Gameplay

Far Cry 6 is the long-awaited successor to Far Cry 5 (2018), one of Ubisoft's best-selling titles ever. It has been delayed twice, in total by eight months, and is finally coming out tomorrow. This time, the game takes you to a Caribbean island that's suffering under the strong grip of its dictator, played by Giancarlo Esposito. Your mission is to liberate the island, using guerrilla tactics, to gain support from various factions so the evil regime can be overthrown.

Far Cry 6 is a typical Far Cry game—an exotic remote location with lush vegetation you get to enjoy in an open-world view. There's some decent variation in those tropical environments; beaches, waterfalls, towns, villages and jungles, but no ice or desert. You have tons of weapons in your arsenal, ranging from pistols and bows to submachine guns, automatic rifles, sniper rifles, and launchers—around 40 guns in total. On top of that, you get another 40 "uniques" that are preconfigured weapons with unique looks and various improvements. Through crafting, you can add the same improvements to the base weapons, too, but have to find the required resources first, of which some are fairly rare, so you won't be able to improve a lot of weapons at the same time. While the uniques are an easy way to bolster your armory with capable weapons, they can't be customized, so you'll often have to adapt your playstyle to make best use of them. Far Cry 6 sees the addition of "Supremos," some sort of special weapon that can get you out of those "oh shit" situations when you aggro'd a whole camp of enemies and reinforcements are coming.

In addition to weapons, your character can wear five pieces of armor, for which a nice selection of loot is available, too, with unique capabilities. Far Cry 6 doesn't have the Borderlands loot spam, and the gear system isn't nearly as complex as that of some RPGs, but it's still a nice improvement and gives you the option of varying the way you attack your mission objectives.

Missions are mostly "go to x and kill or blow up y." Some missions are a bit more in-depth, though. I've encountered "free prisoner," "steal truck," "jump and climb to make it to the objective" missions, among others. Despite the simple underlying objectives, all those missions are beautifully created, well-scripted, and supported by a good amount of cutscenes. The whole story is split into several arcs, separated by geographical region, each with a different objective. For example, you have to convince a rebellious music band to join your side in one, so they can use their social media influence to support the revolution. Obviously, these people have different interests than that armed rebel group in another region you're supposed to ensnare so they join your cause.

I felt just the right number of characters are introduced for you to relate to them and stay interested in their backstories, which are told at the right pace during the various missions. As you can see from our screenshots, the cutscenes are of high quality and have excellent production value. Far Cry 6's humor is solid. I felt well entertained and had to lol a couple of times. There's also a bit of meta humor, like that one quest that has you vandalize billboards, drunk—the quest counter shows 769 (!) mission objectives left to complete. I'm halfway through the game now I think, around 10 hours played so far. If you turn over every rock, complete every side quest, and all optional points of interest on the map, I'm sure you can get 50+ hours out of Far Cry 6. On top that, there's the multiplayer aspect with co-op PvE and PvP, so you can enjoy the game with your friends, too.

In the first two hours of the game, a lot of things happen, and things feel overwhelmingly complex at first. Also, there's A LOT of walking and running over long distances just to fight for a few minutes. As you progress and understand how the game mechanics work, this mostly becomes a non-issue. I still had Cheat Engine's Speed Hack feature on hotkey, just to cut down on the boring travel times. Just like in other modern open-world games, there's a huge selection of vehicles for transport and combat: horses, cars, trucks, boats, helicopters, and planes. I found the aircraft controls surprisingly approachable, but road vehicles are more difficult to steer, and horses are quite a bumpy ride. I sure get the romantic vision behind that, but to me, it often felt like distances and vehicles were designed to be a time sink to extend the playthrough time. There's a fast-travel feature that works reasonably well—make sure you unlock the base addon first that improves fast travel.

