Far Cry Primal is something of an spinoff for the series — a stopgap release meant to fill the hole between Far Cry 4 and Far Cry 5. So it’s no surprise to see it recycling things from its predecessor.
As first discovered by the website Gamepressure.com, Far Cry Primal‘s map is actually based on Far Cry 4. A source familiar with Ubisoft confirmed to me this afternoon that this was indeed the case, and that the developers of Primal used Far Cry 4‘s heightmaps — units of topography storage — as a basis for the map in their game, which was released last week. (Stephen really dug it.)
You can see the similarities in both maps:
As it turns out, Ubisoft did the same thing for 2013’s Far Cry Blood Dragon, whose map is based on Far Cry 3‘s south island.
Comments
55 responses to “Turns Out Ubisoft Used Far Cry 4’s Map To Make Far Cry Primal”
the difference was we knew it was as it had far cry 3 s map it was just a silly, awesome standalone expansion, wasnt even full price i dont think.
whereas this is full price and just far cry 3 reskinned, and with no guns.
its so sad to see the same animations reused and reused and reused.
time and time again they show they want to do as little work as possible.
but sooo many more animals & the AI humans doesn’t feel so stupid, because they are cave-men after all.
I’m really liking the change of pace in this one. Strutting around on the back of a Sabre Tooth is pretty sweet.
And to be honest, I had no idea it was based on FC4 until I read this.
there not any cavemen, its actually modern man(wenja,ilaki) vs neanderthals(Ullum)
Lol are you kidding? Every developer EVER does this, ever, bar none. Pull your head out mate
Theres a difference between using an upgraded engine (which is normal) and reusing the same animation frame for frame.
nice hostility
Name twelve developers that do this?
That’s right I didn’t think so.
Punk.
That reuse assets large and small? All. Of. Them.
Ubisoft, capcom, square Enix, criterion, ID, Nintendo, treyarch, SNK, namco, FROMSOFT, sega, Konami. You dickhead.
Don’t you dare say a word against Nintendo or I’ll bite your nose clean off your face. Punk kids don’t respect a thing nowadays. I only counted eleven. Nintendo doesn’t do anything of the sort. Punk.
name 12 AAA that dont.
This was my biggest issue with the game when watching Twitch streamers; I could see a lot of the same animations from FC4 and I thought the map looked familiar as well. They’ve basically just reskinned the game and whacked a full price on it.
It’s a good deal for peeps who haven’t played any FC in a while but for people who played FC3, Blood Dragon and FC4 it looks quite stale. I suppose it’s no different from the AC cycles; just reskins/reworks of the same game repeatedly.
Wow. I mean I get it was supposedly linked in some way to Kyrat…. but this is lazy, really lazy.
What if they intended it to be the same location geographically, just during a different time period?
Primal is based in European Alps and 4 in Himalayas. I’d be fine if it was the same place, but full price for lazy work is just terrible. Screams cash grab, full price but minimal work just means massive profit margins.
I don’t really see it as lazy, to be honest.
The cost and time involved in making AAA content is ridiculous. I wouldn’t be upset or surprised if companies started building libraries of assets to use across multiple games. Especially if they’re set in some variant of the same universe.
Realistically, what’s the point of re modelling trees, rocks, height maps, etc. over and over again? It pulls effort away from making the bits that actually matter.
I do, I absolutely see it as lazy. 4 as @Jaedee884 said, is based in a completely different geographical area. Topograghy and geology differs region to region for one, that’s definitely worth taking into consideration, there’s only almost 7,000km seperating the two after all. The alps and the Himalayas are most definitely different geologically and topographically for one. If they want to cut and paste the same map, asides being incredibly lazy and the fact we’ve scorned EA for doing the same exact thing with Dragon Age 2 in the past, that’s a lot of work they obviously don’t have to do, but why should they then charge full premium price for that? Of course they can choose to, but this is another nail in the coffin for me, I simply won’t purchase it and will vote with my wallet.
People should never ever be ok with cut and paste in premium priced games. If this were a value game such as Blood Dragon? You’d never hear me have a complaint, ever. However with the current RRP on this (I don’t care what people can find it for elsewhere, that’s not the point), it’s being marketed as a full brand new game, but obviously isn’t and that’s a real shame.
