Another detail confirmed during the presentation was that Valhalla will have a fishing mechanic–and it’s tied into another new system for the game. In Valhalla, your health does not automatically regenerate over time, so you will need to find ways to replenish it. One way is to catch and consume fish.
Nice!
Given that Valhalla is set in 873 CE, the game does not feature actual fishing rods. So you will simply cast a line with your hand and try to catch a fish that way. Once you have a fish on the line, you’ll need to mash the A button to bring it in. You must control the direction of the fish and also the tension of your line to be able to successfully land the fish.
In the demo, we see Eivor catching a bullhead catfish, with the on-screen message stating that it’s a “regular” size, which presumably means there will be bigger and smaller fish (and of different varieties) to catch. We don’t see Eivor choosing the specific type of bait, so it’s unclear if you’ll get to choose what you want to fish with. Also worth noting is that Eivor casts her line from what appears to be a fishing village, but you can also fish from your long boat in the open water.
In addition to catching fish, players can forage for food, like mushrooms, in the wilderness to regain health.
Valhalla releases on November 17 for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. It’s also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those consoles release, and players who buy the game on current-gen can upgrade to the next-gen edition for free.
For lots more on Valhalla, check out GameSpot’s new hands-on impressions in the video above. You can also read Jordan’s interview with narrative director Darby McDevitt and assistant level design director Laurence Letalien about Eivor’s mysterious identity, the interwoven story, and more.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
In the reveal trailer for Far Cry 6, the main antagonist, Yara president Anton Castillo, explains the chaotic nature of power in governing society to his teenage son Diego. His son is poised to take over when the time comes, but for now, Anton wants his son to understand his point of view. Using a hand grenade as a metaphor, the elder Castillo states that, “Our country is like this grenade, except it has two basic parts: the people, and you–and you must clutch them nice and tight. Or we all go boom.”
Far Cry 6 is a game about politics and how radically different views inevitably lead to conflict. Set during an uprising in the country of Yara, which takes stylistic and historical inspiration from the island of Cuba, you’ll join the rebel force made up of citizens to overthrow Anton Castillo and his regime. His ultimate goal is to bring the country out of its period of stagnation and into a supposed new age of prosperity, even if it means oppressing and enslaving the country’s citizens to do it. Since Far Cry 3, the franchise has enjoyed putting its villains front and center, giving them plenty of time to explain their philosophies in elaborate detail. They’re larger than life figures whose presence is evident throughout the jungles, caves, and forests in the open-world settings–and Far Cry 6 is no different.
The new game coming from Ubisoft Toronto leans more heavily into the dynamic of revolution, and how Yara’s citizens rise up to free themselves instead of waiting for an outside savior to do it for them. Far Cry 6’s story is about combating fascism, and you are playing as a member of the anti-fascist movement. Speaking with Far Cry 6 narrative director Navid Khavari, he explained the backbone of Far Cry 6’s plot, and how the game’s central character, Dani Rojas, fits in.
“It all came from a place of really just trying to understand the idea of revolution, and what that really means,” said Khavari. “I started on this game about four and a half years ago, and when we began our research, you look at the history of revolutions, and that of the guerrilla revolution. When we landed on the inspiration of the island of Cuba, and got to spend about a month there for initial research, we got really excited about this idea of a modern guerilla revolution. When you’re looking at any revolution, you’re examining the nature of defiance, systemic oppression, and the idea of how far do you have to be pushed to be willing to pick up a gun–to be willing to risk your life for something you believe in?”
Given the rocky history of Cuba, which has seen its share of oppressive leaders and stagnation due to economic sanctions, Yara’s fictional setting certainly makes for a fertile place to examine the concepts of oppression and revolution in a game. The Far Cry series hasn’t been shy about treading into evocative themes and locales. For Instance, Far Cry 2’s setting in central Africa still remains one of the more harrowing and brutal depictions of conflict in a game. 2018’s Far Cry 5 focused on the antagonist Joseph Seed and his heavily-armed cult that captured the isolated area of Hope County, Montana. While it incorporated certain topics such as conservatism and feeling like “the other,” it often skirted the underlying issues in favor of keeping the priority on the traditional Far Cry open-world hijinks.
Tensions rise in the island country of Yara.
