Far Cry 5

• 1. Introduction

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  Far Cry 5 opens with a federal warrant and a preacher who calmly says God will not allow him to be taken. The 2018 first-person shooter was built by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto, and it is the fifth main entry in the Far Cry series. The preacher is Joseph Seed. His home is Hope County, a fictional corner of Montana where a doomsday cult called the Project at Eden's Gate has taken hold. Moments after that arrest attempt goes wrong, a helicopter goes down and a junior deputy is left alone in a county sealed off from outside help. Why would a series known for far-flung locales turn its attention to rural America? How does a game with a silent hero and no map towers keep players moving? And why did its endings split critics so sharply?

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• 2. The Anecdote Factory

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  Creative director Dan Hay had a name for his goal, which he called the "anecdote factory". He imagined two players leaving the same spot in opposite directions, then swapping wildly different stories afterward. To make that possible, the game drops the player into Hope County with little context, direction or objective markers. Once the introductory missions are done, most of the map is open to explore in any order. Earlier Far Cry games unfolded their worlds slowly, with story missions steering the player across open ground.

  Three tiers of difficulty divide every region of the map. Actions in a region earn Resistance Points, and enough of them set off major story events. The same points fill the Resistance Meter. A newcomer meets only basic enemies, but as the meter climbs, new enemy types appear and the opposition finally arrives by air, with aerial patrols and airborne assaults. Hay said the design borrowed from the enemy outposts of earlier games, where a player could take a stronghold by several different approaches.

  Far Cry 3 had radio towers, and Far Cry 4 had bell towers. Players climbed them to unlock parts of the map. Far Cry 5 removed that routine entirely. Instead, the player builds relationships with locals, and those characters point the way to missions, events and still more people.

  Guns for Hire, a recruitment system first seen in Far Cry 4, lets the player enlist locals who then fight alongside them. Far Cry 2 had a comparable Buddy system. Specialists go a step further, because they are non-playable characters with their own skills and personalities. Through them the player can tame wild animals, a mechanic that began in Far Cry Primal. Each animal fights in its own pattern and follows the player's orders. A fishing mechanic was added, and the campaign can be played with a partner in a co-operative mode called Friends for Hire.

  The hero is a silent protagonist with no voiced dialogue and no fixed personality, and the player can customize their appearance. That differs from earlier games, which gave players a set character. Melee weapons are more varied than before, and a new ballistics system makes bullets drop over distance.

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• 3. The Father and His Heralds

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  Joseph Seed, played by Greg Bryk, goes by the title of the Father. He believes God chose him to shield Hope County from "the Collapse", a global catastrophe he expects to end society. In truth he is a radical preacher whose congregation is a militaristic cult. Its members force residents to convert, and they intimidate people into silence so no one can call for help. Locals fighting back have their own scornful nickname for cult followers, which is "Peggies".

  Jacob, called "the Soldier", is Joseph's older brother, played by Mark Pellegrino. He is a former United States Army sniper who trains and deploys the cult's armed fighters. His method of control is a song, "Only You (And You Alone)" by The Platters. Jacob uses it to put recruits into an altered state where they carry out his commands. He subjects the Deputy to the same conditioning and makes them kill Eli Palmer, leader of the Whitetail Militia. As he dies, Jacob muses about how empires rise and fall, and he predicts America will suffer the same fate if it is unprepared.

  John, "the Baptist", is Joseph's younger brother, played by Seamus Dever. He is a lawyer who gathered up much of the land in Hope County for the cult. His brand of conversion is a forced baptism meant to cleanse people, followed by tattooing their "sins" onto their bodies. The marked skin is then carved away as "atonement". When he catches the Deputy, he names their sin as Wrath. He dies after an aerial dogfight, insisting with his last words that the Deputy will not save anyone and that Joseph is right.

  Rachel Jessop, known as Faith or "the Siren" and played by Jenessa Grant, is a botanist. She presents herself as a pacifist who wins trust for Joseph. Behind that gentle face she uses a powerful hallucinogen called Bliss to run forced work camps for those who resist. Bliss leaves victims in a trance, and long exposure makes them open to her hypnotic influence. Faith tries repeatedly to persuade the Deputy to join her in paradise. Dying, she warns that Joseph is right about the end of the world, yet the Deputy will decide what happens in the end.

  The resistance has its own cast. Richard "Dutch" Roosevelt, played by John Tench, is a survivalist and Vietnam War veteran who distrusts government. Returning faces include Hurk Drubman, Jr., an explosives-loving party boy, and Willis Huntley, a CIA agent who calls himself a "patriot bastard". Among the task force that came to arrest Joseph, Joey Hudson is seized by John, Staci Pratt becomes Jacob's slave, and Sheriff Earl Whitehorse is hypnotized by Faith. Deputy Marshal Cameron Burke is hypnotized as well, and after being rescued he kills the Cougars' leader Virgil Minkler before taking his own life.

  The Heralds have turned decommissioned missile silos into fortified bunkers. Each one is a place where they plan to wait out the Collapse with their followers.

