The Far Cry series has changed a lot over the 17 years since the original launched on PC in 2004. Not everything has been as drastic as Far Cry 2’s choice to abandon the genetically engineered man-monsters of the first, or the introduction of RPG-style skill trees in FC3, but almost every game has done its part to tweak things in some way or another. Far Cry 6 will certainly feel extremely familiar to longtime fans, but it also takes some big swings at shaking things up. It’s a combo that, based on my experience with the first few hours in a recent remote demo, mostly works really well – though I’m not entirely sold yet on some of its newer elements.
The core pillars of Far Cry-dom – exotic locations, maniacal bad guys (I only had one face-to-face run-in with Giancarlo Esposito’s Anton Castillo, but he was, as expected, delightfully ominous), and a hefty dose of madcap violence – are all still there. I only explored a fraction of Yara’s apparently massive map, and while it’s great to be back in a tropical setting with the added benefit of modern graphics, I’m actually most looking forward to seeing how Far Cry 6 plays with all new environments. After all, aside from the one strip of a rural main street in Far Cry 5 and a couple of villages in 4, we’ve never really seen a proper town in a Far Cry game – let alone a whole modern city like Yara’s capital of Esperanza, and I’m really curious to see how the guerilla tactics the series is known for translate to an urban setting.
Other more recent mainstays like treasure hunts and Fangs for Hire (summonable animal companions who can assist in combat/exploration), now called Amigos, return as well. While I can’t deny that Chorizo the wheelchair-bound dachshund is as adorable as his ability to distract guards is useful, I think my favorite so far is Guapo the alligator – though I only met a few of the half-dozen or so available.
Aside from the notable shift back to fully-voiced third-person cutscenes – which we haven’t seen since the original Far Cry in 2004 – the biggest change to the Far Cry formula is probably how character progression works. Since Far Cry 3, we’ve earned XP to unlock new perks and abilities in RPG-style skill trees – but not anymore. Now, almost all of your character progression is tied to your weapons and gear. And while that’s definitely a big departure from what we’ve come to expect, I think it works – for the most part.
You do still technically level up, increasing your Guerilla Rank as you complete missions, clear outposts and checkpoints, and generally do all the Far Cry-ey stuff we know and love. Instead of earning skill points to unlock different abilities, however, you’ll move up the resistance army’s ladder, which gains you access to new weapons and items which can then be customized to fit your preferred playstyle or meet a specific challenge.
Now, almost all character progression is tied to your weapons and gear.
There are the basic weapon attachments like silencers, extended mags, muzzle breaks, and so on – maybe even a few too many; why do I need three silencer options if they all have the same stats? But it’s when you start unlocking and upgrading the Resolver weapons and Supremos – the zanier weapons and gadget backpacks you may have seen in trailers, respectively – that you’ll start seeing just how flexible Far Cry 6 is trying to be with its equipment. A lot of what used to be skill tree perks are now linked to armor and clothing items, like gloves that give you a damage bonus against certain enemies, or pants that let you automatically repair your vehicle while you drive (I think the logic there is that you can hold extra tools in your pockets, but seeing as how this is a game where you make friends with a giant pissed-off rooster named Pork Rind and build guns that shoot Macarena CDs, I’m not gonna think too hard about it).
The simplest way to look at it now, I think, is like this: instead of picking a ton of upgrades you’ll always have, you now swap between them like separate loadouts. If I want to avoid a fight when sneaking into an outpost, maybe I’ll equip the EMP Supremo that deactivates security cameras, alarms, and vehicles (this is a more important addition than you may realize, because you can now force enemy helicopters to land rather than just exploding) and pair that with a vest that reduces movement noise and distraction-focused consumables. Or, if I do want to go loud, I’d use the Furioso Supremo, which blasts a 360° ring of fire to roast anyone within about eight feet of you, and complement it with bullet and flame-resistant gear, and add a kit full of grenades and Molotov. And a flamethrower, for obvious reasons.
“Supremos all have their own element in a way,” says David Grivel, the Lead Game Designer on Far Cry 6. “Some are tied to poison, fire, or explosives and all that. For us, it makes sense that you don't necessarily have the same loadout of gadgets on top of them … It really encourages you to try different approaches.”
This “right tool for the right job” mentality extends beyond just a simple choice of playstyle, though – it’s something the design team has baked into every encounter you’ll face. Probably the most important weapon mods you’ll unlock are the different ammo types, since just about every enemy you’ll run into has resistances and vulnerabilities to one or the other.
Armored enemies require AP rounds, for example, while soft-target rounds work best on basic infantry. Other varietals, like explosive or poison ammo, have been added into the mix, which will surely make for some interesting tactical decisions later on, but I also found myself a bit frustrated with how often I felt I had to run to a crafting station to swap in a new ammo type before getting into a firefight.
