When I heard rumours of a new Far Cry game, I wasn’t particularly excited for another open-world first person shooter. I’m familiar with the series’s style, and although I’ve learned to appreciate a good game when I see one, Far Cry’s reliance on guns and explosions for entertainment with no meaningful story meant that the series lost avid gamers, like myself, that largely play games to immerse themselves in the story more so than the gameplay.

I’ve previously written about Far Cry 3, and while it by no means is a bad game, it’s the type of game that the teenage version of myself would’ve enjoyed. Right now, I’m at a stage where I prefer to immerse myself in meaningful experiences – I would love to be lost in a virtual world, but you gotta give me characters that I actually care about. Character personalities in game worlds usually have something that stems from the writers’ personal experiences, which can often offer something valuable to learn from.

Far Cry 3’s main issue was that it was exactly what I didn’t want it to be. With too much focus on guns and not enough story, it didn’t take long for me to get bored and figure out that the rest of the game is largely repetitive.

Then comes Far Cry Primal, only 1.5 years after Far Cry 4’s release.

Far Cry Primal is set in 10,000 B.C, taking place in the Stone Age Era.  This was a time where humans first began to use stones to create tools for their daily life, where survival was a daily challenge as tribes came into conflict with one another and nature.

There’s something very intriguing about having a big budget triple AAA game with that setting. I’m sure that, yes, at the end of the day this will still largely follow Far Cry’s style of gameplay – since a core theme of the series is its portrayal of violence – but the interesting thing here is that not much is known about that time period.

There are so many theories on how certain things came to be, which makes it extremely interesting to see how the team at Ubisoft Montreal make sense of certain events and figure out their own sensible interpretations of what happened, potentially giving us glimpses of their reasoning behind how and why things are the way they are.

Mix that in with the lack of guns and the focus on weapons such as spears, bows, and arrows, then you have a lot of room for creativity.

With Mammoths and Sabertooths already in the first trailer, the franchise seems to be heading in the right direction in terms of taking risks to freshen things up in order to avoid “franchise fatigue” that has plagued titles such as Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and Assassin’s Creed.

There just aren’t a lot of games that give the you the opportunity to interact with a world set in the Stone Age from a first person view, so I have high hopes for this one.

Let’s hope they don’t screw it up.

You can follow me @Marwanalshafei where I spark rainbows within people’s subconscious and make the world go round n’ round.