Hallelujah.
Drew Holmes, lead writer on Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn, is now the series’ IP director. As he wrote on his LinkedIn page, “It’s been an exciting few months… I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as IP Director of FAR CRY at Ubisoft! We have big things in store”.
Prior to his work at Ubisoft, Holmes was a writer at Irrational Games, where he worked on BioShock Infinite and the second episode of its expansion, Burial At Sea. But for our purposes the most interesting part of his résumé comes from his time at Volition, where he spent almost six years working his way up from QA on the original Saints Row to become a writer on its sequels, contributing ambient NPC dialogue, radio stations, and mission dialogue for Saints Row 2 and co-writing Saints Row: The Third. He also worked on the Red Faction series, and was lead writer on an early version of Saints Row 4 that was canceled during publisher THQ’s drawn-out collapse.
The Saints Row sequels were delightfully wacky open-world knockabouts, abandoning any pretense of grit in favor of casting you as a Batman villain who sprayed sewage on McMansions and murdered about 1,000 cops. The Far Cry games sometimes embrace a similar degree of open-world nonsense and over-the-top characterization, though Far Cry 6 toned it down a tad. Our reviewer Lauren Aitken noted in her Far Cry 6 review that, “There’s less pomp and exaggeration with this villain compared to Far Cry 5’s Joseph Seed; Castillo is just as committed to his cause, that’s for sure, but he’s much more traditional and realistic due to his seat of power.”
There’s no guarantee Holmes will help to bring the next Far Cry up to the level of Saints Row: The Third, which is basically a perfect game, but given that the latest Saints Row abandoned some of its more chaotic elements in favor of an attempt to return to its roots, it sure would be nice to play a Far Cry 7 that embraced the shenanigans and stupidity of open-world games at their best.
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