Though it might not be obvious just yet, it seems as though some of Ubisoft's franchises are reaching a saturation point. Over the last decade or so, Ubisoft has seen perhaps too many releases for all of its best-selling franchises, seeing fatigue spread rampantly. Rather than take its time between releases, Ubisoft has opted to go for a "more is better" approach with a lot of its IPs, and in the vast majority of cases, this has led to some serious issues. Nowhere is that more evident than with Far Cry.
For almost two decades now, Ubisoft has continued to wring every last drop out of the Far Cry franchise, and though it's far from being a bad video game series, it just doesn't offer fans anything new, and it hasn't for over a decade. To many fans, the last time the Far Cry franchise offered anything truly new and unique was 10 years ago today; on April 30, 2013, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon came out.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon Is Exactly What the Franchise Needs Right Now
Released just a few months after the base game, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was a relatively inexpensive standalone expansion for Far Cry 3, and it's one that's still talked about fondly today, 10 years later. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon took the gameplay framework of FC3, and spun it on its head to produce one of the most unique and creative DLCs of all time, offering plenty of bang for the player's buck.
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon drops players into a cyberpunk parody of 80s Sci-Fi action movies, tasks them with taking down an evil faceless corporation, and sees them kill a few titular cyber dinosaurs along the way. It's a premise that could have easily felt cheap and tactless, but Ubisoft Montreal's overwhelming passion for the source material shines through at every turn. From direct references to Terminator and RoboCop to more subtle homages to campy villains and their lack of real motivations, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is a passion project through and through, and it's one of the core reasons behind the expansion's continued success 10 years later.
It's this extreme level of passion and uniqueness that the Far Cry franchise desperately needs right now. The last few mainline Far Cry games haven't been bad, just woefully uninspired. After Far Cry 3 became one of the most influential and successful open-world games of all time, Ubisoft decided that it was a formula worth repeating, at least another three to five times. While the setting and characters change, every Far Cry game of the last 10 years has boiled down to essentially the exact same gameplay loop, with very little gameplay variation between each entry.
The latest entry in the series, Far Cry 6, felt slightly more original than its last few predecessors, but it really wasn't by much. Though its map was by far the biggest the franchise has seen so far and it introduced some fun new mechanics like skydiving from a fast travel point, Far Cry 6's gameplay loop followed suit once again, tasking players with liberating camps, hideouts, and of course, enough radio towers to shake a crocodile at. And while there's nothing inherently wrong with this gameplay loop, it's just run its course with the vast majority of fans, and it's time for something new. The next Far Cry game needs to take more risks and be more experimental, just like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was. Ubisoft shouldn't be afraid of letting its developers create something they're truly passionate about.