Gunplay is solid. As mentioned, there's a huge selection of weapons that fit all playstyles. Stealth is definitely an option and highly recommended because overall difficulty is higher than I expected from a mass-market title. Ubisoft tried to make the loadout choices more in-depth by including various types of damage: soft-target, armor-piercing, explosion, fire, etc, both outgoing and incoming, so you're supposed to gear up against that and switch equipment often depending on the enemy type. At least for the first few hours that might be slightly challenging, until you figure out that high-powered armor-piercing single-shot headshots are the way to breeze through the game—you'll take down nearly all enemies in one shot. It also seems to me that the head hitboxes are quite big, and I suspect they get enlarged at long distances because it's SO easy to get headshots even with all aiming assists off. This is still entertaining and rewarding. Enemies are of "average" intelligence, I'd say; they do take cover, move around, and use grenades, but there's not much there in terms of AI that one bullet to the head won't take care of. If you're still not good enough, you can lower the difficulty setting at any time, and raise it again once the challenging part is done.

I didn't encounter any serious bugs. There's some minor issues with NPC pathing as they sometimes get stuck, which sucks if it's an NPC you're trying to escort. The "auto drive" feature of vehicles tends to run into other cars while trying to follow the road, the game crashed once on me, plus one GPU driver crash. None of these issues are serious, though. I didn't feel there's a lack of Q&A in Far Cry 6.

Overall, Far Cry 6 is a great game, especially if you liked previous titles of the series. The game doesn't introduce anything fundamentally new if that's what you're looking for, though. Overall, I'd say 8/10, not sure if we'll see any discounts this year, but if you can wait for 2022, you might be able to pick it up at a lower price.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Far Cry 6 uses the latest version of Ubisoft's Dunia engine. Unlike Far Cry 5, which used DirectX 11, Far Cry 6 is a DirectX 12 title exclusively. The developers also included a separately downloadable "High-Res HD Texture Pack," which adds 35 GB to your download size—we enabled this for all our testing on all cards. The game's installed size including HD Textures is 77.1 GB.

Going through our screenshots, you can see that some look truly impressive, but many others look like a game from a decade ago. I went back to my Far Cry 5 article and took a look at the screenshot. Besides better textures, I'm really not seeing much of an improvement. While world geometry and vegetation look good in Far Cry 6, indoor environments and placed objects look VERY poor. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to get these right, we're talking about a multi-million dollar production here, maybe give Giancarlo Esposito less money and hire a few additional artists?

Character animations and voice acting are outstanding, on the other hand. The models of the major characters are detailed richly, secondary characters and most enemies are of clearly lower quality, though. Water, waves, splashes, etc., look awesome and feel incredibly realistic even without ray tracing.

You've probably already looked at our RT comparison shots and wondered "are you fucking kidding me, that's it?" Yup, seems ray tracing was sneaked in at the last minute, probably to grab some $$ from "next-gen" console or GPU vendors. These sentences are copied and pasted from last month's Deathloop review. I'm starting to wonder if this is what ray tracing is supposed to be, which makes it feel like a scam. Luckily, there's titles like Metro Exodus and Cyberpunk 2077 that give us a much better RT experience. Far Cry 6 has support for ray traced shadows and, surprise, ray traced reflections. Ray traced reflections are only implemented on some puddles of water, not on the ocean, not on glass, cars or other shiny surfaces. Even with RT off, these puddles look "good enough" because they use screen-space reflections, which generally work well and have a much smaller performance cost.

The ray traced shadows mostly seem "softer," but if you look at them in more detail, you can see that the actual shadows have subtle differences, sometimes. I took the time to peep at individual pixels and feel like RT shadows sometimes makes things more accurate, sometimes not. Yet again, just like in Deathloop, your character doesn't cast a shadow when indoor, no matter if RT is on or off. It seems some geometry that is correctly detected by classic shadowing algorithms is missed with RT shadows due to the low shadow density.

