Far Cry New Dawn: All in the Family

Far Cry New Dawn was released in 2019 as a spin off of Far Cry 5. The game was initially priced at about $40 which reflects its limited scope. Speaking broadly, I am strongly in favor of developers making further use of already-developed assets such as the world of Hope County, the dialog and weapon systems, and whatever else they can repurpose. Developing new open world games is a massive undertaking, and supposing that each one can hold only one story, only one game experience, is absurd. 

That said, the Hope County presented by New Dawn is in fact fairly reworked, both to reflect time’s passage after the apocalyptic end of FC5, and to, I suspect, give the game an aesthetic recognizably distinct in single screen shots. That aesthetic can be summed up in a single word: pink. Everything is pink! From the rolling fields of blossoms to the many train carriages, storage containers, cars both derelict and running, and even the game’s interface, everything glows with a hot neon pink. I was immediately reminded of the similar spin-off-expansion: inFAMOUS First Light, which bears a similar style.

New Dawn barrels right into the contradictions in tone that Far Cry is famous for. On one hand we have an overarching narrative theme of “family” – everyone is related to someone in this game. Our main quest-giving guide is none other than Kim Rye, whose daughter Carmina was born during the events of Far Cry 5 (with the player’s help of course). We will rescue the pilot and father Nick Rye early on as well. Our main antagonists are twin sisters: Mickey and Lou, who constantly refer to their Old Man. Hurk Drubman Jr. has a child, who is apparently under the care of his cousin Sharky Boshaw. Joseph Seed, it turns out, also has had a son who has taken up leadership of New Eden, remnants of the Project at Eden’s Gate cult.

Next to this potentially fertile area of narrative structure we have the series’ usual slew of mayhem and murder—but right off the bat, we have the Saw Launcher. This first weapon is cobbled together by the player-character while picking through the wreckage of a crashed train full of mercenaries on their way to liberate Hope’s County. The device seems built from bits of a motorcycle including its chain and sprocket, with a left-side handlebar for stabilization. It flings circular saw blades at enemies, ricocheting with remarkable accuracy more often than not. I understand that “post apocalypse” requires a certain amount of makeshift industrial design, but three questions present themselves to me immediately: first, why are there suddenly hundreds of circular saw blades just lying around the countryside? Secondly, are firearms really going to disappear out of Montana a mere seventeen years after the general collapse of society? And third, how is that the player-character manages to improvise the exact same weapon that Grace Armstrong just so happens to have been working on, completely independently? This mash-up of hot pink visuals, an overt appeal to a fast and furious dedication to family, and the post-apocalyptic goofiness put me in the mind of something that, if it were funnier, could have been called Fallout: Love and Thunder. 

Not that these are inherently poor decisions. Ubisoft doubled down on the silliness in the very well-received Blood Dragon expansion of Far Cry 3. Here, though, the punches get pulled and neither the wholesome family values, nor the Tank Girl/Mad Max elements get pushed far enough to become coherent.

After the Saw Launcher, the next mechanical issue that jumped out at me was the combination of myriad bits and pieces (read: currency) that there were to collect across the world, and the upgrade path for the player’s home base: Prosperity. The structure for unlocking weapons, vehicles, explosives, healing agents, and other gameplay elements is more detailed and involved than in the parent game. The economy felt much more part of an online social game than a single-player story game (even an open world game). These were absolutely all the rage for a time, even World of Warcraft had its Garrison during the Warlords of Draenor phase. Now, it feels quite dated. [N.B. I was absolutely expecting the "Expeditions" to be invisible teams of allies fighting their way across a spreadsheet table, as is common in the base development types of games I mention. I was very pleasantly surprised when it was actually me and my player-character getting dropped off-map to take out a bespoke installation!]

Clearly, the various currency types (gears, duct tape, springs, solvent, titanium, yucca fruit, and above all, ethanol) are combined with the scattered Outposts in order to pad out the potential play time. Ubisoft’s open world games really shine when the player is immersed in a stealth-turned-to-shit mission to liberate an enemy stronghold. That remains true here. In New Dawn, the various materials are scattered throughout the physical locations, and are delivered as rewards for liberating them. Even further to this, the outposts can be “scavenged” and effectively returned to the enemy. They are then reoccupied with more difficult enemies and multiple alarm systems for the player to capture all over again, with even higher rewards available.

I ended up doing this for three or four of the outposts I’d liberated, to gather what I thought was just enough ethanol to upgrade Prosperity’s facilities and my own weapons as far as I would need them. At first, this work was pretty frustrating and difficult, but I turned a corner when I got my hands on an upgraded bow. The stealth kill seems far more effective in New Dawn than it was in FC5, and by the end I was able to ghost entire level two outposts quite effectively. 

