Far Cry 4 director pushes back against Far Cry TV showrunner calling game stories 'pointless' and executes a drive-by on Alien: Earth 'which turned into a kind of weird Peter Pan gets a dog story'

Earlier this week writer and director Noah Hawley, who's previously been behind the Fargo series as well as Alien: Earth, spoke about his upcoming TV adaptation of Ubisoft's Far Cry. Hawley made some comments that caused a bit of a stir while explaining why he wouldn't be directly adapting any of the existing 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.'"

What really put the cat among the pigeons though was Hawley's contention that "games are built in a way that doesn't make for the best drama. When you play a videogame, 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."

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I'm not much of a cutscene-skipper myself (except on repeat playthroughs), and don't understand why you'd play something like Resident Evil Requiem, or indeed a Far Cry game, and skip the narrative context. It's also inarguable that the quality of production and writing across the industry has, generally speaking, improved massively over the last decade or so: I can genuinely call Requiem a well-written game with a straight face, which certainly wouldn't be the case with some of the older Resident Evils.

"The best Far Cry game to me is a fish out of water story," continues Hutchinson. "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 [Hawley's] dismissal of the game stories as pointless. His position isn't without merit, and his adaptations 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."

That's a rather brutal drive-by on Alien: Earth, though it's one I agree with: that show started fantastically well, but for me ended up in completely the wrong place. There's lots to enjoy in the first series, and hopefully Hawley can channel the best bits into a great season two, but that show's finale in particular was both absurd and unsatisfying.

But I don't want to come across as being too dismissive of Hawley's remarks (after all, he certainly knows more about making good TV than me). As PCG's Andy Chalk noted, "Far Cry at this point is a formula: A guy, some pals, and a situation that can only be resolved through the persistent application of extreme violence." A little like Bioshock and its lighthouse, you can start from that and tell any number of stories.

There's no further details about what to expect from Hawley's Far Cry series. Though if he does get it wrong, you can bet these comments will come back to haunt him.

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Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."