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

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.

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.