Far Cry + Speculative Zoology = Win?

Being the paleontology nerd I am, it's no surprise that one of the first things I put up on this blog is that a Far Cry game with dinosaurs would be totally friggin' sweet


Hell yes. 
On a similar note, I recently got hooked on the topic of speculative zoology. In particular, a specific website dedicated to one rather bizarre thought experiment: what if you seeded a world with just enough life to support a population of canaries, and just let natural selection take its course for millions of years?

That website is Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds (the brainchild of artist Dylan Bajda, a.k.a Seather888), which is one of the best hard-science speculative zoology projects I've ever heard of. Piece by piece, the reader is taken through a journey through millions of years of evolution on the moon of Serina, as the canaries and other creatures diversify and evolve into some truly bizarre and epic creatures. In fact, it's mostly the creature design that fascinates me, and the logical step-by-step process of how they came to be from the humble domestic canary. 

Within 10,000 years, you get things like this. After 10 million years, you get stuff like this. And after about 250 million years, you get stuff like this


What the hell am I looking at
It's a tremendous hoot seeing what such a vivid imagination guided by scientific knowledge can produce. Who says thinking about evolution can't be fun?

But what does this have to do with Far Cry and video games, you might ask. Well, one of the strongest points of the Far Cry series is the wildlife and the effect it has on the game. Both in terms of gameplay (with both you and NPCs being at risk of being mauled out of nowhere by tigers) and in terms of incidentally educating people. Let's be honest, how many people only learned what  a Thylacine or Clouded Leopard was by playing Far Cry 3 and 4 respectively?

I can picture clearly, so tantalizing clearly, a Far Cry game set on an alien world with Serina-style creatures running amok: running like hell through forest to escape a Grappler's tentacled face, frantically beating away a pack of predatory Circuagodonts or dogfighting in a gyrocopter with giant aggressive Archangels or Ornimorphs. Or at the very least, copyright friendly versions of such creatures. 

Far Cry as a series has already been heading into sci-fi territory with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Far Cry: New Dawn. Far Cry: Whacky Alien Bird Planet is not a terribly huge logical step, or at least it isn't to me. 

People who aren't into speculative zoology might be a bit surprised, though. 

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