Overall, I think I'm down. Far Cry 3 disappointed me in a lot of ways compared to FC2, but I still found it to be one of the few games recently I actually enjoyed enough to justify full price. I don't expect Ubisoft to change a whole lot since FC3 was so successful, but I'll still try to hope.
I really enjoyed Far Cry 3 when I was just running around in the jungle encountering random events and taking down enemy bases. The actual missions though are kind of dull. The main missions are too linear and the open-ended side missions are too simplistic. It's actually pretty much the same format as the last few Assassin's Creed games: Open world, linear main missions, simplistic open-ended side missions, tons of crap to collect. It looks like Watch_Dogs is going to be doing nearly the same thing.
I'm hoping beyond hope that FC4 can at least bring back FC2's open-ended main missions. But even there I'm afraid Ubisoft will design all the areas as blatant video game levels rather than realistic places.
Anyone thinking this won't be limited by old-gen will be sorely disappointed. They will just add graphical effects to the game not possible on the old gen.
The models will be roughly the same polygon count, textures will be slightly better, all of the in game world geometry and structure will be roughly the same.
This trend needs to stop.
Here's the thing though: Every Far Cry game so far has basically been a PC game with significantly inferior console ports.
The actual original Far Cry 1 didn't even come out on consoles until this past February (the older Xbox versions were different, inferior games). When Far Cry 2 came out people talked about how the PC version was different and better in a few significant ways (a lot of them visual). Far Cry 3 ran like shit on PS3 and 360 (and actually had pretty high system requirements on PC at the time).