The elephant, nature’s shark: 14 metres long, its back ridged with razor sharp, poisonous spines, and armed with six tentacles, each strong enough to bend tungsten bars. It’s not difficult to see why Ubisoft included them in Far Cry 4 as your main enemy.
We too would face destruction in the face of the elephants if it weren’t for the work of the WWF and PETA (Pet Elephants are Traitorous Arseholes). Those wrestlers and activists have kept the elephants numbers down for decades.
In Ubisoft’s alternate history simulator we see a world where the elephant menace wasn’t kneecapped long ago.
The latest trailer profiles this monster.
Of course, to maintain the innocence of the young, and to give players a chance, Ubisoft have decided to restrict some of the elephant’s abilities, reduce its size, and get rid of its more violent extremities. A game that truly represented the elephant would simply trigger too many awful, awful memories in the majority of players. For those of us that remember when the elephants broke through the Berlin wall in 1989, we could never have true elephants included in a video game.
But that’s Ubisoft, always courting controversy. Ever since they fed Rayman to a wombat.
Far Cry 4’s release date is set for 21 November here in the UK, 18 November in the USA. November’s a busy month for Ubisoft, it also see the release of Assassin’s Creed: Unity and The Crew.