Far Cry 4 creative director Alex Hutchinson has spoken out after comments from Fargo and Alien: Earth creator Noah Hawley drew ire from video game fans online.
Hawley, who is currently preparing to launch a new Far Cry TV series, sparked controversy when discussing why his series would not adapt any of Ubisoft’s popular open world games.
“I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out,” Hawley told Deadline. “I’m saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men 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,” he continued. “When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes 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.”
This last comment has not gone down well online, particularly among fans of the franchise you’d think Hawley would be keen to court as his next TV audience. Hutchinson, too, was one of those expressing annoyance at Hawley’s words. “This is kinda pissing me off,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “And I like Noah Hawley’s work.”
Now, speaking with IGN, Hutchinson has responded to Hawley’s comments in more detail, saying that “gamers just want to feel their loves are respected not dismissed as they often were historically.”
“I think in certain genres a lot of people skip cutscenes,” Hutchinson began, “and certainly the player story takes primacy, but story is a complex topic in games. Theme, setting, character are all key to story and are certainly drivers of player engagement, so even if they’re skipping some cinematics, they are deeply engaged in narrative as they occupy a role and move through a designed space.”
This is especially true in Far Cry, Hutchinson continued, where protagonists (and players) are challenged by being a stranger in an unfamiliar setting.
“The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story,” Hutchinson said, “dropping the player as a ‘normal’ person with limited knowledge into an extreme situation with a bunch of toys and challenges. Then the story acts as both asking the player questions and then providing reactions based on the player’s input.
“My biggest problem is the dismissal of the game stories as pointless,” Hutchinson said, addressing Hawley’s comments directly. “His position isn’t without merit, and his adaptions of Alien and Fargo also basically threw away history. This worked well in Fargo but less well in Alien, which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story instead of remaining true to the best elements of the brand.
“I think gamers just want to feel their loves are respected not dismissed as they often were historically.”
Of course, Hawley has huge experience with adapting existing works for TV. He wrote more than 48 episodes of his Fargo series, created X-Men spinoff Legion, and is now working on Far Cry simultaneous to the second season of Alien: Earth.
So far, however, there’s been little detail of what Far Cry series will be about — other than it telling a new story, with the expectation it will become a fresh anthology franchise if all goes to plan.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