There’s merit to that “If you pay full price, you should be getting an all NEW product.” argument, sure.
But here’s something I’m interested in… If you were never told, could you truly honestly say you would ever have even noticed it was based on the same map?
Personally, I’d bet big money that unless most people were actually told they’d never have had a clue. But now they’ve been told, they get to be outraged for the sake of it.
Personally? I don’t care, at all. The game is fun which is all I actually care about… And if I’m being honest I’m probably enjoying it more than I actually did Far Cry 4.
So in essence ‘ignorance is bliss’? I understand where you’re coming from with that and it is indeed true for the most part, it’s not the first time a dev has reused assets at all and it won’t be the last, but at the same time, should a consumer have to be recycled the same thing over and over? How many games down the line will it be ok to use the same map with at premium price? Expansion price I wouldn’t care, again, but full price seems disingenuous.
I don’t see it as an issue of ‘if I were never told’. We all learn information from somewhere. It’s not going to keep me up at night, but it is enough to drive me away from paying current premium prices for the game, maybe I’ll pick it up on Steam one day when it comes heavily down in price, but it is the kind of thing that’s a deciding factor in a purchase now and a purchase ‘down the line sometime’ unfortunately.
But, you do get an upvote for a well thought out counterpoint 🙂 and it’s a great point that after all of it, if the game is fun, gameplay trumps all as we know, and that has to be kept in mind.
This guy must be fun at parties…..
If that how you feel, don’t purchase the game, its that simple!
Not really premium priced. I got the pc version from green man gaming for about $50 Aus.
It is premium priced as physical copies are currently going for 78 to 89 dollars. Its great people can find discounted cdkeys for pc but the rrp is the standard price to go by.
I stand corrected.
Don’t get me wrong, if people can get it cheap, by all means do so! If it’s fun, enjoy the hell out of it and don’t look back.
While at first it seems lazy, at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter.
They made a map that’s about the same size, why not start with the old one?
The “bowl” shape is the most logical shape for an open world map, since it’s the easiest way to confine players without resorting to invisible walls. If they’re going to be broadly the same shape…. Why not start with the old one?
The maps in Far Cry 4 is pretty freaking huge even with, cars, jet skis ect. If you’re walking through denser, slower jungle that gameworld is going to seem far denser even if the geography is similar.
In the last one you could get in mini-choppers to observe the geography. I don’t know if you can ride a pterodactyl or something in that, but if you’re confined to the ground nobody would ever notice the similarities.
Ideally they’d be more different, but also it doesn’t matter at all. What’s that saying about not being able to tell the forest from the trees?
You get an owl, whose eyes you see through. Sorta. Pretty restricted viewing angles, though. It’s basically a prehistoric predator drone.
So, y’know… get-out-of-town awesome.
I was kinda annoyed at what felt like lazy developing but after putting 30 or so hours into it I’m happy with how smoothly it runs compared to some other triple A releases we’ve been getting
So you mean to say i just paid for a MOD!!!!
lol just kidding
Yes, it is essentially a mod. A professional mod.. a total-conversion mod with AAA production values, however, yes… you just paid full price for a mod.
Why re-invent the wheel?
Yeah. All Far Cry maps from here on should be based on Far Cry 1! Why bring anything new to the table when we already have tonnes of crap to draw from?
You joke, but I’d actually pay for a game using the Far Cry 1 maps again.
You know, I have memories of finding routes through the map on Farcry 1 that I never could find again after the first time… that was a pretty awesome map and brilliantly designed.
I don’t remember any different routes as I spent 90% of my time playing just gawking at the beach :p
lol! I was screaming through the bush in a jeep in the game at one point, then suddenly I’ve gone up a cliff and near the ship, I’ve flown out over the cliff and plummeted into the water after following some vague track. I even got some sort of mini cutscene from doing it!
For the life of me I never found it again 🙁
The extreme range, map spanning sniping that you could do in that game was something I will never forget.
And it was something that was a massive let down for me when they removed that in the Crysis games due to the way enemies spawned.
More like, why invent the wheel?….
