Anearly reportindicates thatFar Cry7can only be beaten if it’s completed in 24 real-time hours. That’s how long you have to save the protagonist’s kidnapped family before the baddies who took them kill them off. The timer will stop counting down when you enter a safe room, but otherwise, sand will be sinking through the hourglass anytime you’re playing.
It’s a cool idea, and after the past few Far Crys have been met with the same shrugging, ‘it’s more Far Cry,’ reaction, it’s a smart move for the series to pivot. ButUbisofthas sanded the rough edges off cool ideas enough times in the past that I can’t help but think the final game won’t be as interesting as this pitch.
Specifically, I’m thinking of one of the company’s recent open-world games that sounded really ambitious while in development but ended up playing like any other game when it hit store shelves:Watch Dogs: Legion.
When reports first came out about that game, it sounded incredible. There was no central character and instead, you could recruit and play as any of the people milling about the game’s near-future London. There would even be permadeath so that when one character died, that was it. They were gone forever. If you needed their skills, you would need to recruit someone else with the same abilities. Add in the fact that its development was led by Clint Hocking, the creative director of Ubisoft’s revered Far Cry 2, and the concept had great potential.
But, in the final release, much of what sounded interesting about the initial pitch was curtailed to make it more palatable to a wider audience. Instead of permadeath being a key part of the experience, it was an option you could switch on or off. The “recruit anyone” promise fell flat as you quickly realized that everyone was grouped into a handful of archetypes, and they all basically played the same (with minor variations). It wasn’t abadgame, but it wasn’t special either. It was another Ubisoft open-world, with a slightly different coat of paint.
There are plenty of other examples.Assassin’s Creed Originspulled back from having a female protagonist because company leadership thought that it wouldn’t sell, relegating Aya to secondary character status. The initial imagery Ubisoft put out forFar Cry 5suggested that the game would be about fighting a far-right militia, tapping into concerns about rising white nationalism in the United States following the election of Donald Trump. But in the final game, Joseph Seed’s cult was a multiracial coalition, not a white supremacist hate group. The company tends to pull its punches.
Ubisoft typically makes decent, but fairly homogeneous, games. That’s how it can pump out such huge open-worlds at such a fast pace. As I wrote about recently when discussingMassive Entertainment’s simultaneous development of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Star Wars Outlaws, and The Division 3, each Ubisoft project has a lead team and then several other support studios around the world who pitch in.
For example, a game as massive asAssassin’s Creed Valhallawouldn’t be possible without the 15 other studios toiling away behind the scenes to help Ubisoft Montreal get it across the finish line. I’m not saying these games can’t or don’t have interesting ideas. But, change is less like pulling a hairpin turn in a speedboat and more like shifting the direction an aircraft carrier is traveling. When a game this big has an ambitious idea, there are thousands of people in hundreds of departments who need to work to implement it, and just as many potential complications that could force the project to take a different, less interesting path. Even if the whole team comes together and manages to preserve the initial pitch, there’s always the possibility that corporate leadership could request a change that stops it in its tracks
So, as cool as Far Cry 7’s concept sounds, I don’t think it will make it through to release with such a ballsy pitch intact. I’ll be happy if I’m wrong. But Far Cry 3-6 indicate that I’m probably not.
NEXT:Far Cry 3 Is One Of The Most Important Games Of Our Time
