Far Cry 6

My Ubisoft game binge continued even further when Ubisoft+ was free for a month again right after I was done with Assassin's Creed Revelations. In addition to Far Cry 6, I was going to use the month to play through AC Valhalla's DLC but they announced the game would be still getting one final story update (which it just got now in December) so I decided to postpone that until next time. Far Cry 6 also took a lot longer to beat than I had anticipated. I did however briefly revisit AC Odyssey as well for the crossover story it got. Turns out there's not much actual crossover on Odyssey's side: Kassandra just has a bit of a holiday trip and prepares to live through the ages with the Staff.

Livin' la vida loca

I got an impression that Far Cry 6 borrowed from Just Cause's design book. Its setting is very similar to those of that series: Yara, a fictional island state in the Caribbean Sea with a tyrannical ruler, El Presidente Antón Castillo, played by Giancarlo Esposito (one may know from TV shows such as Breaking Bad and The Mandalorian). In addition, Yara has a unique resource: a cancer treatment Viviro, developed from Yara's tobacco.

You take the role of a guerrilla, causing chaos and fighting to overthrow the dictator like in Just Cause. Causing too much trouble in a short period of time causes heat meter to fill up and elite soldiers to be sent after you. They can be annoying when one of them is still somewhere hiding, aiming at you with a missile launcher to blow your vehicle up just when you thought things had calmed down.

One of your allies in Libertad is Juan Cortez who very much reminded me of Tom Sheldon (from Just Cause). Supremo, the magical multipurpose gadget backpack Juan gives you felt like it was from that series as well.

I don't personally care for game studios paying to get a big-name star -- and their likeness -- into a game. I feel that all it accomplishes is to pull you out of immersion, reminding you of the actor's other roles. Esposito does play his role convincingly well though.

Your character, Dani Rojas, is also back to having voice after the silent protagonists of Far Cry 5 and New Dawn. There's a charming detail how Dani will start singing along to a selection of different radio songs playing in a vehicle. (Apparently the Saints Row series has done this before.) Female Dani's singing voice however sounded so different to her speaking that I had to look up if it was really the same person. And it was not: Nisa Gunduz didn't feel fluent enough in Spanish to sing all the different genres of music Ubisoft wanted and so they had Humberly Gonzalez do the singalongs. Which is a shame 'cause I like Gunduz's voice. Also, there is simply a stupid amount of setting-fitting licensed music in the game.

Her lips are devil red

And her skin's the color mocha

She will wear you out

Livin' la vida loca

Far Cry 6's story is ultimately nothing special but I liked it already more than Far Cry 5's just for the fact that it's not so hostile towards player agency. A couple of times you do open a door only to become a helpless subject of torture but that's far less than in the previous game. There was also one moment when mission text tells you to leave the guy you were after but I decided to try if I could kill him anyway. It turned out to be a valid action -- I like it when a game gives you options without saying you actually have them. It made me suddenly think back in the game: had I missed there being similar hidden choices before?

I enjoyed not being able to tell where the narrative was going. I knew that it would somehow end in a situation that would allow continuous play after the ending -- how else would you make players return for microtransactions -- but I wasn't sure how the game would get there. The big unknown for me was the president's son, Diego. I couldn't figure out how he would fit in the game's ending.

Uncharacteristically to the series, drug-induced scenes are scarce. I wonder if that is because the game was developed by Ubisoft Toronto instead of Montreal. Toronto was a co-developer on Far Cry 5 but this one was just by them. (As much as that is true for Ubisoft anyway: I believe they regularly have their studios share workload on some level.) I didn't mind it at all because they're never my favorite parts of the games. Far Cry always becomes less fun when your options are being limited. One such boring mission is a Stranger Things crossover one -- which you by the way shouldn't do until you have gotten the standard AR-C rifle. The mission gives you a special one which will cause the standard one to become unobtainable and always remain grayed out in your loadout options. They should probably fix that.

Potato struggle

My now ancient PC's specs are merely above what the game requires for 1080p/30fps on low settings -- they must have added some bells and whistles to the engine because the previous title I could still run in 1080p/~60fps on mostly medium settings.