I mean, so long as its not noticable, then I guess its not so big of a deal… but still leaves a sour taste in your mouth, especially with it being a full priced game
For the most part alot of you haven’t probably bought it but are incessantly whinging about the game!!! Honestly who gives two flying turtle dove farts if it was recycled!!
I “give two flying turtle dove farts”. Why should I spend my hard earned cash on this game? If it were like Blood Dragon, sure. But, Primal is a full price game. If they expect me to pay full price for this, I expect them to put some sort of effort into making this game.
Play cod?
No, I don’t play CoD.
^ this – just came here to say – No Blood Dragon 2, No Sale
I’ve noticed that 99% of the whining and outrage is coming from those who haven’t played it. Its a reskin, they say! Its too expensive! Its the same as the others!
Play it first. You sound like an idiot going on about something you haven’t touched. Devs reuse and reskin assets in every series. Its not new or uncommon. You can’t expect every game to be built 100% from the ground up.
The game is amazing and a ton of fun. It does not feel like a reskin and reusing the same basic map design is irrelevant because doesn’t look anything like FC4. Seriously, get real and stop acting so entitled. Every major series has a formula and reuses assets/basic design principles.
Unless you’ve played the game, you’re opinion on its quality means less than squat
Yes, because somebody needs to play a game to understand this. No, we don’t need to play this. Reusing the same map for a full price game is lazy and ridiculous. If this were a Blood Dragon sort of thing, a stand-alone spin-off with a suitable price, this wouldn’t be a problem. But no, they’ve decided to release a lazy, full price game with nearly nothing new outside of the setting.
Great game. Really enjoying it.
I like what they did. Saved themselves a tonne of work, and given that almost everyone didn’t realize it until this article, I don’t see what the problem is. Besides, the game could be set in literally the same geographical area just millions of years in the past.
I dare say that I prefer this “filler” more than Far Cry 4 and probably more than whatever Far Cry 5: The Streets of Albury-Wodonga, is gonna be like.
Ah that first 10 hours in Wodonga before you finally unlock Albury and go oh..
I’m not even slightly surprised by this. Ubisoft’s whole business model is to find a formula that works and then milk the franchise until we’re dry heaving and begging them to stop. Despite the updated game engines and models, Far Cry 4 was way too close to Far Cry 3 for my liking. The less is said about the Assassin’s Creed games the better, but I’d guarantee there’s asset sharing across the mountain of spin offs that cash cow has generated.
Its Ubisoft. Why would anyone be surprised?
Haha exactly. More boring vanilla shit which idiots enable by lapping them up and buying stupid statues.
What I love is how so many of you are willing to jump on the ‘I hate big companies like ubisoft for making far cry spinal’ while buying the annual call of duty and spending all of your so called hard earned cash on constant yearly season passes for 2 maps and a new weapon. Yet a game comes out, offering at least 50 solid hours of game play, in a setting and era never before used, and graphics truly worthy of a now current gen market and the best you idiots can do is complain its a far cry game thats too much like far cry.
Really? Okay, so GTA 5 isn’t like GTA 4? Or 3? Or the other spinoffs everyone praises? Dark souls 3 isn’t like dark souls 2, or 1, or the other spinoffs like Bloodborne?
Far as I’m concerned, far cry primal is by far and away the best of the series along with Instincts, Predator and far cry 2. Its easily so much more engrossing than 3 and 4 and I have absolutely no regrets whatsoever for spending my own hard earned cash on this brilliant game.
Shame the vast majority of you narrow minded hipsters won’t get to experience this great work of art thanks to your ridiculous misconceptions..
Better than far cry 3 and 4 combined.
Better than Destiny, or Call of Duty
Better than Assassins Creed
Better than GTA
Better than Halo
Better than Battlefield
And all those games have never directly copied all their own previous iterations… really?
Primal is a fantastic game in the great far cry series, which is EXACTLY my point! Its part of the Far Cry series. Not GTA or Call of Duty or Halo…
Oh and I’m a big believer that having an opinion on a game you’ve never played makes your opinion completely invalid.
Big news today, AAA title game assets are reused…. you know just like movies, TV series or anime. I feel like gamers are becoming the entitled brats of the entertainment world.