Quite a lot of time has passed since Ubisoft released a new Far Cry game. For the past decade or so, the FPS series has received new installments on a near-annual basis, mirroring Ubisoft’s release cadences with its other franchises, like Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy‘s. Since the launch of 2021’s Far Cry 6, however, there hasn’t really been any official news on the future of the Far Cry franchise, whether in terms of new mainline game announcements or even spin-offs reveals. The only publicly-revealed information about upcoming Far Cry titles comes not from Ubisoft itself, but rather from Tom Henderson and other insiders.
Recently, Henderson reported that Ubisoft is working on not one, but two new Far Cry games. One of them is a mainline singleplayer installment in the series, codenamed Project Blackbird, and another is a multiplayer extraction shooter, tentatively titled Project Maverick. Considering Far Cry has never delved into the realm of extraction shooters before, Project Maverick is perhaps the riskiest of the two games, assuming they exist. Therefore, Ubisoft should try to avoid falling into the same pitfalls it fell into with other titles in the same genre, such as Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction.
Related
Far Cry 7’s Biggest Leak Traps It Between a Rock and a Hard Place, But It Doesn’t Have to Be
One rumored Far Cry 7 feature has been a huge talking point among fans, and while controversial, there could be a clear solution.
Judging by the information that has been revealed about it so far, Project Maverick sounds a lot like the Ubisoft-developed extraction shooter Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Extraction. Released back in 2022 on all non-Nintendo platforms, Rainbow Six Extraction is a spin-off of the highly-successful 2015 FPS Rainbow Six Siege. In the game, players are dropped into alien-infested locations, grouped together in teams of up to three people, and must work alongside each other to complete a set of given tasks, most of which involve collecting intel or extracting data in some way. Stealth is also, surprisingly, a major part of Rainbow Six Extraction‘s gameplay loop.
If Rainbow Six Extraction‘s premise sounds familiar, that’s because it’s based off of and, therefore, very similar to a certain limited-time game mode in Rainbow Six Siege called Outbreak. In fact, some may say it’s a bit too similar. Despite being a standalone game, Rainbow Six Extraction contains a lot of the same operators (a.k.a. player characters), features, and skill sets that are present in the 2015 shooter. That’s somewhat understandable, given the fact that the two titles are set in the same universe, but the overall lack of original content in Extraction hinders its replay value and prevents it from truly standing out.
Rainbow Six Extraction got off to a decent start in the first week after its release, attracting more than 3 million players across all platforms. Only a few months later, though, the game’s popularity decreased dramatically, and player counts for the game fell to dangerously low levels. Ubisoft ultimately ended support for Extraction less than a year after its launch. While some may have different explanations on the matter, many will argue that Rainbow Six Extraction wasn’t able to last long simply because it didn’t have enough content, and what little content it did have was far too repetitive.
Project Maverick Needs to Stand Out from Project Maverick And Be Content-Rich At Launch
If Project Maverick is indeed in development at Ubisoft as rumors suggest, then the company needs to ensure that the game has enough quality content at launch in order to avoid having another Rainbow Six Extraction situation on its hands. Furthermore, Ubisoft needs to differentiate Project Maverick from its singleplayer counterpart, Project Blackbird. Reusing assets between the two games isn’t an issue, but if they both share the same gameplay mechanics, skill sets, and weapons, then they may end up feeling samey. There are a lot of ways a Far Cry extraction shooter can go wrong, as Rainbow Six Extraction indicates, but hopefully, Ubisoft can defy all odds by releasing a unique, content-rich game in the end.
Far Cry
Far Cry is a long-running first-person shooter franchise set across diverse locations around the globe. Developed by Ubisoft, the Far Cry series features open worlds, unique characters and villains, and tons of weapons.