Since its third installment, the Far Cry series has been met with solidly positive reviews. Many players love the games, aside from one repetitive mechanic that can be observed again and again throughout the series, and notoriously in Far Cry 5, and fans are hoping Ubisoft will avoid it with the highly anticipated Far Cry 6.
It's no mystery that the format of Far Cry is comparable to Assassin's Creed, another major Ubisoft franchise. Both push the players through the world and story by tasking them with discovering towers that give an overview of the area and liberate settlements from the opposing force. Both titles are geared towards stealthy takeovers of enemies but allow for more open-ended combat if desired. Ubisoft has a habit of recycling unoriginal quest types, but perhaps the element that annoys Far Cry fans the most is being kidnapped and forced to escape.
Far Cry 5
While this mechanic is repetitively used throughout the Far Cry series, the biggest offense is its redundancy throughout Far Cry 5. In-game, while the player is off exploring, looting, liberating camps, or running errands—doing anything, really—the player will suddenly be ambushed by one crazy cult member and their army. Then, they'll wake up, looking at said cult member, who will give some grand speech, typically about sinning, to the main character. Finally, after they leave, the Junior Deputy must escape before they or someone else dies.
Online forums are littered with fans' complaints about this plot device, saying it's "unrealistically laughable" how many times the Junior Deputy escapes a near-death scenario throughout the game. Others feel that it makes the player character look like a pathetic wimp, wondering how the capturing got forced into the game so many times.
Far Cry 5 oversees Hope County, a fictional location in Montana. While it may be made up, the developers say it's inspired by real cults and landscapes in the state. Hope County is controlled by the violent religious cult known as Eden's Gate and is divided up into regions that are each controlled by a different leader under Joseph Seed. The areas are controlled by Faith and Joseph's brothers John and Jacob. In each region, the player can be captured at least twice and a few more times after that depending on how far the player advances in liberating the area from Eden's Gate.
This is done typically through the use of mind control tactics such as hypnotic music by Jacob and a drug known as "Bliss" by Faith. Perhaps Ubisoft meant for this plot device to not only be used to drive the story but also to show how Joseph Seed has garnered such a notorious following, but it didn't read to fans, who were understandably annoyed. Players were at least thankful that the cutscene could be skipped after a few times of the instant-captures going down. And some others were able to trick the game and avoid being kidnapped a couple of times, but not without dedicating a chunk of their gameplay time to doing so, instead of focusing on missions and story.
Far Cry 6
Far Cry 6 was announced at Ubisoft's most recent livestream conference and is slated for release February of 2021, and it's easy to anticipate where this mechanic can be repeated. The story will follow Dani Rojas, a guerrilla soldier who had tried to avoid the war on the Cuba-inspired island of Yara. The player leads the fight for freedom against Yara's oppressive leader, Anton Castillo, and his son Diego. While Ubisoft can easily regurgitate this mechanic with Anton forcing his soldiers to capture Dani repetitively, hopefully, the developers will come up with a more original concept to move the story forward this time around.
Far Cry 6 is set to release February 18, 2021, for PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.