30 fps is not enough, especially for a shooter, so I played the game in 720p. That certainly didn't do the game's visuals any favors and sure as hell made sniping with a low magnification scope challenging: it's hard to tell from 6 pixels where the head is. But at least the game ran at nearly 60 fps except for some more demanding locations like resistance camps where camera goes into third person. Most cutscenes also play in third person which is a new thing in the series, as far as I know.

The game, or the Ubisoft Connect overlay, complained about VRAM supposedly running out too. 4GB should be enough for low settings but I'm guessing it's GTX 970's "4GB" that was causing trouble. (Having two monitors could affect it too.) Maybe I should buy one of the less expensive 6GB cards to extend the lifespan of my desktop PC a bit. I could then play some games that vehemently require more than 4GB to run like Guardians of the Galaxy. That would certainly be less of a spending than a whole new computer at once. Anyway...

Same old Far Cry, mostly

Core gameplay-wise Far Cry 6 is almost disappointingly identically to the previous installments. While it's mostly smooth and enjoyable, the old annoyances continue to be annoying: getting kicked to the ground by enemies, ledge-grabbing being so oddly clunky (compared to something like Dishonored), and healing animations taking two days to finish. Ubisoft Toronto for some reason decided to go back from a compass to using a distracting minimap as well. Although points to Ubisoft again for having an option to disable hold-to-interact. I like that it's slowly becoming a standard accessibility option. I don't need it for a disability though; just for saving time.

One design decision where the developers really fumbled in this game was the removal of perk trees. The perks are still around but as gear pieces. The positive aspect of it is that exploration and doing missions feels rewarding. However, there are more negative sides to it.

First of all, you can only wear 5 pieces of gear at once, meaning you only get 5 perks. That leaves you rather underpowered. You can save additional loadouts but their problem is the same as with Mass Effect: Andromeda's profiles -- it's too bothersome to switch. There's not much of a power progression either since once you have a gear piece in every slot, most of the stuff you find is just side grades. There are very few pieces that have a more powerful effect than another piece. And even more have same identical one. There is some sort of enemy scaling system based on your guerrilla level but I don't think it has hard damage affecting numbers like the tiers in New Dawn.

I mostly wore stuff that gave speed increasing perks. You can have a pretty high sprint velocity if you do so. I liked that a lot: less time spent on traveling. The game has transmogrification too, as is tradition, though the gear (at least on my graphic settings) wasn't that great looking. I did like the looks of the pink lights on the gloves from the Far Cry Blood Dragon pack (which was probably given for playing on Ubisoft+ and thus the most expensive version of the game).

Guns have different kinds of ammunition: balanced, soft target, and armor piercing. Early on I kept one gun with armor piercing and one with soft target, but then I discovered that armor piercing is fine against all humans as long as you aim for the head. My favorite gun in the series, the Vector SMG had been unfortunately moved behind a paywall but the game gave me just enough of the MTX currency to allow me to buy it.

Tanks I found to be unreasonably durable until I learned that there's a simple takedown for them: just disable the tank with an EMP attack first and then jump on it for a context sensitive prompt to destroy it or to take over it for yourself.

The definition of insanity...

I might have skipped this Far Cry game's DLC if they didn't have the challenges for Ubisoft Connect points. The game's three pieces of DLC are sort of action roguelike inspired type of deals in which you play as one of the past villains: Vaas Montenegro, Pagan Min, and Joseph Seed in their respective maps. The DLC give you a slightly deeper look into their personas and are honestly not the worst things ever. But it is kind of silly to do the basically same thing three times (and more if you want to unlock all the challenges).

A 4th piece of DLC dropped just recently too, called Lost Between Worlds, this time letting you play as Dani. It appears to be some sort of scifi adventure, which could be good. At least the Assassin's Creed games are always great when they go beyond mundane. But Far Cry 5's scifi DLC wasn't all that great. I guess I'll revisit Far Cry 6 to check this one out the next time I have the Ubisoft+ subscription active.