It does not appear to be a drastic gameplay departure from earlier Far Cry games, in that it still appears to be a chaotic open-world first-person shooter. A gameplay reel they showed us was full of the usual gunfights, explosions, and flamethrowers.
What most clearly sets Far Cry 5 apart from its predecessors is that it isn’t about shooting up a beautiful island run by a madman in the South Pacific or a lovely region run by a madman in the Himalayas. It’s about blasting through a section of modern Montana controlled by a Bible-thumping madman who runs a heavily-armed militia. You’re up against “The Father,” Joseph Seed, who along with his family has spent the last dozen years sinking deep roots into the fictional Hope County while establishing a cult called The Project at Eden’s Gate. The cult is preparing for a big fight and/or the end of the world and are recruiting people in the town to do their bidding, whether those people like it or not. Imagine a community where some of the townspeople are actually in the militia, while others just suffer its encroaching influence and nurse their desire to rebel.
In a change for the series, you can choose to play as a man or woman and pick your skin color. You’re a junior deputy on the police force, though how you wound up in Hope County is a secret. At Far Cry 5’s press event in New York, Hay talked reporters through the opening events of the game on condition we wouldn’t report it… presumably because Ubisoft wants to save that for an E3 demo or something.
You spend the game building a resistance to the milita. While Hay didn’t explain how the game’s recruitment systems work, he did spotlight three characters—a preacher, a bartender and a pilot—and presented them as examples of everyday Americans living under the thumb of the militia who the player can tap to help fight back. It’s unclear if they are simple quest-givers or allies who can be summoned to help in a fight. The gameplay reel did show some allied characters helping in the fight, but it doesn’t appear to be quite the return of the buddy system in Far Cry 2.
The buddy recruitment thing will play into a more open-ended approach to action throughout the game. Hay: “When you play Far Cry 3 or Far Cry 4 or even Primal and you go out and see these outposts, and in those outposts there’s an opportunity to attack them from 360 degrees and the real question we asked is: ‘Why can’t we do that with the whole game? Why can’t we make it that the whole game is about you finding people in the world and being able to attack the world from 360 degrees and then bring people with you?’”
Ubisoft is going out of their way to portray the militia as religious extremists distinct from more ordinary people of faith. From the get-go, the first reveal established a contrast between the cult’s unhinged preacher/leader with the more benevolent and recruitable ally character, the gun-toting but seemingly friendly Pastor Jerome Jeffries. Here’s Hay: “In terms of religion, I think what the cult is—is when you think about things and groups that are out there in the world today, a lot of times you’re seeing somebody who has hijacked religion.”
