The grand arch-sin of Ubisoft games is that they miss their own point almost entirely and are afraid to be fun.

The simple thing is that most of the game should be the most fun bit of the game.

E.g. if an FPS with good gunplay as a central element has 51% of game time spent in hacking mini games, that’s probably gonna get pretty irritating, right?

In the case of Far Cry 3-5: most fun bit is the outposts. Therefore most of the game should just be approaching, assaulting and solving various outpost combat sandboxes of increasing complexity.

Blood Dragon still has the best scope and scale in that respect, the whole design around a basic linear mission structure feels like it’s out of sync with the fact the fun is elsewhere, so you just end up in a situation like you already having liberated every single outpost, but technically you’re in the beginning of the game at like mission 2, it just doesn’t gel together.

Far Cry 5 has planes and helicopters and outpost-esque or adjacent activities and it’s the only game in the series where it’s those that actually move the story forward.

It’s the same shit with assassin’s creed. The most fun bit is y’know, stabbing people with the thing in historical settings. So it should be most of the game. Instead most of the game is anything and everything but that.

Heck, watch dogs legion even severely limited the amount and variety of hacking in the game when that’s like the whole thing and what made the second game in the series shine.

As for the upgrade and crafting systems I would honestly toss the whole thing out, RPG mechanics don’t belong in action games. A shop at most with all guns and everything unlocked at the start and money made through open world activities would fit Far Cry just right.