After Three Hours With 'Far Cry 5,' Its Politics Are Far From Clear

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I was really hoping to roleplay as a Federal Bureau of Land Management vigilante or an eco-warrior taking on a simulacrum of the Bundy Clan, so this is a real disappointment.

Then I went back to Far Cry 2 and realized the game’s genius was: the protagonist was always under pressure and the wackiness was always due to emergent game play in firefights. This formula was serious, and the seriousness provided immersion – something that got completely trashed in FC3 and FC4. FC5 looks to be more of the same, just closer to home so even more awkward and painful?

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While I reallyyyy hoped this Far Cry game would do literally anything with its premise I’m still probably going to play this game for two reasons:

  1. I grew up in Idaho so the setting is interesting to me. Its the closest a AAA game has come to being set in a place I have lived.
  2. I weirdly enjoy going into a piece of media being extremely skeptical and trying to critically finding its issues. For example, I wasn’t really into video game coverage when Bioshock Infinite came out so when I heard that its politics were real bad, I was excited to play it, try to find the problems myself and read up about it afterwards. Its like a weird critical exercise for me idk.
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I get why a AAA game wouldnt delve deep into domestic politics and just use it purely as a skin. There is way too much money to be lost if Ubisoft were to critique the right wing, religious, gun nut, militia/cult ideology. So it doesnt come as too much of a surprise that Ubosoft would shit themselves and walk back the politics in the game and not really pick a side.

Ubisoft wants to make money, shock horror.

However, after seeing Far Cry Arcade im contemplating Far Cry 5, hopefully it gives players the chance to maybe create their own mini stories and experiences, maybe (on PC at least) in the future theres a chance modders can create good political stoires in the game with the massive asset base.

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Capitalism is shock horror, you’re unironically right.

Hadn’t heard about this FC Arcade thing though. The map editors for these games always seemed neat but, while I’m happy they’re leveraging their unified asset pool for creative stuff and am always happy to see inroads to making gamedev actually seem fun, I’m still skeptical. Even with the much bigger asset pool than these editors usually have, which in and of itself is like, how will they distribute that? Optional downloads, I presume, but how much of a barrier will that be to people poking into an optional side-mode these games never emphasize on the UI? How much game logic is editable and repeatable outside of some novel use of trigger volumes? How much support is there for custom narrative through text/UI prompts? What systems are available, what systems are programmable?

I also hate to say it, but if there’s going to be an overtly political custom thing coming out of that any time soon, it will probably be edgy alt-right bullshit first and foremost, and who knows what kind of hot takes/hot Ubi responses that’ll get.

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I also think anyone hoping for insightful political commentary coming out of custom maps is bound to be disappointed.
I’m very excited about the arcade feature though. I played a ton of custom maps PvP in Far Cry 2 on the 360. It was special. I didn’t play 4, so I haven’t seen the custom-map single player tools yet. I especially like that they included a surrealistic non-combat puzzle-room to demonstrate in the promotional material.
I always think I’ll end up using this stuff more than I do, but I do enjoy it. Trackmania is a good example.
I doubt the maps will be cross-platform, but I do expect that the distribution will be mostly painless. Whenever the DLC comes out that may change. I’m mostly excited that console players will get to make wacky 3d environments to share with each other.

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So this reminds me a little bit of a video from Matt Lees about Stellaris and developer responsibility on themes. The whole video is good if you’re interested in Stellaris, but the point he brings up concerning the social contract between a developer, the player, and how mods enter that conversation feels relevant to this game. There is nothing leading me to believe that Far Cry 5 is going to properly tackle any heavy subjects so maybe this is a moot point for this game, but when it comes to player created content, if Ubisoft doesn’t have a solid stance on what is okay to make and what isn’t okay to make, it could very well color how a player feels about interacting with those elements of the game.

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Something horrible just occurred to me. I hope Ubisoft has the forethought to not allow map-makers to choose the gender and skin color of the NPCs they put into their maps.

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In their trailer they said 9000 items included, each of the three DLCs come with another pack of assets (im unsure whether you have to have the dlc or not) and in between DLC there will be 3 asset drops.

But you’re right, im guessing game logic and custom narrative are pretty limited, for sure on consoles. No doubt it wont be as malleable as something like Arma where you are free to create a campaign/story with the tools you are given.

Also, with regards to this, you are probably correct.

Maybe I understood the trailer wrong, but it looked to me as though you woud be able to create more than just a map, and be able to create mini scenarios. But as Ali said, you are probably right. And about skin color and gender, I have a feeling you will have control over it, similar to something like an Arma. But also that could surely be used for good and not just as a white supremacists wet dream

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I swear a lot in the coming paragraphs, so feel free to ignore them if you’re not wanting to read some pure rage.

I find it interesting how conflicted people are with this game, and whether they should interact with it or not as I’m pretty certain on my standpoint. It’s a very simple rule, and one I’ve followed for a little while now.

If a game creates a character that is sympathetic and you’re supposed to help them, but they’re a terrible person? I’m not going to play it. Although now that I think about it, it’s a little more complex than that.

So for Far Cry 5 those characters are obviously Hurk and his dad. His dad, I believe, is not meant to be a sympathetic character. You’re supposed to listen to him and groan, and listen to Hurk talk about how terrible his father is and you agree. I mean, they went real far with him; and that’s fine for his character. I’m not sitting in a truck with Hurk’s dad (as far as I know at least) and shooting the shit about how many libtards we can own online. So since his dad is a terrible person, but it’s thematically appropriate and seemingly played well, that’s fine.

