after building my first custom gaming PC. I was absolutely mesmerized by the graphics and the game itself was hilarious. The binoculars that let you listen in on the enemies and their ridiculous conversations cracked me up. (That was back when I was playing games like Half-Life 2, FEAR, Oblivion and so forth. What a time to be a PC gamer!)
In any case, the next two Far Cry titles were also really good. Far Cry 2 completely changed the tone and nature of the game, leaving the colorful island of the first game behind and traveling to war-torn Africa. The game also ditched the linearity of the first entry, opting for a more open world and implementing many of the systems that would become standardized as the series continued, such as Buddies and open-world gameplay.
Far Cry 3 took bits and pieces from both the first two games, as well as world design inspiration from a host of other open-world titles from Skyrim to Red Dead Redemption (and stories like Apocalypse Now and Lost) and created one of the best open-world shooters ever made. A strong story with excellent villains—chief among them Michael Mando’s Vaas—and some pretty wild twists and turns helped Far Cry 3 sell over 10 million copies. In many ways, it was the pinnacle of the entire franchise. A big part of this success also came down to the meticulous world design, with Ubisoft describing the island as “the second most important character” in the game.
The game was so successful that Ubisoft has spent the last three games copy-pasting it into new settings. While the game publisher has done a couple interesting things since the release of Far Cry 3—namely Far Cry Blood Dragon and Far Cry Primal—by and large, the series has become as cookie-cutter and by-the-numbers as Assassin’s Creed. While the settings have shifted to the Himalayas, Montana and South America, the game’s formulaic design has grown stale. I’ve narrowed down the series’ problems to three categories, and I’ll offer up solutions to each as we proceed. We’ll begin with . . . .
1. Open-World Mediocrity
While the settings have changed over the past four games, the nature of each feels remarkably similar and none of the past three compare to Far Cry 3’s island, which was a dense open-world but a compelling one. Add to this the abundance of box-ticking side-quests, repetitive crafting and hunting, and you really just have the same game over and over again but in a new location.
My solution to this is simple: Ubisoft needs to change how it creates its open worlds and structures its quests. Implementing a better gating system and more linearity would go a long ways toward making these games feel fresh again. A great model for what I’m describing is From Software’s masterpiece, Elden Ring, which completely changes the nature of open-world gaming, largely by gating off certain areas but still allowing players to see beyond where they can reach.
In Elden Ring, for instance, I often would find myself staring across a gorge or into some distance and seeing an area that I couldn’t figure out how to get to. There was either some secret way, or some story beat I had to accomplish first, in order to make it to these inaccessible areas. This gave me a sense of purpose, a reason to explore and to continue pursuing the various inscrutable questlines. Once I finally gained access to a previously impossible-to-reach area, I felt a great deal of satisfaction. (Later I often learned that there was some hidden shortcut that would have allowed me to reach it sooner, which is also very cool!)
Adding this kind of open-world design to Far Cry would make for a much more compelling adventure. I’d also adopt some of Elden Ring’s opacity when it comes to questlines. Far Cry would benefit from making players think a little bit more, and not crowding the map with a ton of different boxes to tick off. Let players explore and open up quests and discover information about the world more organically.
Some of the most fun in these games is taking down enemy bases because this gives players a ton of agency in how they approach the assault (though this often boils down to stealth vs guns blazing). Give players that degree of agency, while cleverly gating off areas and story progression, throughout the whole game!
2. Lackluster Storytelling
I get the feeling that Ubisoft really is trying to create compelling villains who can hold a candle to Vaas in each of the games since Far Cry 3, but they’ve failed almost every time. I did think the cult in Far Cry 5 was interesting, but Ubisoft pulled far too many punches, making the weird right-wing religious death-cult in the middle-of-nowhere Montana a multi-racial affair. They should have gone full white supremacist! And rather than make your customizable protagonist totally customizable, they should have made him/her a Native American. There was lots of room for a more messed up story of religious extremism, racism and the whole nine yards, but instead we got a pretty generic story and cult (among many other problems). Far Cry 6’s dictator—despite being played by Giancarlo Esposito—was also fairly boilerplate.
What made Vaas work so well was really a combination of factors. For one, your player character was an actual character rather than a fully customizable non-entity. He was a stranded rich white boy separated from his companions and forced to survive in a dangerous foreign land. Vaas was a maniac who made the whole thing very, very personal. The story felt like something out of a Joseph Conrad novel. None of the games since then have lived up to the insanity in the third game’s story.
I’d like to see Ubisoft stop pulling punches and give us a Far Cry game with a story that’s every bit as dark and twisted as the third game’s, with characters we actually care about. It would also be nice if the games stopped trying to one-up each other in terms of crazy weapons and bombastic nonsense, and focused more on realism with an edge of the absurd. Let things ramp up over the course of the game, too, including access to a powerful arsenal.
3. Innovation (Or The Lack Thereof)
A lot of this boils down to a lack of innovation across game design and narrative design. While the first three games in the franchise were all wildly different from one another, the next three ended up feeling largely the same: Trademark Ubisoft open-world games. Boring.
There are many ways to innovate in this series. Going back to a more linear but open-ended design could be one (either using the Elden Ring model I talk about above, or even adopting something more akin to Dishonored, which allowed the player a free hand in each stage, but never opened up the entire world).
Ditching many of the current systems could also work. Buddies have grown fairly stale in my opinion. There’s a lot more that could be done with liberating bases—you could create much more in-depth bases that required a lot more strategy and time. Hell, you could bring in some kind of Zelda-like dungeons to this game, with full-blown puzzle-solving and platforming areas. I’d play a Far Cry game with Zelda-like dungeons and complex bases.
There are plenty of other ways Ubisoft could tinker with the formula and innovate with the game’s many systems. Simply getting rid of towers to unlock maps isn’t enough. Why not just make tower-climbing more complex and challenging?
Another innovation I’d like to see: Replacing busy work with more satisfying quests. I don’t want to hunt and skin 10 deer to get a better holster. How about a cool story quest with a better holster as a reward instead?
4. Gunplay Needs An Overhaul
Finally, focusing more on improving gunplay should be a big priority for Ubisoft. As franchises like Call Of Duty continue to improve gunplay each year, Far Cry’s remains stuck in time, ultimately very shoddy by comparison. There’s no reason Far Cry can’t be a premium first-person shooter, but that would require Ubisoft to double down on sound design, weapon design, things like recoil and so forth. I’ve become very, very picky about gunplay in my shooters, because it’s so fundamental to the core experience. If Far Cry had shooting anywhere close to as good as Call Of Duty I’d be far more likely to sink more time into these games.
What would you like to see change in the Far Cry series? Do you have any hopes for a more interesting Far Cry 7? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
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