“People from that region don’t necessarily trust the government. “What was really interesting was what we learned there: this concept of freedom, faith and firearms. “We actually went to Montana and we visited,” said Hay. That is, if my neighbors wanted to kill me for not believing in their religion. The enemies in this first-person shooter are stereotypical rural Americans. It has taken over, via silent coup, a piece of rural America.įar Cry 5 takes place in the fictional Hope County in the very real state of Montana - a state that, even today, is wrestling with issues like gun control, religious tolerance and citizen’s access to public lands. It’s not buried deep in the heart of darkest Africa like in Far Cry 2. You see, Joseph’s cult isn’t holding out on a tropical island like the one from Far Cry or Far Cry 3. It figures prominently on Joseph’s belt buckle, and on the icons scattered around his pseudo-nation. While no longer exclusively associated with World War II-era Nazism - in 2008, Germans voted to bring back the symbol for modern military decorations - it is nonetheless a symbol with a past. It features a symbol akin to the Iron Cross.
The iconography of Eden’s Gate is particularly sinister. They believe we must be prepared to be tested, that we’re going to have to harvest souls. “He has a mandate, and what he believes is that he has been chosen to protect people from the collapse, to save them, and he’s going to save them whether they want to be saved or not. “He hears a voice,” said executive producer Dan Hay. The main antagonist in Far Cry 5 is named Joseph, and he’s the leader of a cult called Eden’s Gate. Not afraid of the game itself, but of whom they made that game about. After a preview event last week in Los Angeles, it feels like the developers might actually be afraid of what they’ve made. Ubisoft Montreal’s next project, Far Cry 5, could prove to be the most controversial title of them all. Wildlands got it even worse, with one reviewer calling the game “ an appalling celebration of violent American interventionism.”
There were those who thought that Tom Clancy’s The Division, for instance, was soft on issues of authoritarianism, or that it engaged in a kind of class-based shorthand for friend and foe. As often as they hit the mark for timeliness, they lose the way with their tone.
But these titles always seem to come at a cost to Ubisoft. This ripped-from-the-headlines mentality, this gonzo-style approach to making games appeals to players - and writers like me - in a way that games from other publishers simply don’t. Its centerpiece was a fictional Bolivia, but it just as easily could have been about any one of a half-dozen real-world countries. Later, with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ubisoft created a failed state overrun by a militarized strongman. It told a story wrapped around themes of government overreach that, at the time of its release, threatened to lap the game entirely. Take Watch Dogs, a game about my beloved city of Chicago and also about the modern surveillance state. This publisher, and the studios within it, seems to possess an uncanny ability to anticipate modern cultural and political trends. Over the past few years of writing deeply about Ubisoft games, I’ve begun to notice a recurring theme.
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