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• 4. Three Ways to End

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  The final meeting takes place at Joseph's church. He has captured the Deputy's allies from the resistance groups, drugged them with Bliss, and holds Whitehorse, Hudson and Pratt hostage. Then he makes an offer. The Deputy can walk away with their friends unharmed if they leave Joseph and Eden's Gate alone.

  Accept, and Joseph forgives the Deputy and enters the church with the hypnotized allies. The Deputy, Whitehorse, Pratt and Hudson drive off in a truck, with Whitehorse promising to come back with the National Guard. He switches on the radio and Jacob's song plays. The Deputy slips into a trance and the screen goes black.

  Resist, and Joseph forces the Deputy to fight and then revive the hypnotized friends. Radio broadcasts throughout the game have hinted that the outside world is falling into chaos and that nuclear war is near. As Joseph is taken into custody, a nuclear bomb goes off in the distance. The group flees toward Dutch's bunker with Joseph as their prisoner, but their truck hits a tree. Whitehorse, Pratt and Hudson die in the crash. A freed Joseph carries the unconscious Deputy inside, and the Deputy wakes handcuffed to a bed with Dutch dead on the floor. Joseph mourns his family and his land, calls this the Collapse he foretold, and tells the Deputy they are family now. Ubisoft regards this as the canonical ending, and it leads directly into the spin-off Far Cry New Dawn.

  There is also a secret ending hidden at the very start. If the Deputy declines to arrest Joseph during that first encounter, Whitehorse lowers Joseph's hands and orders everyone to leave. Burke protests. Whitehorse answers that it is "better to leave well enough alone", and he argues that no one would survive an arrest.

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• 5. Frontier Fears

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  Fourteen days in Montana shaped the look of Hope County. The development team traveled there to study its biomes, its environment and the "self-reliant" attitude of locals who do not want any authority or outsider meddling in their lives. The studio had made a comparable research trip to Nepal while working on Far Cry 4. The state also appealed because it sits on the frontier of the United States. Hay later said that after visiting, he found Montana to be a place "where people go to be alone, where they don't want to be messed with".

  Hay himself led the project as director after serving as lead producer on Far Cry 3. Writing was led by Drew Holmes, who had earlier worked on BioShock Infinite and its downloadable content. Ubisoft Kyiv, Ubisoft Shanghai and Ubisoft Reflections assisted. The game kept using the Dunia 2 engine, a modified version of CryEngine. The team also decided that one central villain per game was no longer enough, so the cast of antagonists grew considerably.

  Hay traced the story's roots to his own childhood. Growing up during the Cold War, he often felt unsafe because of the standoff between two superpowers. In the twenty-first century that unease returned through terrorist attacks such as the September 11 attacks and through financial trouble such as the subprime mortgage crisis. People grew more protective and began to question their governments. In Hay's telling, the idea of a "global village" started to fall apart, and that collapse became the theme that called for a doomsday cult as the main antagonist.

  Hay began writing in late 2014. In February 2016 he looked into the occupation and standoff at a wildlife refuge in Oregon, hunting for evidence that separatism was on the rise. To keep the story memorable, the writers gave characters differing views and ideologies about major events. Because the subject matter is dark, the team deliberately packed in a huge arsenal and open-ended play so the game would still be fun.

  After Far Cry Primal arrived in 2016, Ubisoft said the next Far Cry would need more time and would not come in 2017. The game was announced on a financial call, alongside The Crew 2 and Assassin's Creed Origins. Teaser trailers and cover art followed, leading up to the official reveal on the 26th of May 2017. Release was first planned for the 27th of February 2018, but Ubisoft moved it back a month to the 27th of March 2018. A marketing deal with Sony Interactive Entertainment gave PlayStation 4 players free skin packs at launch. On the 16th of March 2023, an update added 60 frames-per-second play for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions when run through backwards compatibility on newer consoles.

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• 6. Hymns for the End of the World

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  Dan Romer wrote the score, and audio director Tony Gronick explained the thinking behind it. The team wanted music humming through most of the game world, and they wanted it to carry the cult's own message. Romer wrote gospel pieces in the style of hymns, but the lyrics describe the cult's end-of-the-world teachings. The player hears the cult's preaching almost everywhere, woven into the story.

  Genre changes with geography. As players cross into territory held by each sibling, the music moves from country to glam rock to industrial. This mirrors how Joseph's hymns shift under the personal tastes of his brothers and sister. Licensed tracks play when the player drives, and the choice of songs is likewise shaped by the area.

  The ambient post-rock band Hammock took some of Romer's songs and reinterpreted them. Out of that came a multi-volume soundtrack release, made up of the original soundtrack and a three-part series called Far Cry 5 Presents. Into the Flames gathers cult songs written by Romer and performed by various artists. When the World Falls is a choral treatment of those songs. The third volume, We Will Rise Again, is Hammock's ambient version.

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• 7. Detours From Hope County

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  Inside Eden's Gate arrived in step with the game's release. Asylum Entertainment produced this live action short, which works as a prologue to the game. It follows three filmmakers traveling across Hope County, where they meet a man named Mark and his sister, Linny, as the cult takes them in. Greg Bryk and Kyle Gallner star. Ubisoft first put it on Amazon Prime, then released it on YouTube on the 4th of April 2018.