After watching the trailer for Far Cry 6, with Giancarlo Esposito’s powerful performance as Anton Castillo, the imagery of political upheaval, with citizens fighting riot cops and toppling statues was certainly effective–especially in light of what’s going on today. But after playing Far Cry 5, and seeing how it often tip-toed around heavy themes, I have a lingering feeling that the next game will fall into the same trap that its predecessor did. In that, it may not be able to do proper justice to the imagery and themes that it’s presenting in-game. With that said, Khavari seemed to embrace the parallels with the game and with the current global protests against systemic oppression.
“To be very honest, I think it’s actually been quite powerful to watch these themes gain more prominence in the last few months around the world, particularly in the United States, Canada, London. For us, what I’m proud of is when we were looking at building the revolution in Yara, we didn’t try to shy away from difficult subjects and really to draw meaning from that. So I’m hoping players will be able to see that meeting and have those themes resonate with them. I think that’s exciting for us to be able to present in the game.”
One returning feature from previous games coming to Far Cry 6 is the voiced protagonist. In Far Cry 5 and New Dawn, both games featured silent protagonists who were simultaneously the catalyst and passenger for the story. FC6’s central character Dani Rojas–who can be either male or female–has a much stronger presence than previous heroes in the series. Instead of being an outsider who manages to overthrow the antagonistic force and help the country’s citizens throughout a campaign, Rojas is a native of Yara who most definitely has personal investment in the game.
Yara’s capital city, Esperanza.
“When you’re looking at the topic of revolution, it was essential for us to ensure that the protagonist has a personal investment in that revolution,” said Khavari. “With a character like Dani Rojas having that context, to have a history [in Yara] and to have a voice, is very important for us. What’s interesting about Dani is that while they were raised in Yara, they aren’t necessarily looking to be part of a guerilla movement from the onset. One of the interesting aspects for us was seeing this character swept up in the movement, being drawn into it in that way, and embracing the almost David versus Goliath conflict across the entire island. For the series, it’ll be fresh for players to see Dani in cutscenes, to be able to see them make decisions, and interact with other characters.”
Going back to the lead antagonist, Anton Castillo, he has a confident, yet still cold presence that sets him apart from other villains in the series. Instead of the charismatic, yet unhinged Vaas from Far Cry 3, or the flamboyant warlord Pagan Min in Far Cry 4, Castillo is all serious and believes he’s doing what’s best for the greater good. During our talk, Khavari explained that the lead actor did his homework before stepping into the role.
“It was an unbelievable experience [working with Giancarlo]. Right from the beginning, when I flew down to New York to meet with him, he’d done so much research already based on the material that we sent him. He brings an amazing empathy to his characters, and he brought that same empathy to Anton that I wasn’t expecting. He really approached it from the angle of what makes Anton tick? What makes someone who’s so charismatic and intelligent, be able to justify doing such brutal things? He also looked at it from the angle of a father. That level of empathy of you’re ruling a country, but you’re also passing down these very twisted lessons to your son, but you also love your son at the same time. He brought such great nuance and ability in Anton, and he really brought the character to life in a way that I wasn’t expecting.”
Giancarlo Esposito portrays Anton Castillo, the president of Yara.
The showing at Ubisoft Forward was only a small sampling of what’s to come with Far Cry 6. I’m really looking forward to checking out the game in the months ahead to see how these themes come up, and also to explore the really cool and visually exciting setting of Yara. With that said, I hope that the game will commit to having something more to say about the themes and settings that it’s inhabiting.
For more on Far Cry 6, check out our breakdown of everything we know about the game, along with other games shown at Ubisoft Forward.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
The developer confirmed in a post-show livestream that Eivor, the main character of Valhalla, can recruit a cat to join you on your journey. You’ll get the cat by helping a Norse child in town, and then the cat–whose name is Nali–will join your longship and become a “cat raider,” as the developer put it.
This cat will curl up inside your boat, and it will also eat rats to keep your shipmates healthy and safe, it seems. “As you’re riding around the rivers of England, you will see a cat basically walking around your longship, keeping your Viking raiders company,” Ubisoft said.
You can see a portion of the cat mission in the video below.
Valhalla releases on November 17 for PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. It’s also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X when those consoles release, and players who buy the game on current-gen can upgrade to the next-gen edition for free.
For lots more on Valhalla, check out GameSpot’s new hands-on impressions in the video above. You can also read Jordan’s interview with narrative director Darby McDevitt and assistant level design director Laurence Letalien about Eivor’s mysterious identity, the interwoven story, and more.
Click To Unmute
Size:
Want us to remember this setting for all your devices?
Ubisoft has just finished its first Ubisoft Forward event – and announced that it will broadcast later this year.
Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot said that there will be “a lot more to come” from Ubisoft, and an Ubisoft spokesperson said the next conference will include “games news and updates”
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
Become Eivor, a mighty Viking raider and lead your clan from the harsh shores of Norway to a new home amid the lush farmlands of ninth-century England. Explore a beautiful, mysterious open world where you’ll face brutal enemies, raid fortresses, build your clan’s new settlement, and forge alliances to win glory and earn a place in Valhalla.
Far Cry 6 is the next game in Ubisoft’s open-world shooter franchise. While Far Cry 5 brought the series to North America for the first time, and with its follow-up New Dawn taking a surprising turn towards the post-apocalypse, Far Cry 6 brings the series back to its roots in a tropical locale. This return to the series’ roots also brings back a kind of protagonist who has more of a personal stake in the story, and FC6’s lead character will be more present and visible throughout the campaign.
Revealed during Ubisoft Forward, the protagonist of Far Cry 6 is Dani Rojas, is a native of the island of Yara–a country “frozen in time” due to economic sanctions. With the rise of a guerrilla revolution in the country, Rojas gets swept up in the push for change against Presidente Anton Castillo’s regime. Unlike other Far Cry protagonists who are outsiders making their way through a foreign land, Rojas has deep ties to the island, making their investment in its future more personal.
Taking cues from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Valhalla, players can choose from either a male or female version of Dani, and both will be fully voiced throughout the campaign. Furthermore, Dani Rojas will also appear in cutscenes interacting with other characters throughout the game, moving away from the first-person dialogue sequences and making the protagonist more visible.
Before the official reveal at Ubisoft Forward, I spoke with narrative director Navid Khavari about Dani’s background, and how they’re different from other Far Cry protagonists.
“When you’re looking at the topic of revolution, it was really important for us to ensure that the protagonist has a personal investment in that revolution,” said Khavari. “With a character like Dani Rojas having that context, to have a history [in Yara] and to have a voice, is very important for us. What’s interesting about Dani is that while they were raised in Yara, they aren’t necessarily looking to be part of a guerilla movement from the onset. One of the interesting aspects for us was seeing this character swept up in the movement, being drawn into it in that way, and embracing the almost David versus Goliath conflict across the entire island. For the series, it’ll be fresh for players to see Dani in cutscenes, to be able to see them make decisions, and interact with other characters.”
Far Cry 6
Like in Far Cry 5, you’ll be able to interact with a variety of supporting characters, some of whom will join you out in the field to take on Castillo’s men. One of whom is a dog named Chorizo, who can be recruited after a mission.
Far Cry 6 will be handling some heavy topics relating to revolution, fascism, and the nature of power in isolated communities, all of which are topics that are front and center in today’s age. I certainly welcome the change of having the protagonist be more present in those topics, as opposed to having another voiceless hero bouncing around from one mission to the next. So far, the game also has a great cast to tell this kind of story, with Giancarlo Esposito’s headlining as Presidente Anton Castillo.
Ubisoft confirmed during the show that it will hold a second Ubisoft Forward event later this year. The publisher is promising “tons of game news and updates” during the new show. An exact date for the second Ubisoft Forward event has not been announced, but keep checking back with GameSpot for the latest.
Some of the company’s high-profile games missing from the show included the pirate game Skull & Bones and the long-in-development Beyond Good & Evil 2, among others.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla will introduce new narrative elements for the Animus that provide lore justifications for new gameplay possibilities, namely the ability to switch the gender of the player character at will, as well as bring modern-day protagonist Layla into the historical open world.
A recent hands-on demonstration of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla I took part in featured the ability to swap Eivor’s gender from a menu. But it turns out this isn’t a demo feature to allow journalists to show both male and female versions of the character to readers. Talking to IGN, Valhalla’s Narrative Director Darby McDevitt explained – while avoiding any story spoilers – that this is a new gameplay feature to ensure both male and female versions of Eivor are considered canon. The feature is backed up by new lore that upgrades the abilities of the Animus, the machine that allows Assassin’s Creed’s characters to explore the memories of their ancestors.
“You can go into the Animus layer of our game,” he said. “There’s an option to change the memory stream. To explain why would spoil a long-running secret, but I will say that the whole reason for why you can switch [Eivor’s gender] back and forth fully embraces the often overlooked science fiction nature of our series.”
“We’ve got this thing that’s called genetic memory, and we’ve got this Animus,” he added. “What are all the ways you can play with that? And how could we leverage that to make a character that you could choose male or female? We found a way that we think is pretty satisfying.”