Overall, our comparison screenshots clearly show that the differences between RT on and off are minimal, impossible to spot in regular gameplay. I'm not impressed at all. I suspect that the limited RT capability of consoles plays a role here. Let's face it, games are developed for consoles first and ported to PC later. I feel like NVIDIA, being the ray tracing leader on PC, will have to do better here to convince developers to add meaningful ray tracing to their games, so they can sell their graphics cards and people won't just buy an AMD-powered console.

AMD recently released their FidelityFX Super Resolution algorithm as open source, and it has taken the gaming world by storm. Almost every new game that comes out has support for FSR, while DLSS adoption rates seem to be falling behind. Far Cry 6 supports FSR but not DLSS, the probably most likely explanation is that it's an AMD-sponsored title, who possibly paid extra to keep DLSS out of it.

In Far Cry 6, FidelityFX Super Resolution is an excellent way to boost gaming performance. Using the Ultra Quality preset yields meaningful improvements without any noteworthy hit to image quality. Thanks to the integrated sharpening filter, it actually looks slightly better than native, though some sharpening artifacts can rarely be seen on thin lines like cables and stair rails. It seems the underlying issue is the game's implementation of temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), which I felt isn't as good as in other games, so it causes shimmering. The other FSR modes add only surprisingly little additional performance on top of that—the biggest gain comes from enabling FSR in the first place. If you have a weak GPU, definitely try out FSR, it looks quite good in Far Cry 6 and is clearly superior to the game's own resolution scaling.

In terms of performance requirements, Far Cry 6 is fair, requirements match the offered graphics, I'd say. For example, for 1080p 60 FPS gaming, a GeForce GTX 1070 or Radeon RX Vega or RX 5600 XT is sufficient. At 1440p, you'll need an RTX 2060 or RX 5600 XT, and for 4K60, an RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 3070, or Radeon RX 6800 will do. Please note that we're not using the game's integrated benchmark but actual gameplay. The benchmark isn't a very realistic representation of what you'll encounter while playing the game; it also uses a ton of wet ground for reflections (not happening in the actual game), and FPS results are higher than what you'll end up with in-game.

Taking a look at individual results, we can see that at 1080p many cards are CPU limited—note how they are all bunched up against an invisible wall. Just like Far Cry 5, it seems Far Cry 6 is quite demanding in terms of CPU requirements despite the use of DirectX 12. In general, NVIDIA seems to have a slight advantage over AMD when compared to our usual review results, but the differences aren't huge.

What's really interesting is VRAM usage. I measured well over 10 GB with the 4K, HD Texture pack, and ray tracing combo, which does stutter sometimes on the 10 GB GeForce RTX 3080, but runs perfectly fine with cards offering 12 GB VRAM or higher. I guess I was wrong when I said that the RTX 3080's 10 GB will suffice for the foreseeable future. That said, there's plenty of graphics options, and I wouldn't be surprised if a future patch addresses memory requirements. For lower resolutions, 6-8 GB VRAM will be required. Our performance results clearly show that 4 GB VRAM at 4K isn't enough (RX 5500 XT), but at 1440p, even this 4 GB card runs reasonably well. As requested by many of our readers, I measured VRAM usage on NVIDIA and AMD, with surprising differences. Seems VRAM use is higher on NVIDIA. I'm not sure whether this is a reporting issue, due to the measuring method or whether more memory is really allocated. I asked NVIDIA for their thoughts and will update this review once I hear back from them.

While we usually talk mostly about rendering and image quality in this section, I have to praise Ubisoft for including a ton of accessibility options in Far Cry 6. You can turn off motion blur, camera shakes, and auto-aim—we've seen this in other titles, too. But what's new is that you can enable outlines for enemies and world pickups (<3 this option), the reticle can be made more visible or QTEs can be simplified, requiring just a single key press. There's many options to change key "holds" to "presses," everything can be remapped and there's various driving assists in vehicles. This will certainly make the game more accessible to a wider range of gamers, and that's what it's all about: Let more people enjoy your masterpiece, and you'll be making more money in the end, too. Dear game developers, please learn from Far Cry 6 and give us such options in all games.