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Far Cry 5: Thumbs up, but what’s next?

Far Cry 5 is a great game and a world success but for how long can Ubisoft cash in on his open world winning formula?

Pascal Luban, Blogger

May 28, 2018

3 Min Read

Far Cry 5 is the most recent open world game developed and published by Ubisoft. It is a great game and a world success. The French publisher masters all aspects of successful open world games:

  • Highly diversified environments that bring many surprises and reward exploration

  • Live and credible worlds whose components impact the gameplay and are not there for cosmetic reasons only

  • Interesting narrative backdrops

  • Large choices of actions that allow gamers to play the game the way they want and expand drastically its play length

  • Effective and diversified gameplays.

This recipe is well polished and Ubisoft turned it into a game template used in other hits: Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs, The Division and, to a lesser extent, Assassin’s Creed

However, even if those games offer vastly different backdrops, they tend to offer similar game experiences; when we begin to play one of those games, we know what to expect:  Lot of traveling, progression trees to unlock equipment, higher attributes or new teammates, but also repetitive actions and a narration that is a mere pretext for action instead of offering true drama.

This is an issue: The repetitiveness of the player’s experience over several titles could lead to player’s boredom and affect the commercial success of its future titles. Ubisoft is facing a situation that is both enviable and dangerous: It has developed a winning formula but is has become dependent on it.

Which solutions could Ubisoft develop to preserve the future of its open world franchises?

  • To continue its present strategy which consists in refining its open world game template over each new title. This is the less risky strategy. Actually, it is the one Activision is implementing with success for its Call of Duty franchise. However, the big difference between Ubisoft and Activision is that the latter applies it to one title only, not several of them.

  • To better differentiate each franchise by focusing on one strong feature. For instance, Assassin’s Creed focuses on the historical background of each sequel. Games like Ghost Recon and The Division could benefit from better differentiation in their gameplay.

  • To focus on high quality storytelling. The themes and backgrounds of each Ubisoft open world games are significantly different from each other but that’s not enough to make good narration. In nearly all Ubisoft open world games, it is impossible to develop the slightest empathy toward main characters and secondary ones are shallow stereotypes. Furthermore, narrative arcs are either weak or nonexistent. Now, imagine how a game like Far Cry could benefit from a quality narration like the one found in The Last Of Us!

  • To give up the total freedom of movement and limit the game environment to a semi-open world the way This War Of Mine does it. The benefit of this strategy is to focus development resources on the locations where missions take place. That will allow level designers to develop more interesting and better tuned missions.

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About the Author(s)

Pascal Luban

Blogger

Pascal Luban is a freelance creative director and game designer based in France. He has been working in the game industry as a game or level designer since 1995 and has been commissioned by major studios and publishers including Activision, SCEE, Ubisoft and DICE. In particular, he was Lead Level Designer on the 'versus' multiplayer versions of both Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Chaos Theory, he designed CTF-Tornado, a UT3 mod multiplayer map built to showcase the applications of physics to gameplay, he was creative Director on Wanted – Weapons of Fate and lead game designer on Fighters Uncaged, the first combat game for Kinect. His first game for mobile platforms, The One Hope, was published in 2007 by the Irish publishers Gmedia and has received the Best In Gaming award at the 2009 Digital Media Awards of Dublin. Leveraging his design experience on console and PC titles, Pascal is also working on social and Free-to-Play games. He contributed to the game design of Kartoon, a Facebook game currently under development at Kadank, he did a design mission on Treasure Madness, zSlide's successful Free-to-Play game and completed several design missions for French and American clients. Pascal is content director for the video game program at CIFACOM, a French school focusing on the new media industry.

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