Writer of the best Saints Row games is now IP director of Far Cry

Far Cry 5 villain with arms outstretched, looking at the sky — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

Drew Holmes, lead writer on Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn, is now the series' IP director. As he wrote on his LinkedIn page, "It's been an exciting few months... I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as IP Director of FAR CRY at Ubisoft! We have big things in store".

Prior to his work at Ubisoft, Holmes was a writer at Irrational Games, where he worked on BioShock Infinite and the second episode of its expansion, Burial At Sea. But for our purposes the most interesting part of his résumé comes from his time at Volition, where he spent almost six years working his way up from QA on the original Saints Row to become a writer on its sequels, contributing ambient NPC dialogue, radio stations, and mission dialogue for Saints Row 2 and co-writing Saints Row: The Third. He also worked on the Red Faction series, and was lead writer on an early version of Saints Row 4 that was canceled during publisher THQ's drawn-out collapse.

The Saints Row sequels were delightfully wacky open-world knockabouts, abandoning any pretense of grit in favor of casting you as a Batman villain who sprayed sewage on McMansions and murdered about 1,000 cops. The Far Cry games sometimes embrace a similar degree of open-world nonsense and over-the-top characterization, though Far Cry 6 toned it down a tad. Our reviewer Lauren Aitken noted in her Far Cry 6 review that, "There's less pomp and exaggeration with this villain compared to Far Cry 5's Joseph Seed; Castillo is just as committed to his cause, that's for sure, but he's much more traditional and realistic due to his seat of power."

There's no guarantee Holmes will help to bring the next Far Cry up to the level of Saints Row: The Third, which is basically a perfect game, but given that the latest Saints Row abandoned some of its more chaotic elements in favor of an attempt to return to its roots, it sure would be nice to play a Far Cry 7 that embraced the shenanigans and stupidity of open-world games at their best.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.