Far Cry Primal is launching next February, but not for us. No, that’s only the console release date. The PC version will land a week later, on March 1st. This isn’t all that unusual for an Ubisoft port.
Check out our first Far Cry Primal hands-on.
The publisher has a mixed past with PC ports, particularly when it comes to release dates. Frequently, they appear on console quite a bit of time before they launch on PC. With Assassin’s Creed Unity, it looked like times were changing, but we ended up waiting the better part of a month for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate to appear.
What’s a bit unusual, this time, is that the delay is really quite short, only a week, so we reached out to Ubisoft to find out why there’s this brief gap between the console and PC launches.
“The team are giving themselves that short additional time to ensure that the PC version is as polished and optimised as the other formats,” an Ubisoft spokesperson told us today.
It’s sort of what we expected. That’s usually the official reason for these release gaps, though historically the PC ports of their big games have not exactly benefited from the extra work. Unity famously launched in such a terrible state that the publisher ended up cancelling the season pass, giving away free DLC and apologising as it released patch after patch to get the game working.
That said, there’s reason to be more optimistic this time. In our Assassin’s Creed Syndicate PC port review, Phil wrote “[A]ll things considered Syndicate isn’t a bad port. Above all, its a huge improvement on Unity in terms of stability and consistency,” while in his Rainbow Six Siege PC port review, he stated that “Early impressions suggest Ubisoft Montreal have created an environment that e-sports players can take their talents, and a hardcore community can grow without having to write their own .ini files first.” He passed both of them.