--- title: TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal | TIME description: Matt Peckham plays Far Cry Primal canonical: https://time.com/video/IsYTnfCg/ og:title: TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal og:description: Matt Peckham plays Far Cry Primal og:url: https://time.com/video/IsYTnfCg/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/IsYTnfCg/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal twitter:description: Matt Peckham plays Far Cry Primal twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/IsYTnfCg/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Plays: Far Cry Primal](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/IsYTnfCg.m3u8) (8:17)  _Published 2016-02-22. Matt Peckham plays Far Cry Primal_ --- Jul 27, 2023 7:40 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Far Cry 5 Teaser Trailer](/video/xDfxJepW/) ### Far Cry 5 Teaser Trailer [Far Cry Primal Trailer](/video/AmQwi3KA/) ### Far Cry Primal Trailer [E3 Interview: Far Cry](/video/rEJwgpHO/) ### E3 Interview: Far Cry --- ## Transcript Hi, this is Matt Peckham, and today I'm playing a game called Far Cry Primal. The Far Cry series, if you're not familiar, is by publisher Ubisoft. It's been around for awhile. The Far Cry games are about thrusting players into these large, open world environments with All kinds of things to do, resources strewn everywhere and then asking you to apply basic survivalist techniques in this environment. So that means foraging, scrounging for things like wood, hunting non- human animals Skinning them using the parts, the bits and bobs and pieces to craft upgrades, so that you can get better weapons and you can carry more stuff and eventually get more powerful have Various attacks. It's a power fantasy game, like so many games today still. But the difference with Far Cry Primal, and here's my clue. I'll show you before I tell you, is that that is not an animal you are gonna find in 2016. That is a saber- tooth tiger. And in this case, you're getting a sort of a sneak peek preview of an apex predator that you have to get fairly far along in the game to be able to team up with. So yes, Farcry Primal is, unlike the other Farcry games which were all set in modern times with guns, and explosions, and modern technology Far Cry primal is set in the Stone Age, so around 10, 000 BCE. So you don't have any of those niceties. You have to make do with bows and arrows, spears Things like that. And so how do you compensate? How do the developers compensate? Well they let you tame animals, and then you have these animal companions that you can then deploy in the environment. They'll either automatically attack others if you're attacked or you can tell them to attack others. And this is a huge help when you're assaulting things like forts and some of them are complicated combat scenario that are gonna emerge in the game. Let's see, I think a heard an enemy predator there. You can see it down there on the radar. Let's go see if I can attack this creature. Yeah, so that's a dole, they're a If I'm pronouncing that right there. They've been in prior Far Cry games. Now you'll see my saber tooth attack the dole. And pretty much one swipe takes that little fellow out. He's bottom of the food change. I had an encounter a little earlier here. I don't have it captured. But there are wooly mammoths in this game. Needless to say a wooly mammoth Is going to trample all over a saber tooth tiger. So now here's a wolf, a little bit more powerful. It takes a little longer to take out the wolf. But you can see, very handy having this fellow at my side. That is an indicator that I'm being spotted by humans. When you see that, that's a classic Far Cry tell there. So they're attacking me. I can heal myself, let the sabertooth go in and do the heavy lifting. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And then try and take, that's one of my own guys I just shot there, not a good thing. Don't do that, people. So this is what happens when you try and talk and chew gum at the same time. So, here I thought I'd show you a little bit what it's like to be up in the mountains. As you can see, there's now a meter here that says that I'm cold. [ LAUGH ] That's it. I'm just cold. So if I stand here by a bonfire, I warm right up. But I'm not wearing what I need to be wearing. In order to survive long in this environment. I'm up in the mountains. You would have been looking at them distantly in the last part of this clip. I've travelled now to this location. And this is where you are making your way. The thrust of the game in this case there's always some sort of. Human- on- human conflict in these games. In this case, you're trying to establish a tribe. You start as the last or one of the last apparent surviving members of this group of Messolithic peoples called The, called the winger, and you've been sort of almost wiped out, you've been scattered, kind of a diaspora here of winger because this other tribe called the Odom, they are portrayed as cannibalistic bad guys have sensual running. And so let's see. Here we go. We're gonna take this guy out. And so you're making your way through these areas and conquering forts, and in that sense it's very much like Far Cry 4. So if you're completely thoroughly done with Far Cry 4 and you're You're really over that game. It's a great game, but if you've done it to death, cuz that was a very long, huge game, then Far Cry Primal's human on human stuff is maybe not as interesting. You've done it. You've seen it. But the wildlife game, the wildlife in this game far mo dynamic that any of the other Far Cry primal. You can't even depend on them to be where the map says. They're going to be half the time you'll The map will tell you that this type of an animal is in a given place, and you'll get there, and at that point, the game will have already shifted. So, the ecology is dynamic. You have to be on your guard. You have to be very watchful of apex predators, because they'll take you out. And, I'm actually fond of this particular thing from [ INAUDIBLE ]. They've left the grapple hook in, this is not something that you would have had in 10, 000 BCE, but well, so what, who cares. It's fun, you know you also wouldn't be firing triple flaming arrows which is something that you can do later in the game as well. The last thing I'd like to show you is I think Ubisoft I think came up with to maybe address an issue that some of the earlier Far Cry's have where it has to do with how you Approach, when you're making your tactical approach to an enemy encampment, and the encampment has multiple enemies. And in the prior games, well in the prior games what you would have to do is, and here's what I'm looking at. You can see the smoke from it. You would have to get up there somehow without being detected and look around, and scan enemies, and mark them on the map. And that would tell you what their combat profiles were and give you a sense of how to approach them tactically. But it took time, it could take five, ten, 15 minutes to properly scope out a camp and then you would attack. So in Far Cry Primal, all you have to do now is Tap a button, you summon an owl. The owl flies, hopefully high enough here, can fly above everything and, undetected and unbeknownst to the enemies here, I can now see who they are. I can see what their combat profiles are, I can see what they're doing, whether they're sleeping or awake Are they off, there's one there with that horn. That horn indicates that if this person is roused, they will call for reinforcements. So I need to take that person out right away. So and then here's another one down here. And in addition to being able to attack these guys with the owl, which I won't do now, I'm gonna go back cuz I'm getting too far away. It's just a very quick now. If I just put the owl back in my pocket and then bam, now I can see them. It's a very quick way for me to have scoped the terrain and now I can just focus on how do I want To go about attacking this fort and taking it. So, it's cutting out kind of a middle layer that sometimes got a little tedious in the earlier games. Very clever integration, it ties right into the fiction that you are The Beast Master and can control these beasts and the owl becomes a very very helpful in speeding certain processes. 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