While it's ostensibly a game about humans, Far Cry 4's insane and aggressive animals have become the breakout stars of Ubisoft's new shooter. And since this is a Far Cry game, players have been having quite a bit of fun poking and prodding at the beasts.
Just how fierce has the "man vs. wild" mindset of Far Cry 4 become? By way of an answer, I submit to you one of the most ridiculous gameplay videos I've seen so far—this one (from YouTuber BiGBANGTH3ORY) of a player attaching C4 explosives to elephants to launch them into the air:
As I watch these elephants flopping around, I have to wonder: "How did we get to this point, where players are seeing how high they can launch Kyrat's seemingly docile creatures into the air?"
It started out normally enough. At least, "normally" by the standards of an open world shooter set in a majestic wilderness filled up with an explosive combination of angry animals and high-powered firearms. Honey badgers were surprisingly dangerous foes, but they still seemed tiny and cute enough to almost make it ok.
Almost. I mostly dismissed the horror of Far Cry 4's honey badgers as a minor annoyance. But that's only because I didn't fully realize at that point what we were all up against. YouTuber Star_ showed the real nature of the honey badger threat at one point in this hilarious video, when one of the critters lays siege to a heavily fortified outpost complete with fully-armed soldiers:
"The animals were starting to stand up for themselves," the narrator intones. "It was kind of a cultural movement. I first noticed it with this honey badger that just did not care."
As the player watches from a safe distance, the soldiers in the outpost scramble in fear—shouting, "Careful!" or, "Run, run!" to another another. "Don't mess with it, just shoot it!" One soldier screams. And yet, none of them seem to be able to take the furry monster down.
"How many men does it take—with assault rifles—to deal with a honey badger?" the narrator asks.
Well sure, when you put it like that, all the people in Kyrat sound hopelessly impotent. But these aren't just any honey badgers. These are animals in Far Cry 4. Have you see the terrifying devil birds in this game?
Players began to realize that there was only one way to cope with the wilderness in Far Cry 4: by using explosives. YouTuber Cosmic Contrarian gave a good early example of this with a video showing how to blow up Kyrat's eagles with an RPG:
Festus M soon followed with a tutorial on how to safely fish in Far Cry 4 by using—you guessed it—a grenade launcher:
But after all us Far Cry 4 players had finally learned how to hold our own against the game's beasts, people started looking for something else: revenge. Hence BiGBANGTH3ORY sending elephants on an impromptu space expedition.
Alternatively, you could also make a custom map in the game's multiplayer mode, drop in a whole lot of soldiers and large animals, and watch them go at it:
Or do something similar, only with more fish in the picture:
Watching Far Cry players go to town on the game's animals makes me take all the jokes I've seen about how people want Ubisoft to add dinosaurs to the game much more seriously than I did when I first started playing. How cool would it be if Far Cry basically became a new-gen version of those Turok dinosaur hunter games from back in the day? That sounds like something I would play.
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.