Spoilers for Far Cry 5 and New Dawn ahead.
Recently revealed after some pretty heavy leaks (as is the Ubisoft way), Far Cry 6 is the latest in a long line of open world shooters that’s due for release early next year for present and next-gen.
Set in the present day (so get any of those Vaas prequel theories out of your head), you play as Dani Rojas, a revolutionary in fictional Yara as they look to wrestle their country back from the oppressive President Anton Castillo, played by Giancarlo Esposito, and his son, Diego.
The question is: how is Far Cry 6 explaining away the apocalyptic ending of Far Cry 5 and the events of New Dawn?
After battling with the charismatic cult leader Joseph Seed across Hope County, the protagonist has two options: walk away and then (presumably) die anyway because of brainwashing, or go to arrest Seed and find that a nuclear bomb goes off, leading to them then taking refuge with Seed as the world crumbles.
The latter is the canonical ending, the spin-off Far Cry New Dawn picking things up 17 years later as you are plopped down into a very pink post-apocalypse to battle The Twins with Seed later showing up again, as well as the protagonist of Far Cry 5. The game goes a little off the rails as you eventually gain superpowers, because why the heck not.
This writing looked like it had clearly backed Far Cry into a corner in the same way that Saints Row had no conceivable way of following up the madness of Saints Row IV, which saw you battling aliens as a superpowered president inside a simulation. So maybe 5 and New Dawn weren’t quite as outlandish as that, but it was a big question mark as to where the franchise could go next after those twists.
The answer: apparently just completely ignore them. With Far Cry 6 being set in the present day, it seems that Far Cry’s stories aren’t as connected as we may have thought. There are easter eggs throughout the series that tie things together, one of the most famous showing a connection between Primal and 4, but it appears that they’re looser than we imagined.
There is, of course, Hurk, who appears in most Far Cry games and is the weird and annoying anchor to everything going on, though perhaps he’s supposed to be more of a “wink and nod” character rather than someone to ground all the different narratives, kind of like Johnny in Metal Gear Solid.
That said, it might be the case that Yara, the fictional setting for Far Cry 6, was one of the places left untouched by the nuclear fallout. We only really see the United States in New Dawn, so it could be that the nuclear war didn’t affect everyone around the world. A little more weight is added to this with the fact that President Castillo wants to rebuild a “paradise”, suggesting some kind of haven from the rest of the ruined world. That also might explain why the country is “frozen in time” as mentioned in PR materials, as well as why the citizens of Yara feel so antagonised by El Presidente’s iron fist method of ruling. People tend to get their backs up a bit more when dealing with the stresses of the post-apocalypse, after all.
For that theory to make sense, though, you’d think that it would have been alluded to a bit more than from what we’ve seen of the game so far. I’ve scoured the CGI trailer and the website for some hints of the post-apocalypse and have come up pretty much empty-handed. The only real hint is the appearance of a poster that says “reconstruir el paraiso”, which translates to “reconstruct the paradise”, suggesting some kind of social regeneration following a major event. Yara is a stand-in for Cuba, which is cut off from most of the world. Is it unreasonable to suggest that Yara’s independent nature might have excluded it from nuclear warfare?
It will be pretty interesting to see how Far Cry 6 explains the events of Far Cry 5 and New Dawn the closer we get to its release, or if it bothers to at all. Who knows, maybe we will wake up in a lab and Kristen Bell will be there telling us about some weird apple.
Now wouldn’t that be something?
Far Cry 6 releases February 18, 2021 for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X, Xbox One and Stadia.
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