The lead writer for Far Cry 5 has explained Ubisoft’s decision to set the latest entry in its multi-million selling open-world franchise in North America.
Speaking during an interview with GamingBolt, Drew Holmes confirmed that the idea to set a Far Cry game in the U.S. has existed since the third game in the series, and Montana fit the bill due to its sprawling landscape that encapsulates a sense of the unknown.
“We had a few ideas on where to take the franchise,” Holmes said. “But Dan Hay [director of the game] always talks about bringing Far Cry to America, pretty much since they’ve done Far Cry 3. The first place that everyone decided to check out was Montana. I think that there’s a great sense of frontier, great sense of wilderness, of danger, wildlife, there’s mountains, there’s big sky. There’s lots of places that feel unknown even though it is in the backyard.”
Related – Far Cry 5 gameplay impressions
“So I think as soon as the team went there,” he added, “they started to meet the people there, and get a sense of, ‘Montanans are a very self-reliant type of person. They don’t like to be pushed around.’ There’s a history of standoffish-ness and leave-me-alone with the state that I think worked really, really well with Far Cry. The list of places that Far Cry wanted to go after that just fell off the table. We said, ‘this is the spot, this is where we want to go. Now let’s think of an interesting villain that could populate that space’.”
Far Cry 5 is due out on PS4, PC, and Xbox One on February 27, 2018. The game takes place in the fictional Hope County, which is under the thumb of Joseph Seed; a local preacher who leads a doomsday cult known as Eden’s Gate. Players control a sheriff dispatched to the region to bring Seed to justice, and winds up in the middle of an ongoing conflict between Seed’s religious nut jobs and Hope County’s free citizens.
Disappointingly, while the game supports co-op for the main storyline, only the host player will be able to keep their progress during the game.