Over the weekend, Ubisoft published on its website that a TV show based on Far Cry is under development at FX. It then quickly deleted the post, but Reddit was faster. Unfortunately, the Reddit post has now also been removed by moderators. Someone doesn't want us to know that Ubisoft is doing a Far Cry Show, I guess …
Comments that read the post before it was taken down reported that the show will be an anthology drama, with each season “that was put in a new world with another role of characters after the video playing franchise signature independent story format”. It will be helped by Rob Mac by It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Noah Hawley from Fargo and Alien: Earth Fame, with Hawley act as showrunner while MAC stars.
Long crying is a bit stupid, really
I don't think a long adaptation, especially below these Special circumstances are necessarily a bad idea. To be clear, it is not so much to Far Cry Games history. Most of them have been criticized for their writing, even spin-offs like Blood Dragon, which is at least tonal and conceptually more Interesting than the most important games.
That said, the world design is often praised by critics, so perhaps to give the adaptation, some decent writers can actually make it worth looking at. In addition, I love that it is always sunny, Fargo is critically acclaimed, and FX has made a damn good TV before – Shogun, Sons of Anarchy, Atlanta and what we do in the shadows, to begin with.
I am more concerned about what pace adaptations of video games – specifically TV programs – get green. The last of us critical and commercial success as an HBO -TV show, and a similar reception for Amazon Prime's Fallout, has led to countless streaming platforms trying to jump on the bandwagon and make their own critically acclaimed TV adjustments.
During the years since the first season of the last of us, we have seen Amazon and Netflix Greenlight adaptations by God of War, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and Wolfenstein. Some of them sound better than others, but everyone betrays the same simple money -creating principle: Take an iconic video game -ip, turn it into a TV show and make big money.
How many fucking video games -TV programs can a player watch?
This has not always worked well. Video games can be difficult to adapt from their original form, and what works in a game does not always work for a TV show. Just look at season two of the last of us for proof of how the game's structure is difficult to replicate on television, or Prime's very mediocre as a dragon: Yakuza show to see how it fails to capture a series of tone can lead to rejection from their fans.
Of course, video game adjustments that will not be good are not new. We see a top in video games that get live TV TV as opposed to movies or animated series, but video games have been consistent in fashion, and most have been consistently bad.
I am not so much worried about the quality of these shows as much as I am the saturation factor. These TV programs tell either stories that we already know without change, make them true and perhaps boring adjustments of games that we have already played, tell the same stories with some changes, risk making fans crazy or telling brand new stories, also risking fans crazy.
This is not like Game of Thrones, where a fantasy book series Skyrocket for mainstream recognition of a well-made (to a point) TV show. Each of these IPs is already extremely iconic and popular in its own rights. Given that we are talking about all seasons of television programs and not movies that would take a fraction of the time to end, over-saturation is a real risk, especially if we only see familiar stories that are recounted in another medium.
People liked the idea of Star Wars show until they were abundant -the same with Marvel movies. Now that companies believe that people want video games to turn into television programs, they announce them on the left, right and center. If The Last of Us' third season flops, I'm sure many of these shows will silently disappear, just as the Far Cry movie announced in 2013 simply faded away. Maybe it's for the best.
