Unlike the last several Far Cry games, I haven't played a whole lot of Far Cry 6 and I'm nowhere near finishing it. I completed a few missions, did some exploring, tried out an FOV mod, and played around with the best vehicle in the game. Along the way, naturally, I took down some outposts and killed a bunch of enemy soldiers with my machete, rifle, and no small amount of dynamite. Then I quit.
That's apparently not good enough for Anton Castillo, the cruel dictator of Yara and Far Cry 6's main bad guy. Anton is really, really disappointed in me because I haven't killed enough of his soldiers or taken over enough of his strongholds, thus allowing him to remain in power.
I know this because he emailed me with the subject line: "You disappoint me." The email reads "I wanted to thank you for giving me free rein in Yara. Take it easy, and know that Yara is in capable hands." That's some pretty passive-aggressive talk from a dictator, or more accurately, Ubisoft's PR department.
It's nothing new when a publisher sends out an email to encourage us to play its games more. Just as one example, our brand director Tim gets regular emails from Bungie to let him know how many Lost Sector eliminations he's got in Destiny (28,702, for the record) while reminding him about the Festival of the Lost, or sends him a graphic showing him his PvP highlights while encouraging him to check out the latest set of collectibles.
And we can't forget how last year Ubisoft sent out personalized videos based on our stats in Ubisoft games, which were quite amusing if you hadn't really played any Ubisoft games in 2020:
But it's a little weirder in this case because I did play some Far Cry 6, and I did kill a bunch of Castillo's soldiers. Over 500, in fact, with 100 of those kills being of the stealthy variety.
And he's mocking me for this?
On the one hand, he's right, I could do better than this, especially since I spent many of those 14 hours just taking pictures and feeding pelicans. I would expect at completion of the game that my death toll would be somewhere in the thousands.
But 537 dead soldiers, that I've killed single handedly, is a weird thing to egg me on about. That's a lot of soldiers you no longer have in your army, Anton. Presumably a lot of them have heartbroken partners and grieving families and weeping children who will never see them again. Do you really want to stir the hornet's nest and have me return to kill more of them? I stole one of your tanks, too. Should I blow up more of your guys with it?
Anton also tells me I've only collected nine unique weapons, which is especially weird. First, it lets me know there are even more unique weapons to use against him and his army, a perplexing bit of information for a bad guy to offer up. Also, how would he know how many unique weapons I have? One of them I found in a cave after I killed a phantom puma. If you knew it was there, why didn't you get it yourself?
Anyway, it's rude not to respond to an email, so here's my reply:
Yo A.C.,
Good to hear from you but knock it off with the passive-aggresh. It makes you seem weak and needy. I'll probably circle back to killing hundreds of your soldiers in a couple months, like maybe over the holidays. Or maybe not, I dunno! No need to follow-up, I've set your emails to 'Mark as Read' so I won't get a notification.
PS: Please stop counting my unique weapons. Even in a dictatorship, it's a real invasion of my privacy. Viva la Libertad.
