Far Cry Primal

The amount of interesting games on Ubisoft+ was getting pretty low, even nonexistent. But because I still had two whole weeks of the cheap month left, I had to dig up something. I ended up on Far Cry Primal.

Far Cry without guns

The game is pretty much what I had expected -- and why I hadn't bothered with it before: a Far Cry without guns. Some people seem to love it, especially with its survival mechanics enabled, but for me the lack of explosions takes a lot of the fun out.

Sneaking in first person perspective in a wilderness environment is not a particularly great experience either: you have hard time time seeing enemies while their perception isn't blocked by foliage nearly as much. It's weird that Primal lacks the highlight vision drug Far Cry 4 had before it. Being able to see enemies through bushes and trees would have been really useful. Primal does have a bird's eye view scouting though, which a year later became a staple in the Assassin's Creed series. I didn't use it too much because I found it a little bit too janky in this game: enemies being difficult to spot and tag.

Primal is set around 10000 years BCE. Characters speak a fictional, simple language: I started to recognize some commonly used words. I guess that there was no danger of Elias Toufexis to be mistaken for Adam Jensen this time -- he returned to voice a Far Cry protagonist after having been booted out of his role as Jason Brody in Far Cry 3.

The player character Takkar ends up being the savior and leader for his scattered and useless Wenja tribe whom are threatened by hostile Udam and Izila tribes. Takkar discovers he's quite the animal whisperer and you as him get to summon all manner of beasts to your aid. I wonder why animal mounts were not included in Far Cry 5 that followed Far Cry 4 and this game. Maybe horses got dropped due to time constraints and only got to be in Far Cry 6 after.

The series' usual heavy type enemies are amazingly spongy in this game: no armor piercing bullets for easy win. I'm not sure if there's any way to make them die faster outside takedowns but luckily Death From Above can be used in open combat quite easily. I was constantly scanning for big rocks or some other elevation to jump off when fighting the heavies.

Another notably difficult event was the boss fight against the Izila tribe's leader. I had to retry it four times and I was playing only on Normal difficulty. The boss's damage output is high and not being careful in the open gets you killed quickly.

A more tedious type of difficulty are the many caves the game has you search for collectibles. Spelunking in the dark caves gets old quickly: always the same things for same rewards. Occasionally there were these spiky shrubberies you need to burn to make way. They looked suspiciously similar to those in Agony -- did Madmind straight up copy them from this game?

Completionist-hostile design

Far Cry Primal too was released before Ubisoft started having softer level caps in their open world games. There once again were activities left on the map after I had already maxed everything: not a rewarding experience for a completionist in that way. You can hit experience cap before you have maxed out your perks, after which you need to do activities that specifically grant actual perk points as rewards. That is such unpolished design. There's a limited amount of max health you can get from perks too, meaning that there ones that do nothing. It's perplexing that even in 2016 a big game release could still have so half-assed skill system.

Thanks to my new graphics card, I could for once install an optional higher definition texture pack. By today's standards they weren't super sharp and didn't do much for how the environments often don't look very realistic. I don't know exactly what's wrong with it. Maybe how in Primal foliage looks like it was placed around by a human whereas in The Witcher 3 for instance, plants looked they could have grown in places naturally.

I sometimes wished Ubisoft Montreal had put some anachronistic wingsuit or parachute in the game so that I could have jumped off high places. I was wishing for such a feature so hard that at one point I thought it was actually happening. Only as I was watching Urki about to jump off a cliff while some woodwind instrument was playing the Assassin's Creed main theme, I realized Urki was Primal's version of the recurring Hurk character. And that no wingsuit was going to happen. The easter egg did get a good chuckle out of me though.

Far Cry 6: Lost Between Worlds

I briefly revisited Far Cry 6 as well for the Lost Between Worlds DLC it got. An extraterrestrial probe of sorts crashes on Earth right next to Dani who proceeds to shoot at it. That gets her trapped inside it in some sort of fragmented virtual world and you have to get her out of it.

The DLC was more straightforward than I had expected: there's barely any randomness or roguelike elements to it. It also features the damage type feature from the main game but forced as an absolute rule: blue enemies take damage only from blue ammo and red enemies from red ammo. It adds nothing to the combat; only the bother of having to press a button to switch your gun's color mode on the fly.

The DLC seemed to have been developed mainly by Ubisoft Kyiv. I reckon the ongoing war hampered things and the DLC didn't get realized in its whole intended scope. Some Ubisoft Connect challenges related to the DLC were still bugged too (like two months after release) but I think they have by now actually managed to fix them. (Ubisoft had also fixed the base AR-C staying locked in the main game if you do the Stranger Things mission before getting it.)

The Far Cry engine is called Dunia