Ubisoft just confirmed something fans have been quietly hoping for since Far Cry 6 launched back in 2021. A brand new project in the Far Cry universe, internally codenamed Kodiak, has passed its conception stage and officially entered development at Vantage Studios. And honestly, the timing couldn’t be more interesting.

This isn’t just another rumor floating around gaming forums. According to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson, who has a strong track record with Ubisoft leaks, Kodiak is being built as an open world first-person shooter where “player interactions and player driven stories take center stage.” That’s a pretty deliberate way of describing a game, and it tells you Ubisoft wants this one to feel different from anything the franchise has done before.

What Happened to the Extraction Shooter

Here’s what most articles missed when covering this story. Kodiak didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s actually built on the bones of a canceled project called Maverick, which was originally being developed as an extraction shooter set in Alaska. Extraction shooters have been a hot trend in gaming for a few years now, and it looked like Ubisoft wanted a piece of that pie.

I’ve been following this for a while, and honestly, the cancellation didn’t surprise me much. Extraction shooters are brutal to balance and even harder to keep players invested in long-term. Sources describe Maverick as having run into repeated internal issues, and rather than scrapping everything, Ubisoft apparently decided to salvage what worked and rebuild it into something new. That something is Kodiak.

Sources suggest the studio is treating this as a genuine second chance rather than a quiet retirement of the idea. And that’s a smart move if the underlying tech and world design were solid, even if the extraction shooter genre wasn’t the right fit.

Blackbird Is Still Very Much Alive Too

What makes this story bigger than a single game announcement is that Kodiak isn’t the only Far Cry project cooking right now. There’s also Blackbird, the next numbered mainline entry that many expect will eventually launch as Far Cry 7. This one has had a rockier road, having been delayed multiple times during Ubisoft’s broader restructuring over the past couple of years.

The more I looked into this, the more it became clear that Blackbird might actually be the more important project of the two in the short term. Charlie Guillemot, who co-leads Vantage Studios, reportedly called Blackbird “honestly impressive” during an internal interview and referred to it as “Act One.” That phrasing is doing a lot of work. It suggests Ubisoft sees Blackbird as the foundation for a whole new era of Far Cry games, provided it lands well with players and critics when it eventually releases.

Blackbird is also said to be adding a cooperative multiplayer component baked into the main experience, letting more than one player explore its world together. That’s a notable shift for a series that’s historically leaned heavily on single player storytelling, even when multiplayer modes existed on the side.

Why Vantage Studios Changes the Bigger Picture

Industry insiders hint that none of this would be happening at this pace without the creation of Vantage Studios, the new subsidiary Ubisoft formed to run Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Rainbow Six with what’s been described as full creative and business autonomy. Tencent holds a stake in this new entity too, which gives Ubisoft’s biggest franchises a level of financial backing and independence that the parent company hasn’t always been able to offer on its own.

I actually think this restructuring is the real story here, more than either Kodiak or Blackbird individually. Ubisoft has dealt with studio closures, layoffs, and canceled titles over the last few years, and its stock has taken a beating along the way. Handing its three biggest franchises to a semi-independent studio with dedicated resources is a pretty clear signal that leadership sees these three IPs as the ones worth protecting no matter what else gets cut.

What nobody talks about is just how many Far Cry projects have quietly died over the years before ever reaching an announcement. Getting two projects this far into development at the same time, with actual internal praise attached to at least one of them, is genuinely rare for this franchise’s recent history.

What This Means Going Forward

If the current trajectory holds, it looks like Far Cry fans could be looking at two very different flavors of the series arriving over the next few years. Blackbird sounds like the classic Far Cry experience most people grew up with, just with cooperative play layered in. Kodiak, on the other hand, sounds like Ubisoft’s attempt to modernize the formula around player driven interactions, whatever that ends up meaning in practice.

This is one of those things I genuinely got excited about the moment I saw it, mainly because Ubisoft rarely commits this much attention to a single franchise at once. Both projects are still reportedly years away from release, so patience is going to be necessary. But the fact that Kodiak survived a cancellation and came back stronger, while Blackbird earned actual internal praise from studio leadership, suggests Ubisoft genuinely believes in where Far Cry is headed next.