The Stone Age is coming to Far Cry.
Publisher Ubisoft held a special livestreaming event today to announce a new game in the Far Cry series called Far Cry: Primal. This game takes the first-person survival elements of that franchise to a new extreme by setting the adventure during the Stone Age. It will hit PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on February 23. It will also come to PC in March.
In Primal, players take the role of Takkar, a hunter who is the only person left after his group goes on a hunt. To survive, players will need to take down prey, learn to use fire and craft weapons, and more.
Here’s the first trailer from Far Cry: Primal:
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“The interesting thing about Far Cry is that it’s flexible,” Ubisoft executive producer Dan Hay said in a canned statement. “So when a team proposed to explore the idea of a Far Cry taking place during the Stone Age, we just said ‘let’s hear it!’ And the more we heard about it, the more we realized how much of a damn good idea it actually was.”
In another statement, Ubisoft creative director Jean-Christophe Guyot explained that idea as a new way of expressing the core fundamentals of the Far Cry franchise.
“The Stone Age is the perfect setting for a Far Cry game,” said Guyot. “Far Cry usually puts you at the edge of the known world, in a beautiful, lawless and savage frontier. The Stone Age is, in a way, the very first frontier for humankind; it’s the time when humans put a stick in the ground and claimed land for their own, the time when we started climbing the food chain. That came with conflict, against other humans of course, but also against nature itself.”
While Ubisoft is building up Primal as a bold new direction for Far Cry, it also looks like it is an attempt to release a fresh entry in the series while Ubisoft develops a Far Cry 5. That is similar to what the company did with Far Cry: Blood Dragon, a special off-year version of the franchise that was smaller and more stylized than a typical game in the series. Blood Dragon’s main crux was that it was like a 1980s sci-fi action film — it had interlaced video, a buddy-cop storyline, and cheesy one-liners. It also heavily relied on content that Ubisoft built for Far Cry 3.
This Stone Age take looks like it is doing the same thing for Far Cry 4 that Blood Dragon did for 3. An example of that is that Ubisoft can quickly take the elephants it built for Far Cry 4 and reskin them to look like woolly mammoths.
Ubisoft is well known for taking its franchises and making them into annual releases. It did that to great success with Assassin’s Creed — although that series is potentially on the decline after many fans expressed dissatisfaction with last year’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Now, Ubisoft has quietly done the same thing with Far Cry, and it seems like it’s something that could work.