It was never a real hassle to find one (almost every enemy outpost or crossroads had one nearby) but a lot of the fun of Far Cry, for me, has always been that scramble to come out on top when a plan goes awry or you randomly cross paths with an enemy patrol. That’s a hard feeling to recapture if you‘re being penalized for having, say, fire bullets loaded instead of explosive rounds. I’m also still not wild about the move towards health bars you need to drain on each enemy. Sure, you can disable the visual aspect in the settings menu, but as someone who typically ascribes to the “being shot in the face should kill you” school of thought, I couldn’t help but feel a bit frustrated when an enemy would get sprayed with a hail of SMG fire at close range and stay on their feet.
To be clear, enemies in Far Cry 6 aren’t the full-on bullet sponges they were in New Dawn. “When you are using the right weapon and still it takes 1,000 bullets to kill a guy; we are not doing that,” Grivel says with a laugh, explaining that they wanted to put more emphasis on the new resistance and crafting mechanics – but he also points out that there are some guaranteed one-hit-kills at your disposal, too. Lining up a bow headshot or taking the time to sneak up on a target for a melee execution both count as an insta-kill, for example. “Headshots with a bow, no matter what, are always guaranteed, even if I'm with enemies that are 10 levels above me,” he says, explaining that they want to reward acts of skill. “The reason for that is, quite frankly, if you can get a headshot with a bow, good for you; that’s already a lot of skill. It's a bit the same logic for the takedowns: it takes skill to get close to the enemy to do that.”
New enemy types make firefights more dynamic and feel more frantic.
All that said, there are some interesting strategic additions to Far Cry 6’s combat encounters, too. New enemy types – beyond the classic rifleman, heavies, or snipers – threw in the good kind of hurdle that made firefights more dynamic and feel more frantic. Medics, for example, can revive fallen comrades, while Engineers can plant turrets or use EMPs to disable your vehicle. Officers will buff their subordinates and call reinforcements – or can even call in an airstrike on you if you’ve found a sniper’s perch. “It's the first time in a Far Cry game where you fight an actual army, like a proper army,” Grivel says. “To me, it would have felt weird if there weren’t any specialist units.”
Going up against Castillo’s army does feel like a decidedly different experience than the mercenary bands or ragtag pirates of Far Crys past – and not just because of how the AI handles combat encounters. The stark, orderly designs of uniforms and government buildings, coupled with the propaganda plastered all over and/or blaring out of every speaker and television – with Esposito finding an engrossing balance between menace and smugness in his broadcasts – does a lot to reinforce just how outnumbered your character, Dani, and their guerilla cohorts really are.
Finding yourself outnumbered and outgunned has long been part of the Far Cry experience, but the team working on Far Cry 6 seems really invested in pushing those ideas in different directions. “The beauty of Far Cry – and one of the reasons I've been with the brand for so long,” says Navid Khavari, a veteran of the series dating back to Far Cry 4, now the Narrative Director on FC6, “is it's kind of a fresh slate for every game, in terms of location, in terms of context, in terms of story.”
One of the elements I found most compelling throughout the several hours I spent with it is how Far Cry 6 handles the potential nuances of a revolution. The divisions at play within a country in turmoil and the complexities boiling beneath the surface – which might otherwise be overlooked in the are there to see. In my first few hours, I met the leaders of three separate groups of rebels – there was Libertad, what you might call the “classic” rag-tag militia, next a group of veteran rebels from a late 1960s uprising, and then the pseudo-anarchistic La Moral – and nobody agreed on how to get anything done.
“If you look at revolutions throughout history,” Khavari says, “we tend to think of them as homogeneous; one big entity – whereas, when you start to uncover the layers, you're like, ‘Wait a second, there's like 50 different small groups all vying for power.’ And that felt really untapped as a storytelling device.”
"These people all have wildly different interpretations of how to win and what Yara should look like."
Of course, there’s the chance that it could quickly fall into a simple binary of good vs evil – but I’m hoping the story manages to keep things in the grey. It seems to do a good job bucking some of the tropes that similar stories run afoul of – for example, while most rebellion/guerrilla games tend to have all of the civilians cheering for you after every mission, one lady early on straight-up ratted me out to the cops for being a “Fake Yaran.” It was a scripted moment, almost undoubtedly, but coupled with some of the jeering audio bytes I heard from NPCs driving by while I was roaming the countryside, it was a good indicator that we could see a more complex rebellion story than we’re used to.
“We've seen a lot of stories – in [all] media, I'm not just tying it to games – where it's just, ‘We're rebels fighting the evil big bad,’” Khavari says. “And when you look at it, it's like, ‘well, those people all have wildly different interpretations of how to win and what Yara should look like.’ And that was a gold mine for us, story-wise.”
Ultimately, I’m excited to explore more of Yara – personal gripes about health bars aside – because what works in Far Cry 6 works really well. It’s a big beautiful world that offers some interesting new ideas and challenges, and I’m looking forward to seeing just how well this iteration of the Far Cry formula comes together.
JR is a Senior Producer at IGN, and secretly hoping Anton Castillo's BioVida wonderdrug ends up being a link back to those FC1 mutants. You can discuss more video game conspiracies with him on Twitter.