While McDevitt would not explain the story reasons for the Animus doing this, it seems reasonable to predict that this is an continuation on from an idea explored in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. In that game, when the Animus scans DNA found on Leonidas’ spear, it finds two potential matches in siblings Kassandra and Alexios, hence your choice of protagonist. For Valhalla, we may be dealing with a damaged DNA sample that cannot determine Eivor’s gender, and so the simulation fills in the blanks based on what Layla/the player asks it to do.
The Animus also has another new ability: to bring modern-day protagonist Laya into the simulation itself, allowing you to control her in the Anglo-Saxon open world. It’s an innovation designed to solve a problem previous games have had.
“The modern day story often grinds the experience to a halt,” McDevitt said. “Taking you out of whatever historical period you’re in and putting you into the present day where you have a bunch of different characters with different skills, different affordances, and different abilities. It really has this kind of hard stop.”
Layla being able to explore the open world prevents that hard stop. “The story is that there are anomalies inside the stimulation. And when you find them as Eivor, Layla and her handlers will pause the simulation, and set up this big thing for her to deal with. It’s a big puzzle, lots of intense puzzle solving and parkour so that you can acquire a bit of interesting data and then close this rift.”
“And so that the experience is much more comfortable,” he adds, “you’re not just going into a loading menu, going into a small office somewhere in the present day. You still get to be Layla, but you get to be Layla in the past. And so that means that all these interesting skills that she may have learned – the parkour, the epic vistas, and the puzzle solving – you get to float right into that without any kind of hitch.”
Watch Dogs Legion was originally meant to come out on March 3, but saw a lengthy delay (and will now arrive on October 29) – thankfully, creative director Clint Hocking says that allowed the game to improve, even allowing the team to incorporate ideas it thought were out of reach before the original release date.
Speaking to IGN, Hocking explained that the delay was due to “reasons external to the project”, and described the mixture of emotions upon being told the release would be pushed back: “Obviously the day the word came down was devastating because you put yourself in the mental mindset of ‘We’re going to close this and get it out the door.’ And that takes a little bit of time to undo but after a few days of stewing in it, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, actually, this is great. This is great.'”
The reason those extra months worked so well for the team was seemingly in how it allowed to team to take its near-finished systems to the next level, particularly its standout “Play As Anyone” idea, where every AI character can be recruited and used for their own generated stats and abilities.
“We were very close when we were ready to ship,” explains Hocking, “and the delay has allowed us to really look at the things that were out of reach for us back then, and how to incorporate those things and add a layer of polish and realization and clarity to the game.”
“So the most important thing I think we’ve done is added a lot more refinement to traits and the abilities that you find on characters in the world, and better ways for aggregating those into individuals. As a consequence of that, we have a lot of cool characters that kind of emerge out of these great traits.”
The idea is that the kinds of characters – and the skills they offer you should you recruit them – will be more varied and interesting, and that they suit the characters themselves better. For instance, an architect with construction site safety gear would be able to enter a restricted construction site – but a construction worker who works on the same site may have the same privileges, but come wielding a nail gun, and able to call in a cargo drone that could let them access hard-to-reach areas.
It turns the population of London into something like a strategic smorgasboard of gameplay opportunities, and potentially a more immediately readable one, where the kinds of clothes someone wears, or the job they have translates to your needs as a player. In a similar vein, progression systems were also tweaked so that players wouldn’t feel punished for experimenting with lots of recruits, rather than specialising in a few.
On the widest level, Hocking says the delay has also allowed the game to better translate its biggest moments, such as uprisings. Each London borough in the game includes activities that weaken the Albion corporation’s control in the area. “Once you do all of those activities in a borough,” explains Hocking, “you get a borough liberation mission, a really custom beat with unique gameplay and a really cool challenge. And then that causes the people in the borough to rise up and that makes them much easier to recruit, and it gets rid of the Albion checkpoints and reduces the Albion presence in the streets. It really makes it feel like you’re actually taking the city back.” The delay apparently allowed the team to turn these from unique missions into moments that communicate the sense of the population rising up to take the city back from their oppressors.
Watch Dogs was already an exciting set of ideas, so the fact that the extra time in the oven has resulted in even deeper systems should hopefully make that wait a little more palatable.
If you want to learn more about Watch Dogs Legion, check out our hands-on preview, where we explain why, “The lack of a primary main character doesn’t detract from the story. Instead, it incentivizes exploring and immersing myself in a world I otherwise may have ignored in favor of mainlining the story.”
[poilib element=”accentDivider”]
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to [email protected].