Hurk is supposed to be a sympathetic character though. You’re doing missions for him, trying to help patch up his relationship with his dad (is there not better things to do than find some asshole’s truck? There’s a fucking war going on like 100ft away). And then the first line, at least the first line we hear in the video, is a transphobic joke. And that’s not okay. If you’re going to make an “assume my gender” joke with a character that I can’t then just shoot or never talk to again, I don’t want to play your game. It’s just some bullshit, gamer woke centrist shit that needs to be done away with.

I can forgive Obama loving libtards because it sounds satirical. Yeah, people actually say that but it’s still so over-the-top that the writers were probably rolling their eyes at each other in the writer’s room. But “I don’t mean ta assume yur gender or nuthin’” is fucking trash. There’s no reason to make that joke in this game. Do religious christian cults have a stereotype of being transphobic? Not especially, while they probably were, considering most stereotypes were around race issues, and class issues, and religious issues, sexual issue, etc. There is literally no reason to throw a transphobic joke in this game, besides to make some shitheads on KiA laugh and point to eachother how the game is actually going against the perceived SJW cult, and I guarantee you that will be a thread on there. This both sides crap for literally every issue should not fly in 2018.

I was going to actually buy this game, my first farcry since 3, but I don’t even want to watch videos of it at this point.

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In practice I would love to be able to turn my brain off and play the game as a fun but overdone emergent shooter, but it’s hard to do so when it is so overtly political without actually saying something. All the iconography and symbolism so far screams politics, but would drive me crazy if it actually attempts to have it’s cake and eat it, trying to be the BBC and balancing each side.

I think they have massively bit of more than they could chew, and the higher ups at Ubisoft have clearly told them to not alienate anybody. Profit is more important than a critique on politics.

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The big thing about Wolfenstein II is that it was conceived as the middle chapter of a trilogy alongside The New Order, at a time where “Nazis occupying America” was, at least generally speaking, a really shocking oddity, and not a distressing reality. In 2014 (and, again, I stress, only generally), “Nazis are bad” was not the charged political statement it would become in 2017. Wolfenstein II fell into contemporary discourse, it was not bred from it.

And the same, I suppose, with Far Cry 5 - that stuff Austin was saying about how it was proposed as a concept around the financial crisis makes me wonder if not taking a more decided stance towards white supremacy is less about damage control and more about ensuring the authorial intent isn’t misunderstood. In which case, the question becomes, “how worthwhile is the intended message, anyway?”

People talking about how Far Cry 5 is some kind of “failure” don’t talk about how it doesn’t do what it wants - they talk about how it’s doing exactly what it wants, and how that fails to engage with the cultural dichotomy in an impactful way. That’s how I take it, anyway.

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I was hoping for the Longmire game myself. I wonder if Native Americans are represented in the game at all.

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I guess my question is, how exactly do you get from the financial crisis, to a cult that tortures children and sets their parents on fire for funsies? Like … what? Hello? What reality is this supposed to reflect?

Also, when a company tries to sloppily both sides an argument, no one is happy. It’s especially bad when they co-opt imagery that has Actual Meaning in the real world, but ignore the context. It’s the typical blockbuster writing thing, where you want your work to look like it means something, without saying anything (or worse, getting it entirely wrong).

Games culture is weird, because you have so many fans who desperately want the art to neither reflect, nor change the culture at large – even though that’s not how media works at all. (That’s assuming you don’t see that stance as a bad faith argument to uphold or promote the status quo – which it often is.)

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But that’s exactly why these things become blockbusters: the centrists absolutely love the both-sides garbage. They feel like fence-sitting is this amazingly intellectual and nuanced thing, and making privileged people feel smart and justified is a very good way of making money. Look no further than how people talked up BioShock Infinite’s story at the time.

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I’m guessing you have not seen Black Panther yet.

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My guess is that they started with “doomsday preppers,” went from there to “doomsday cult,” and then from there to “cartoonishly evil doomsday cult that couldn’t offend anyone (because we’d be financially irresponsible to offend gun stockpilers in our game about shooting guns) on account of them being so overly exaggerated as to in no way reflect reality”. But who knows, honestly. There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen and trying to draw lines from the proposition through to the final product is likely a futile gesture.

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Missile Command was about the futility of nuclear war. Like, the programmer said as much.

Quintet’s entire history of releases were reflections of faith, world history, and the nature of death.

The Megami Tensei series, which later became Shin Megami Tensei, explored religious hypocrisy.

Fucking Sonic the Hedgehog has an environmentalism message so blunt that you have to be willfully ignorant not to see it.

Do I even need to get into early DOS games based on books or genre fiction?

Games have been political since their inception. If you look at Far Cry picking out gun smuggling in Africa and a rich white socialite being stuck in a world run by violence and people of different ethnicites and think to yourself “this clearly has no political basis,” you’re lying to yourself. They made a game set in the American south, probably the single most loaded topic in history, so yes, they were invoking those politics.

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Montana is not typically considered “the American South”.

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Guess again. :stuck_out_tongue: But one good movie isn’t going to change my opinion on how Hollywood has purposefully worked for decades.

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The sad thing with Black Panther is its politics is sold as a commodity, whilst there is obviously a market for it, studios will pounce and no doubt take advantage.

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