Far Cry Primal, which may not have any dinosaurs, but still has the potency to present an experience unlike any that gaming players have had before. For the first time in video game history, we have a AAA game braving the stone age specifically the Mesolithic period between 10,000 BC and 5,000 BC, when humanity was trying to carve out a place for itself among the mammoths.
Real Hunting
With what seems to be more of a focus on hunting, The hunting in Primal is less like following an icon on the screen for 30 seconds and more like. The hunting for your next wallet in the last two Far Cry games was usually a matter of going to marked spot on a map, injecting a magic animal spotting potion, and violently subtracting hit points from the nearest fur based life form unless its skin could be stripped and stuffed with cash.
Hunting is a combination of patience and detective work. Looking for signs of your prey, carefully gathering clues about its size and what direction it is heading and how recently it was heading there, following, and looking for more signs.
It is a brave new direction for the series to take, daring to deny gaming players the luxury of picking off your enemies with a sniper rifle from a mile away, or driving and paragliding your way around the map like Richard Branson decidedly does around his private paradise island.
The game is being developed by the publisher’s flagship studio Ubisoft Montreal, with help from teams in Toronto, Kiev, and Shanghai. It will not be small spin off like the ’80s infused Blood Dragon; Ubisoft depict Primal as “a full mature single player experience.”
It is one thing to say there is no guns, and another thing to allow players to craft a 15 round miniature wrist mounted auto loading explosive arrow launcher and then pretend it isn’t a gun. Bows and arrows do not specially thrill me personally, but if we are going Stone Age.
It is coming February 23rd, 2016 to the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, while a PC version will ship in March.
