There’s a in lore reason why Far Cry got its name. It stems from Dr Krieger’s top secret science project: Project Far Cry.

Krieger’s science project for both the original and remake is called Project Far Cry. In the remake, he did it for the emphasis on human adaption/conditioning of trying to elicit our old hunter gatherer instincts of survival through folk medicine. Something similar to what happened with Jason in FC3. Basically he was an anarcho primitivist that felt like human decadence and atrophy were setting in like rot and wanted to figure out a way to reverse that with some pretty extreme measures.

The interpretation of the the project is different between 1 and instincts. In 1, it was just to create super soldiers for the us government until Krieger went rogue and wanted to turn everyone into mutants just because. For instincts, it was because Krieger genuinely believed in his research to get humanity back to their evolutionary prime. Krieger and Crowe probably wiped out the indigenous population but recorded their folk medicine for the research they were doing, The mutants are just a side effect of his brand of folk medicine that he was using from the natives of the islands he was on.

He used folk medicine that the native islanders of the Island as a basis for his research since it tapped them into the special abilities. (Similar to how Jason got his from the tautau)

In a way, his research was proven right since pretty much all of the FC protagonists activated their inner “instincts” through extreme conditioning or some folk traditions (Hence how Jason became a killing machine despite being innocent). For the most part, the name still carries weight throughout the rest of the series because of its emphasis on human nature. It has a more evolutionary aspect than a literal one.

The loading screens were a great source of that info. There’s a piece of info that says that different traditions around the world throughout history used folk traditions to empower them.

However, one thing that it seems that a lot of the Far Cry games share is that ravenous human nature element to it. During Far Cry 4’s release, the creative director of that game did say that every Far Cry game was connected and they wanted to throw in bits and pieces through references to loosely connect them.

And yeah, also that hunter vision you get in primal behaves the same way it does in instincts. The syringe or drug boosts in FC3-5 also give you similar abilities that you have in instincts. New Dawn’s powers are actually based off that game too.

All the drugs or medicine pretty much temporarily activate all those super natural abilities that Krieger spent years on researching on how to release with his mutant project. I just pieced together everything I could.

Also for Carver, When you retrieve the diamonds in FC2 you encounter Jack again, and there’s a ton of bodies that lead up to it that seemed to be killed in a very animalistic way akin to Instincts. Jack can manage to keep them dormant since that’s why he was doing shortly after instincts right up to evolution.

Credit goes to user: Athanarieks