Far Cry 6 has been out for just over a week now, and comparing TA data for this launch period against previous games in the series reveals some interesting bits of information. Let’s preface this by saying all data used here is based on TA users rather than overall Xbox player data (saves us repeating it constantly) but with close to 800,000 tracked players on here, it’s easily a good enough sample size to accurately compare Ubisoft’s latest open-world chaos simulator to its predecessors. With that out of the way, let’s crunch some numbers…Far Cry series: Opening week player countLet’s start with the basics — how many players have started Far Cry 6 and previous games in the series in the first week or so after launch?As you can see, Far Cry 6 looks to be off to a great start, and it would be the series’ best opening week were it not for those absolutely crazy Far Cry 5 numbers. One of the reasons FC5 is so dominant here could simply be release timing — Far Cry games typically drop in the busy Q4 period, where they end up competing for players’ time with some of the biggest names in the business. Far Cry 5 was a rare exception, with its March launch seeing it have the market almost entirely to itself. Only two other Far Cry titles featured here join FC5 in bucking the trend, one being Far Cry Primal, with its February release possibly explaining its better-than-expected performance here.The other is Far Cry: New Dawn, by contrast the series’ weakest launch in terms of player count, although that’s perhaps not all too surprising for a spin-off from FC5 less than a year after it released, and when a lot of players seemed to be getting burned out on the tried-and-tested formula. It won’t have helped that unlike 5, New Dawn had some stiff competition around its February release, with the likes of Apex Legends, Anthem, Crackdown 3, Metro Exodus, and Ubisoft’s own Trials Rising all launching within days of it. Actually, New Dawn’s line hiding away among the others at the bottom of the chart there is an oddly accurate representation of its journey to market, so that’s fun.Far Cry series: Opening week completionsEveryone know Far Cry games are big, but there still always seem to be a handful of people who manage to blitz through them in the first few days. Well, with one notable exception, but we’ll come to that in a moment…It’s usually at least a day or two before we see the first completion, although New Dawn again comes in with a curveball, thanks to being the only major Far Cry game to have seen a day-one completion. Not even just one, but several, so even with its 20-25-hour completion estimate, you have to assume those would have been pre-release copies. After those first few days, we see the series spider out in interesting ways — New Dawn stayed out in front almost up until the one-week mark before being stampeded past by Primal, a slightly longer completion but one with a notably easier list, which makes all the difference in those early days when the guides are still dropping. 4 and 5 mimicked one another almost note-for-note, followed closely by 3, although you have to remember that the open-world formula was still relatively new when Far Cry 3 effectively made it the series’ identity. Below that, surprisingly, is Far Cry 6, and by no small margin, so according to those numbers, the latest game seems to be almost the longest and/or toughest completion in the series. Almost.The exception we spoke of just now would be Far Cry 2, chugging away on the bottom there with a cool zero completions in its launch period. Or anywhere near it, actually — you’d have to extend this graph all the way to almost day 100 in order to see just the first completion some three months after release. Even if you did that, the others would have inflated so much by that point that you still wouldn’t see the line move. Far Cry 2’s list includes a suite of horrendous online achievements and we’ve only seen a grand total of 589 completions on TA, which means that Far Cry 4 and Primal had more completions in their first ten days than FC2 has had in 13 years.Far Cry series: Percentage of players completedSo is Far Cry 6 really the most involved Far Cry completion since FC2? Well, if we combine the previous sets of numbers, we can get an all-new metric with which to compare the series — what percentage of the total player base do those first nine days of completions represent?New Dawn just loves to be the anomaly, huh? A combination of its relatively low early player count and those early completions sees it absolutely leap off the line, with almost 1% of the total player count chalking up the completion on launch day. That immediate drop-off is once again suggestive of pre-launch completions, with only a single new completion by day two while the player count increased almost tenfold. Elsewhere, though, we see a lot of changes — not so much Far Cry 2, here still content to disguise itself as an X axis, but there’s plenty of movement elsewhere.One of the most notable differences (aside from Primal failing to catch up to New Dawn this time) is Far Cry 5, with that massive player pool meaning that despite a healthy number of early completions, it actually ends up on the lower end of the spectrum when considering the percentage of total players who grabbed the 1K by week two. Almost everything else gets shuffled around as well to give us a more accurate representation of actual completion ‘difficulty’ (it’s often more time-consuming than genuinely hard) and aside from the flatlining Far Cry 2, there’s only one other constant… yep, it’s newcomer Far Cry 6.With one of the biggest launch player bases in series history and one of the lowest completion counts during that early period, it really does look like Far Cry 6 could be considered at least the longest/hardest/most involved completion since Far Cry 2. Early estimates from the 67 completions so far put the game in the 60-80-hour bracket, so a good bit higher than the 40-50 for the previous mainline games. It’ll be interesting to see how this all shakes out a few weeks or months down the line — will greater availability of guides bring that completion time down a bit, or is FC6 simply the chunkiest release in the series to date? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure, though: the series is never going to top Far Cry 2 when it comes to gruelling completions. Who would have thought that a game that begins with you contracting malaria would be a rough ride?Hopefully you found this deep dive into the Far Cry record books somewhat interesting, as we’d love to bring you more of this kind of content if you end up enjoying it. What’s your take on Far Cry 6 and its list so far, if you’ve been playing it? Where do you rank it among the series? Did FC5 deserve to have the series’ best opening week? Take to the comments below to thrash out all of this and more!
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