Far Cry 6 Story, “Is Political”

“Our game is political,” remember when people were scared to say this? I still don’t understand why. It seems just about everything, including stupid space battles between good and evil in Star Wars, gets politicized because we’re horrible little cretins that will project our views onto everything. Then when something is overtly political, say a game called The Division 2, set in the heart of American politics and an outbreak, then it’s “politics are bad for business,” apparently.

It seems that Ubisoft has changed its tone recently, when the new Far Cry 6 was revealed on Friday. The reveal came with a handful of announcements, including a weapon that fires discs, discs of the “Macarena,” and yes, when you have the gun out, it plays the “Macarena.” That right there, that’s how you make an announcement I am interested in. However, in the days following, Navid Khavari, the narrative director of Far Cry 6, has come out to say a few words about the story.

Khavari said in a statement Monday, “Far Cry 6 about the conditions that lead to the rise of fascism in a nation, the costs of imperialism, forced labor, the need for free-and-fair elections, LGBTQ+ rights, and more.” Going on to say, “My goal was to empower our team to be fearless in the story we were telling, and we worked incredibly hard to do this over the last five years.” He continued on with a note of the inspirations, including Cuba and other countries with recent political revolutions.

He then spoke of the team and his personal experience with a lifetime of politics surrounding them, writing that some of that may feed into the story. However, Khavari remarks that some will try to take a binary political statement from the game as a stance on real-world events, which he believes shouldn’t be the case. Stating, “What players will find is a story that’s point-of-view attempts to capture the political complexity of a modern, present-day revolution within a fictional context.” He hopes that instead of one sound-bite, players will let the story speak for itself.

Part of me hopes Khavari is right; however, I’ve played Far Cry and other Ubisoft games that skirt on the realm of politics. They don’t always land with complexity. Most notable is Far Cry 5, with a story that is best described as getting in the way for several hours of really fun gameplay. When it comes to a domain of complexity, sometimes the internet and video games aren’t the best places for that. The conversation devolves into shouting matches, not well-reasoned debate. I want to give Khavari’s story a chance, if not for the “Macarena” gun then for the story. However, this is also the series with a giant woman with her breasts out trying to kill you and drug-fueled cultists.