I can now confirm that the rumors are true: Far Cry 6 is another Far Cry game. One of the games of all time. A game that was released in 2021 and continues to exist.
I said that Watch_Dogs was a 2014 game not just in the sense that it was literally released in 2014 and takes place roughly then, but in the sense that 2014 was the sub-genre. It was a game about how people thought the world worked in 2014. Like, obviously no one thought that Chicago literally had a city-wide surveillance network being manipulated by dueling hacker outlaws at the time, nor did anyone believe that exact course of events would occur or that the hacker battles envisioned by Watch_Dogs wouldn’t end up being far more spectacular and fun to play compared to real hacker battles. But people absolutely expected that a growing surveillance state would end up being a battleground for hacker groups and lone wolves. The fears and anxieties of 2014 were written deep into that game’s DNA.
And in the same way, Far Cry 6 is a 2020 game. While some lip service to the Far Cry series’ running thesis of “your player character skills of personal violence will only make things worse, you should just leave” is given, for the most part the revolutionaries are just the good guys. Anton Castillo does Far Cry’s charismatic villain thing, but his ideology is pretty vague. The rebels are left-coded, but it’s United States left-coding and this is pseudo-Cuba, which means Castillo’s entire regime is vaguely left-coded because of its anti-Americanism (something which aged especially poorly as the Republican Party doubled down on being the party of treason and surrender and the Democrats picked up the “vanguard of global democracy” position after the Republicans dropped it – a pivot that happened so fast I felt the need to throw in this parenthetical to remind current readers that in 2021, while a careful observer could see the tide had clearly shifted on this, the general consensus was still that the American right was more overtly patriotic than the American left).
Castillo gets called a fascist by the rebels, and his reserved, presidential demeanor prevents him from fighting against that accusation directly, but in interviews with the American media he criticizes the United States for its history of slavery, and while it’s a very valid criticism to say that the US media being unable to effectively grapple with assertions that having been a slave-owning terror state 160 years ago means America isn’t allowed to oppose slave-owning terror states in operation right now, the game frames this as Castillo being a villain with a point rather than getting away with remarkably stupid defenses because he’s taking advantage of a historically inept journalist industry. Castillo’s relationship to America frames him as Fidel Castro, but his backstory with the nation’s Communist rebels in 1967 frame him as Fulgencio Batista, and to the extent Anton Castillo defends himself from the association with Batista, it is to position himself as being more like Castro, rather than any attempt to suggest that Batista was better – they were both dictators, after all.
There’s even a Just Leave option near the end, but there’s no reason to believe that it’s a better option. Protagonist Dani seems to do better in it, but Castillo reasserts control over pseudo-Cuba and that sure seems to be bad. The rebels don’t seem to believe in anything besides Castillo being bad, but at minimum they’re probably going to do less slave labor and the only person who might’ve been seeking to become a new dictator gets killed in the final battle anyway, which results in Dani being offered the job of supreme leader and turning it down. This sure doesn’t seem like the foundation of a principled democracy, but as with most Far Cry games, the level of authoritarian torture horror that the current regime gets up to is high enough that installing a corrupt hybrid-regime will still be a noticeable improvement. You can ask questions about whether it was worth the war, but the war was ongoing when you got here, so the choice presented to the player character in the narrative and the player in mechanics is not whether you should have a war, but rather that, given there is a war ongoing, which side deserves to win. And the answer is just straightforwardly the rebels.
Anton’s princeling who he’s grooming for succession gets killed in the true ending where you actually finish the game and defeat Anton, but Anton is the one who killed him. Rebels sometimes do chaotic and unhinged things, but no one who didn’t have it coming ever seems to get hurt by it. So while you can Just Leave, it seems like your protagonist skills of incredible violence actually are totally helpful here, because the rebels are better than Anton (probably? It’s all vibes-based, so it’s hard to say for certain, but Anton has lots of very specific crimes and the worst thing the rebels ever do is kill a few specific prisoners of war – bearing in mind they are a revolutionary army with zero ability to hold them, so while the psychological precedent this sets in the minds of the revolutionaries is very bad, they don’t actually have better options, but also the game doesn’t even notice this) and the only thing keeping them out of power is insufficient violence.
Far Cry 5 had a problem where it acted liked it had a Just Leave theme but the problem is that you were playing as a character who was both native to and employed by the legitimate democratic government of the nation the game took place in. The way you get introduced to most (though not all) of the resistance members suggests you’re probably not local local, but you are not crashing into a foreign country to solve their problems with violence, you are defending your own country from an authoritarian theocracy attempting a coup.
In Far Cry 6, things seem to have gone full cargo cult, with a few elements of the Just Leave theme, like the charismatic villain and the shady allies, are retained because those are Far Cry-y, but the developers either forgot, never knew due to employee turnover, or have stopped caring that this is supposed to add up to a theme about the futility of violence to solve certain problems. In fairness, there’s not a whole lot of pro-regime change sentiment left in the audience these days, so the Far Cry series has kind of reached the point where its thesis gets a “yeah, no shit” reaction, but Far Cry 6 doesn’t have a new thesis to push, it just staggers forward, an undead game series that still has the trappings of a point about the regime change sandbox genre it’s a part of but no longer has a point to make about it – probably because the only other surviving series in that genre is Just Cause, who were taking the piss since at least Just Cause 2.
The other long-running theme of the Far Cry series is the Murder Vacation, and Far Cry 6 doesn’t fail this one as badly as it did Just Leave, but mostly because doing Far Cry-y things gets you surprisingly far. Even here, though, the focus seems less purposeful. You still have a wingsuit and little one-person helicopters like the ones you can rent for (relatively) cheap to fly around on vacation, but you also have proper military helicopters and tanks, so the wingsuit and puny vacation helicopters are no longer a consistently effective means of getting around. You still do lots of murder and the vacation-y mechanics are still around, but they’re so de-emphasized in favor of the new revolutionary tone that they can no longer meaningfully be called a theme of the game, so much as the theme of, like, two side quests.
Far Cry 6 kind of gropes its way towards a new theme, a theme of gritty, bloody revolution, of revolutionaries who have legitimate grievances but also show the scars of trauma inflicted by those grievances. And while it would be kind of disappointing to see them move onto a new theme when they never really nailed the Just Leave theme, and kind of garbles their new message that there’s still vestigial Just Leave and Murder Vacation mechanics, it is fundamentally okay and indeed, a good thing, for a series to evolve thematically over different installments. But the problem is that this theme feels totally insincere, feels like people are scared of criticizing the 2020-era zeitgeist and also think they could profit from uncritically parroting its most rote talking points.
It wants to continue Far Cry’s edgy, bloodsoaked tradition of stories where war and revolution come with a terrible human cost, which means they cannot appeal to the Marvel core demographic of people who weren’t very political but they saw a man murdered by the police on camera and they were at least political enough to know that murder should definitely not be allowed. And yet, they lack the unhinged, though, to its credit, very human madness of the most lunatic fringe leftists of the era raving about how they’ll replace prisons with “empathy ceremonies” where criminals are publicly drowned. It wants, or at the very least feels it must be, part of that zeitgeist, but that zeitgeist is an alliance between 40-year old suburbanites that the Far Cry series wishes it was too cool for and actual crazy people that the Far Cry series might want to namecheck but whose actual policy proposals would be embarrassing to actually portray sympathetically.
Kinda makes me think that maybe it’s time for UbiSoft to admit that they are a giant corporation with no beliefs and should maybe resign themselves to making bland, Marvel-style, vaguely pro-status quo media.
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