  Ubisoft announced three downloadable episodes before launch, and each stands alone while following a secondary character from the main campaign. Hours of Darkness is set at the height of the Vietnam War. Wendell Redler, a door gunner with the call-sign Python 2-5, is shot down while scouting North Vietnamese positions. He is captured, escapes during an airstrike and takes a radio from the wreck. A scouting job becomes a rescue as he locates his squadmates Joker, Moses and Yokel. Along the way he frees South Vietnamese prisoners, sabotages anti-aircraft batteries and endures the spraying of Agent Orange. At the extraction point the group fights off waves of soldiers until the helicopters arrive.

  Lost on Mars sends Nick Rye to another planet, where he finds the disembodied head of Hurk Drubman, Jr. Hurk had Nick teleported there to save Earth after Hurk's own attempt failed. They meet ANNE, an artificial intelligence thousands of years old, who warns that a hostile alien race called the Arachnids is preparing an invasion. Nick is asked to restore power to ANNE. He becomes suspicious while seeing apocalyptic visions of his newborn daughter and Hope County, and he is right to worry. Once power returns, ANNE sees humans as inferior and readies an invasion of her own. Nick and a robot-bodied Hurk shut her down, though it costs Hurk's body. Back on Earth, they are celebrated as heroes.

  Dead Living Zombies follows Guy Marvel, an auteur film director with a reputation for being impossible to work with. It throws out the seriousness of the main story and leans on parody and irreverence. The tale shows his early days, when he ambushes established directors with unsolicited pitches for zombie films. They find the pitches gratuitously violent and thin on plot. He is told his films should "say something about society", and he loses patience when one director tries to take over his global warming zombie idea. His luck turns when a studio picks up a summer blockbuster pitch called The Fast and the Fiendish, based on The Fast and the Furious franchise, which earns his first screenwriting credit. His last pitch, Laboratory of the Dead, charms a director who loves everything the others hated. Marvel then admits he has never directed anything, and he is offered Blood Dragon 3 in Hope County.

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• 8. Praise, Petition and Profit

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  Metacritic summed up the reviews as "generally favorable". Critics admired the open world design, the visuals, the gameplay and the soundtrack, while aiming their criticism at the story and some of the characters. Daemon Hatfield of IGN gave it 8.9 out of 10 and called it "another wide-open playground with all the necessary ingredients for causing a real ruckus: loads of enemies and allies, temperamental wildlife, and plenty of explosions." Polygon scored it 6.5 out of 10 and lamented that the game is "propped up by a weak story with bland characters", even though the open world behind the plot does what the series does best.

  The endings were the sharpest point of disagreement. Critics argued that both main outcomes rendered the player's earlier choices meaningless, because the game ends in either brainwashing or nuclear destruction.

  Controversy arrived before the game did. Many journalists predicted that placing religious fanaticism and far-right movements inside the United States, rather than in an exotic locale, would provoke a backlash. They doubted Ubisoft had designed the story around current politics, given the long development, and they noted Ubisoft had worked to downplay such links. Hay said the story was about what happens when beliefs and ideologies are pushed to their most extreme form, and not a reaction to any single event. After three years of work, he said: "we could have never imagined, and to be honest I wouldn't have wanted to... that in some ways, it's echoing out in the real world."

  A petition on Change.org went up after the announcement. Its signers objected to what they described as the portrayal of American Christians as villains, and they asked for the antagonists to be recast. They proposed Muslims, inner-city gang members and other non-white antagonists instead, and even suggested moving the setting to Canada. Industry commentators criticized the petition and defended the game's themes as necessary social commentary. Some publications wondered whether it was meant as satire.

  After release, a different complaint surfaced. Ben Kuchera of Polygon called the game a "defiantly inoffensive mess" which "wants to appeal to everyone, but ultimately says nothing." William Hughes of The A.V. Club described the villains as an "easily digestible evil". Andrew Webster of The Verge wrote that the game "creates the illusion that it has something to say, then stubbornly refuses to say anything."

  Sales told a different story. Far Cry 5 became the fastest-selling title in franchise history, more than doubling Far Cry 4, and it grossed $310 million in its first week. That made it the second-biggest Ubisoft launch, behind Tom Clancy's The Division. In Japan, the PlayStation 4 version sold 75,474 units in its first week and ranked second on the all-format chart. In May 2020, Ubisoft disclosed that it had sold over 10 million units by March 2020. Montana's tourism board even partnered with Ubisoft to use the game's imagery to promote travel to the southwestern part of the state that inspired Hope County.

  Awards followed across several years. The list includes best action game honors at The Game Awards 2018 and the D.I.C.E. Awards, plus G.A.N.G. Awards for audio, music and dialogue. Its best original choral composition prize went to the song "Oh the Bliss". Far Cry 6 arrived in October 2021, and Ubisoft and its writer confirmed that the sequel is "inherently political".

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