Surprising no one, Ubisoft is attempting to distance Far Cry 6 from its political influences and offer a ‘guerrilla fantasy’.
In Ubisoft’s Far Cry 6, you take control of a guerrilla fighter whose mission is to help overthrow a tyrannical despot, who holds a fascist grip on the Cuba-inspired setting of Yara. But, according to Ubisoft, the game won’t contain any sort of political message.
In an interview with TheGamer, Far Cry 6’s narrative director Navid Khavari explained that, while the fictional island of Yara does draw heavy influences from Cuba, Ubisoft wishes to avoid making a political statement about the island itself.
‘We realised it’s a complicated island and our game doesn’t want to make a political statement about what’s happening in Cuba specifically.’
While this does explain why Far Cry 6 takes place in a fictional setting, Khavari also admits that he and his team spoke to actual guerrilla fighters involved with the Cuban Revolution from the 1950s and drew a lot of inspiration from their stories.
‘The original inspiration was Guerrilla Warfare and what is that guerrilla fantasy, which is obviously tied to revolution. When you talk about guerrillas, you think of the guerrillas in the 1950s and 1960s, we actually went down there to speak to actual guerrilla fighters who fought back then, and we just really fell in love with their stories.’
This isn’t to say the game’s narrative will completely lack any nuance though, and be a simple liberation power fantasy. Khavari adds that, given the complexity of revolutions, the characters that players interact with will be equally complex.
‘We have this melting pot of motivational complexity where we tried to translate that into the gameplay and the story. So tonally, it sort of already existed. But for us, thematically, unifying that into the guerrilla fantasy felt pretty natural.’
It’s rather puzzling to hear claims of Far Cry 6 being apolitical, despite its blatant real-world influences, but this is a tune Ubisoft has sung before.
The likes of Far Cry 5, The Division, and Watch Dogs: Legion have all featured narratives with heavy political inspiration and yet, every time, Ubisoft has insisted that none of meant to offer any deeper message beyond ‘save the day/beat the bad guy.’
In 2018, Ubisoft Massive’s COO even said politics in games were bad for business.
Ubisoft seems unaware that deliberately claiming its games are apolitical is a political statement in and of itself, but it’s clear that the publisher’s stance isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Far Cry 6 releases on October 7 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, PC, Stadia, and Amazon Luna.
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