Everyone who’s anyone in the gaming industry is currently having their hit game franchise turned into a movie or TV series. For Ubisoft, that means an Assassin’s Creed adaptation on Netflix and a new Far Cry series on FX. The latter is being run by Noah Hawley, whose illustrious credits include Fargo and Alien: Earth. Odds are he’ll make a good TV show, but it’s not clear he understands how the games he’s adapting really works.
The showrunner recently explained why he’s penning original stories for the Far Cry TV adaptation rather than borrowing from Ubisoft’s existing games. On the one hand, Far Cry is a franchise known for its storytelling, with complex villains and cinematic plot twists. On the other hand, it’s an anthology series where, despite shared game systems and thematic and tonal overlap, each game stands alone. It’s not surprising a creator would want to put his or her own new spin on Far Cry rather than just recreate its past.
Hawley reiterates that sound reasoning, but then goes beyond it to a place that left me scratching my head. “One thing that really attracted me to the Far Cry franchise is that it is an anthology and every time they release a new game it is a totally different story,” he told Deadline on April 24. “That’s how I approach Fargo, and it was an exciting idea that we could build an anthology game adaptation where each season is a different story about civilized people thrown into situations where they have to become increasingly uncivilized.”
He continued:
I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out – I’m saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.’ We can have a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games specifically because games are built in a way that doesn’t make for the best drama.
When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cut scenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show.
The “dialogue with this franchise” bit sounds great. The gameplay vs. cutscene distinction, not so much. It certainly suggests an outdated idea of how games and their stories function. Yes, dialogue and cutscenes can often be skipped. A game like Far Cry is as much about the moment-to-moment feel of exploring the world and watching chaos unfold as you take down an outpost. But anyone who’s played these games knows that just because the story isn’t always delivered in a sequential stream of non-interactive images doesn’t mean there’s no evolving sense of human drama, emotional stakes, and memorable character relationships. Also it’s 2026. Practically nobody is buying these games to skip the story.
No, the narrative stew that works in a game doesn’t always work on TV or in movies. Still, The Last of Us on HBO seemed to manage it just fine. That’s a very different type of game compared to Far Cry, to be sure. Still, I don’t recall any concerns about people skipping Naughty Dog’s storytelling just to get to the next stealth combat level. I’m still looking forward to the Far Cry FX show and more optimistic about it than most adaptations, but the game part of the franchise Hawley and his team are going to be in dialogue with is inextricably tied to the rest of it. It’ll be interesting to see how that manifests in the final product.
