The news has made the rounds that a Far Cry TV show is in development at FX. While details about the game are currently scant, if it wants to be a hit, it needs to look at the best entry in the franchise for inspiration.
Adapting any video game into a TV show is a difficult prospect, mainly because so many games lack a story loop that works when spread across a lengthy format. Vampire Survivors, for example, would struggle to be adapted to the screen, unless people are really interested in seeing an old man fighting off ghosts with a piece of garlic for multiple episodes. There needs to be a story with a narrative throughline that can be expanded on by actors, while also not needing to be too expensive with its action scenes.
The Far Cry TV Show Can’t Start from the Beginning
When adapting a property with multiple entries, the natural inclination is to look at the first entry in the franchise. This doesn’t really work with Far Cry, as the first game was light on story. The big draw of the original Far Cry was its massive levels, which offered multiple ways to handle objectives. Nowadays, that sort of open design is commonplace, but in 2004, it was groundbreaking.
(There’s also Far Cry Instincts, a remake with new content and its own sequel story DLC, but that shares many of the problems of the original. If anything, it’s worse, as it curbed the open-world elements and made the game more linear, taking away the one major selling point it had.)
Far Cry 2 was a lot better when it came to the story, being centered around a civil war in Africa. While certainly more engaging than the original Far Cry, the second game didn’t exactly set the world on fire when it launched. It still holds up to this day, but it wasn’t the game that put the franchise on the map.
Far Cry 3 Needs to be the Basis for the TV Show
The first two Far Cry games helped establish the franchise as a player in the shooter space, but Far Cry 3 is what really pushed it to mainstream success. Set on the fictional Rook Islands, the protagonist is a member of a group of holidaymakers who have decided to party in the wilds. Unfortunately for them, they run afoul of a pirate named Vaas Montenegro, who captures the group.
The protagonist is Jason Brody, whose brother is slain during an escape attempt. It’s up to him to save his friends and defeat Vaas. Fortunately, he discovers allies, as the island’s natives, including Citra, Vaas’ sister, want to see the pirate defeated. This begins his quest to slay Vaas and free his friends, who are kept in different guarded locations around the island.
Far Cry 3 has an amazing setup for a video game, with an instantly recognizable goal, a villain who is both charismatic and despicable, and a set of achievable objectives that can be completed across multiple play sessions, with each gradually offering the player minor, yet tangible upgrades. These elements combined helped Far Cry 3 become a huge critical and commercial success.
The Far Cry 3 gameplay loop would become the established formula for the series going forward: a charming villain in a fictional country who needs to be taken over, a plucky outcast who needs to work with the locals to free the land, and map markers: lots and lots of map markers.
If anything, this became an issue for the franchise, with many fans feeling that later games copied Far Cry 3 too closely, especially Far Cry 6. There are those who want to see the series take a new approach, especially after four mainline entries that used the same formula. Many fans think Ubisoft has yet to top Far Cry 3, which is another reason to choose it for an adaptation.
For a TV show, Far Cry 3 has all of the elements needed to make it a hit: a great villain, a premise that can be broken up across multiple episodes with escalation and progression, and a relatable goal for the protagonist. The action in Far Cry 3 is also something very doable within a TV show budget, as it’s essentially just guerrilla warfare with guns and fighting in the jungle. Sure, the game had some trippy hallucination sequences, but these can be kept to a minimum.
The show could also bring in Vaas’ voice actor to portray the character on the screen. Vaas was played by Michael Mando, who was excellent in shows like Better Call Saul and Orphan Black. Many fans associate him with the role of Vaas, and it would be incredible to see him fully bring the character to life.
The Far Cry TV Show Needs to Make 1 Big Change
The TV show adaptation of Far Cry 3 has the ability to fix the game’s biggest problem, one that pretty much everyone has criticized for since launch. This was an issue so frustrating that every entry in the series since has gone out of its way to avoid it.
Major spoilers for Far Cry 3.
In Far Cry 3, the player has their climactic and amazing battle with Vaas, the villain whom they’ve been fighting since the start of the game. However, the story isn’t over: there’s another foe behind the scenes. It turns out that the main villain of Far Cry 3 is a guy named Hoyt, a slave trader who is way less interesting.
Getting rid of Vaas and replacing him with some boring foe at the eleventh hour is easily Far Cry 3’s biggest misstep. Vaas has become a classic Far Cry villain and was the game’s selling point in many ways. That’s why he should have been the final enemy, especially as he’s so closely related to the island’s natives.
If the Far Cry TV show does adapt Far Cry 3, it needs to make Vaas the primary antagonist and keep him in that spot until the end. Put a throwaway reference to Hoyt as some mysterious employer he’s working with, but keep him out of the story. If the TV show makes this change, then it will have a major leg-up on the source material.
The Far Cry TV Show Can Adapt Multiple Games
Far Cry 3 has enough material for a single season, maybe two, depending on the length. Fortunately, there are three more games after it that have stories that would also make for an excellent TV show. Far Cry has a ton of potential to expand as a franchise, and that’s just with the material that’s currently available, seeing as more Far Cry games will be launching over time.
The best one to adapt after Far Cry 3 would be the fifth game. This entry focuses on a religious cult in the heartland of the United States of America, with the protagonist facing off against a powerful armed militia while being cut off from reinforcements. Far Cry 5 has an excellent story, though, without getting into spoiler territory, the ending would probably need to be changed if they want to make more entries in the future.
After that, it’s a toss-up over whether Far Cry 4 or Far Cry 6 will be next, as they’re very similar games in a lot of ways. They both have fantastic villains, with Troy Baker’s Pagan Min and Giancarlo Esposito’s Anton Castillo both being the stars of the show. However, their stories of freeing an oppressed nation are very similar. It just depends on what country the producers want to use as the setting: a fictional place in the Himalayas or one in the Caribbean.
(There’s also Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, but that would be very hard to do in live-action. The neon aesthetic would better suit an animated adaptation: at that point, people may as well just watch a playthrough of the game on YouTube.)
There’s plenty of material to adapt for a multi-season Far Cry show. Considering most shows barely survive a single season, turning four games into four distinct runs would be a huge achievement for FX if they can pull it off. If the show is to survive and thrive in an era when there are so many shows out there, it needs to start on the strongest foot possible, by bringing the highest-rated Far Cry game to the screen. That’s the franchise’s best chance of bringing in the crowds, at least initially.