Aside from the word “family” circled on top of the narrative direction storyboards, the rest of the game’s fiction was paper-thin. I had a fundamental problem with the premise related to time: it didn’t add up. Only seventeen years had passed since the nuclear holocaust that seems to have wiped out society as it had stood. Perhaps seventeen years of nuclear fallout was enough to turn all the animals into technicolor mutants, but then why weren’t any of the people in Hope’s County affected? The areas immediately surrounding Hope County were impassable “radiation zones” and the Highwaymen had only fairly recently rolled into town. Yet, somehow, everything had been painted with the neon pink smiley faces representing that gang of bandits. They’d managed to arrange a fight club, a no-holds-barred demolition derby with a yearly prize winner, and a bullet-making gulag. Yet that’s all they had done—hadn’t destroyed Kim Rye and her group of resisters, hadn’t dropped a torch on New Eden's wooden fortress… strange priorities, is all. 

I also struggled mightily with the Irwin Smalls character, who turns up out of nowhere and plays an absolutely pivotal role in the plot. A Jersey-type a very long way from home, Smalls is a high-ranking member of the Highwaymen who inexplicably invites the player-character to get very close to the twins through a series of ridiculous machinations. The first time I was required to give up my weapons in order to follow him I was deeply skeptical. The second time, and the third time… well. He offered some explanations which boiled down to there being a particular member of the gang he didn’t like whom he wanted killed. This then would justify exposing his bosses (the Twins) to almost certain death? Why?

The game’s final and most desperate ask of the player, especially one who has so recently finished FC5, is to sympathize with an older, sadder Joseph Seed. The PEG cult has been reduced to a bunch of “dirtbag hippies,” who have, incidentally, forsaken all advanced technology (expect the speedboat used to seek Joseph out in the North). Joseph’s triumphant return infuriates his son Ethan, who had expected the player to prove (or make) his father dead to secure Ethan’s position as leader of New Eden.

The basic motivation given to ally with New Eden at all was a numbers game—Prosperity plus New Eden might stand a chance against the Highwaymen, especially if the mysterious powers that the New Eden members were said to have had. Just a few could defeat whole groups of the Highwaymen, taking bullets without falling, and vanish. So, one is forced to ask, why do they need Prosperity’s help? Also where did those super-cultists go? I could have used the help down the line...

As it turns out, these mystical powers are bestowed upon those lucky enough to have a soul that Joseph Seed approves of, whom he allows to eat from a not-at-all on-the-nose pink apple tree at the top of a waterfall. After defeating the enraged beast inside of me, I emerged with new perk powers to upgrade, including the ability to press R3 to ignore injuries and deal wildly increased damage myself. 

Newly empowered, I was dropped into a penultimate boss fight against the Twins. I had my upgraded bow, assault rifle, plenty of ammunition, and in the end used none of it. The winning strategy in this first-person shooter, as it turns out, is to hit the Wrath button, and beat your enemies over the head with a spikey aluminum baseball bat until they fall down. I especially did not appreciate the number of dogs I had to kill this way.

The final sequence between the Twins was particularly macabre. Given that this is indeed a first-person shooter, the camera is usually the eyes of the player-character. So, as the boss fight sequence ended, we witness the two girls crawl towards one another with the last of their strength. They share a number of quips full of false bravado as they admit that perhaps they were wrong, that they did indeed turn out like their Old Man, and that the younger twin should definitely not die before the older one (she does). We are forced by the designer's invisible hand to stand there, silently gawking at the dying sisters throughout all this. Eventually we are freed, and are offered the chance to kill the remaining Twin as she lies beside her dead sister. I declined. 

After this cinematic malpractice, we learn that Ethan has of course defied his father and eaten of the forbidden fruit himself (why did he not do this before?) and transformed into a raging black demon creature. His soul was somehow far less pure than mine, the mass murderer. Joseph bid me to intervene and stop his son. The Wrath-rage and spike-bat combination worked even better on the hulking beast than on the faster and smaller Twins, and I made relatively short work of him.

At this point, Joseph’s paternal grief kicked in, and he came screaming into the glade to cradle his son’s dying body. He laments over his dead and dying family, his misguided trust in whatever he thought was the vision of God, and still seems to believe that he is the crux of it all. “Give me God’s justice,” he says, as he pulls my gun towards his chest. “Release me.” 

This time, I fired.