Þulr Óðinsson

I just finished playing through Far Cry 6, and I find myself genuinely mourning the characters and feeling of community I'm leaving behind... I'm not talking about people with whom I played online; I played solo, offline. Rather, I'm referring to the wonderful story and character development in the game. I imagine it's not easy to pull off, given the nature of the medium of PC games when it comes to storytelling. I've too frequently experienced losing my feeling of connection to the story in a game, due to too many grinding, senseless missions that felt overly formulaic, often seemingly there only to make the game arbitrarily longer. Now, I'm not saying there is no repetition here, an example being the capturing of checkpoints and bases, but in these cases it makes sense, because you're liberating Yara! Also, they inject little bits of story for each of the bases, which helps soften the repetition and give an added layer of purpose to the liberation of each base. Earlier I referred to the feeling of community that Far Cry 6 stirred in me... the connection to the characters and story line. This comes from, I believe, a combination of quality story telling, rich character development, and spot-on pacing. I found that I could easily balance exploration with story missions so that I was farming enough materials to keep up with weapon and gear accumulation and upgrades, while not feeling like I was losing my sense of being immersed in the story and purpose of what I was doing in Yara. Another unique aspect of Far Cry 6 that really helped draw me in and make it feel more like a real world that I was escaping to, were the missions of celebration! I loved that there were story missions, where you just hung out with your La Libertad friends and had a party to celebrate a victory or, in another instance, to help a friend work through a painful time. Beautiful... These rounded out the story, so it wasn't just kill, capture, repeat. I also appreciated that, while the majority of the game is in 1st person, there were times that switched to 3rd person. I liked that this allows you to see your character from time to time; I've read that for some this reduced their sense of immersion, but for me it actually deepened my connection to Dani. As you can tell, I'm very story-focused when I play a PC game, and Far Cry 6 has this in spades. That's not all it has, though, the graphics and game-play mechanics are phenomenal. I felt put off at first by the new concept of changing outfits for different scenarios, because each outfit gave certain, situation-specific perks, rather than having the usual skill tree, but this grew on me and I found myself liking it later in the game. My main struggle with it is that I came to identify my version of Dani with a certain look, and I felt little conflicted about this when she had to change into other outfits. Overall, Far Cry 6 was the most satisfying, emotionally moving gaming experience I've had in a long time... maybe even since Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Thank you for a wonderful journey!