The future of the Far Cry series will see multiplayer bits pushed “more predominantly”, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. The exec said this thing on stage at a conference in Saudi Arabia last month (thanks, Game File), around the same time he announced the Assassin’s Creed Mirage DLC the company have partnered with the Saudi government on.
Asked about the future of the series that brought us that one scene where the pirate guy talks about the definition of insanity before kicking you into a big hole, Guillemot said that the publishers’ goal “on Far Cry [is] really to bring the multiplayer aspects more predominantly pushed, so that it can also be played for a long time by players.”
Yves, believe me, you can play a single player game for a very long time. His comments come a couple of years on from reports claiming that Ubisoft were working on both the next mainline entry in the series, Far Cry 7, and a multiplayer-only spin-off. Kotaku’s report at that point alleged Far Cry 7 will see the series move on from the Dunia engine, in use since Far Cry 2. The muliplayer game was claimed by Insider Gaming to be an extraction shooter set in the Alaskan wilderness.
While Far Cry’s always been more of a single-player romp of explosions and bullets for me, though the last couple of entries have obviously featured plenty of co-op in addition to traditional online multiplayer. I can’t recall the matches and modes themselves being anything exceptional, if still fun. However, the map editors they came with were brilliant if, like me, you were a 15-year-old who liked building houses and hideouts, but reckoned getting really into Minecraft would be the final nail in your secondary school cool factor coffin.
Then again, maybe I’m not the person to ask given I’ve still not given Far Cry 6 a go, despite having played every other entry since 2. I just keep forgetting 6 exists, then remembering, reading reviews, and concluding that it’s probably not worth it until the next sale, by which point I’ve forgotten again. Far Cries 2 and 3 were the shooter’s peak in my book, at their best when you were setting half of Africa on fire just to kill three guys or blowing an outpost into the sea. My dad, meanwhile, swears by the original and caveperson spin-off Primal.
I’d interrupt his latest Horizon: Zero Dawn playthrough to ask if he’d care about a multiplayer-only Far Cry, but I think I know what the answer’d be.