I love this

Chris Plante has a good write up of this whole thing over on The Verge.

This makes me way more interested in the potential for this new Far Cry. Lets see what they do on the game play front but for now they got my attention.

This is going to be either very cringe worthy, or amazing. Nothing in between.

I like this direction. I also sure as hell hope they do something equally interesting with the mechanics.

WHAT THE SHIT...

Looks like Punk finally got Daniel Bryan to join the SES.

Yeah, that looks like a Far Cry ass Far Cry game.

In theory it can be cool but the reality is I hated the villains and ranting NPCs of the last two Far Cry games. I think the environment and things can hopefully be good but I do not expect anything of the story.

"The game promises a conversation about violence in video games, and why it became acceptable to murder virtual versions of one group of people, but not another." - Think you might juuuust be reading to much into one screenshot Chris.

Also let's not forget about how excited everyone got about BF1 having a black dude on the cover and then never did anything of note with that... let's wait until we actually know what the game is before we go off the deep end.

Looking forward to the trailer this game looks very therapeutic to me.

I would never shoot a dog.

Oh man get ready for the Polygon, Kotaku, Forbes thinkpieces on this game.

@mister_v: I mean, unless this key-art is some Kojima-level misdirection and the villains are actually Russians or something, casting white Americans as the bad guys is not especially common in gaming or mainstream pop culture in general and a pretty noteworthy occurrence if a AAA developer does it. Whether or not its actual story does anything interesting with the subject is another matter entirely but just by making this choice it starts a pretty interesting broader conversation.

Tell me more about that dog.

That guy on the left has good trigger discipline.

After the avalanche of thinkpieces about Far Cry 4's cover art, I guess it's no surprise that Ubi is now actively courting drama.

The image is a little heavy-handed from the bread and wine to the apple pie. I'm curious to see what they're trying to say or if it's all just sound and fury signifying nothing. I think I'd prefer they went for it and offended a part of the game base rather than played it safe.

This game will have as much tact and subtlety as Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Needs more huckleberries.

@banefirelord:What conversation? That white americans can be bad? I hate to brake it to you but the rest of the world has been aware of that fact for a good long while.

Anyway, like I said let's wait until they actually show something. If this just turns out be Justified the game i'll happily play as virtual Raylan Givens.

Wow that is a cool and interesting setting for sure. I haven't played a Far Cry since the first one but I might just jump back in with this one, if only to see where they go with the story.

Also, that guy on the right with the knife is a dick. You can tell because he wears his dog tags outside of his shirt. He was probably an 88M whose biggest horror story of the war is when the chow hall took a mortar and he had to eat MREs for a week.

@mister_v: No, I mean specifically the conversation about villains in games...that specific thing that Polygon was talking about. I just don't expect the game itself to address those conversations like Chris does, but I expect it will generate those conversations regardless of the way the story plays out.

The exact people you'd expect to be mad on social media are mad. Just got off my twitter feed.

"DURRRRR! WHITE GENOCIDE! DURRRRR! CHRISTIAN BASHING." Losers.

@banefirelord: Ah ok, my mistake

Eh.... not as much as you think I guess? Hitman did this exact thing in the last year with a radical Militia in Colorado (and has had American bad guys in that game and the games before). Deus Ex, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Solid, Alpha Protocol, Saints Row, Max Payne, The Darkness, Spec Ops: The Line, Shadow Complex Half Life, Fallout, Bioshock, Vanquish, Red Dead Redemption, Call of Duty, GTA are all games and series that have American bad guys to the extent this game would (they are a "radical group" or whatever) and then factor in games with criminals or whatever. It actually is a really common trope for anything terrorism related in fiction these days, especially as a kind of twist surprise that an American was behind it or something (it happened in 24 for example and also Die Hard).

The only way this will be doing more than other games is if it gets political but I think it'll probably more dumb insanity Far Cry cult stuff so it'll be too silly to go there. But maybe I'll be wrong.

I'm not saying there isn't a thing with a white character going into the middle east or whatever in any media but it isn't that rare and usually doesn't actually say anything politically when there is a white American badguy instead.

Now I am sure there will be some Fox News outrage and to that I say bull shit but that will be inevitable.

Welp, that's... unsubtle. I look forward to some Ubisoft-quality writing handling this game's apparent subject matter with tact and nuance.

@arbitrarywater: They've gotten better. I'm giving credit where credit's due.

@mister_v: All good!

@artisanbreads: Indeed, if you are looking for a deep and meaningful thinkpeice on the socio political state of America, a game who's trailer featured a dude ringing a church bell with a guys head might not be what you are after.

Why Far Cry 5's Treatment of Dogs Is Important

I'm glad that the people who are butthurt about Y'all Qaeda being the central antagonists are this mad.

@artisanbreads: Fair point, but I'd argue (based on this key art, at least) that it's leaning into it in a way that very few games have (with the exceptions of Spec Ops, Mafia III and Bioshock Infinite) which makes it a marked outlier. The identity/nationality of the enemies in most of the games you mentioned is rather incidental, while here it seems (again, just going off the key art) like something of a core theme and selling point.

(Note that I also have very low expectations for them actually doing anything really interesting with it beyond "LOOK AT THESE CRAZY WHACKJOB REDNECKS!")

I hope that new direction includes rethinking the structure of Far Cry or adding elements that make it less tedious. They can change settings and stir up race/religion wars all they want but if the videogame isnt fun who gives a shit. That was my problem Mafia 3, yes it tackled racism but thats just about all it did. (the sound track was pretty good i'll give it that)

I'm getting a real Jim Jones vibe from this. Anyone else?

@banefirelord: I know what you mean but I think until we see the game there's no saying. Given the complete lack of subtlety to the previous games (and their annoying, stupid insane ranting as I find it) I am doubting nuanced commentary. There seemed room for it in the last two games but there wasn't any.

I think it's going to be some militarized cult with some pretty standard cultish beliefs but maybe there will be something more political. I doubt it. I find the Far Cry villains really grating so I am not looking forward to it.

@mister_v: I really liked the other teasers because they were subtle but when I saw that bell one I knew that wacky Far Cry was back.

@stonyman65: That's similar to what I'm thinking. Ultimately I think it will be something more along those lines then a political statement. I bet there are small shots at right wing politics but mostly they are shown was wacky.

I like the touch of the 50 stars being replaced by that cross and...spears? rpgs? flag icon.

Hmm...I could love or hate the direction they're going with this. If they make the villain a Boyd Crowder-esque character with some depth, this could be really fucking interesting. If the villain is a one-note cult leader and every character in the game is a caricature there solely for mockery/contempt, it will be trite and lame as hell. I hope for the former and fear the latter. I am intrigued that Ubi is for once taking somewhat of a risk thematically here, although I imagine that they'll play it fairly safe within that by tailoring it to current general anti-right-wing sentiments and reconciling that by pitting you against a cast of Ramsay Bolton-caliber overvillains. Basically, the tone will need to be tactfully executed, which isn't generally Ubi's forte. Then again, I thought they did a solid job with this in ACIII and everyone hated it, so maybe I'm the weird one here. Anyway, I'm interested to see the full reveal on Friday. We'll probably get a fairly good idea of what this game is there.

Far Cry 4 deserved a lot more credit for it's narriative and story.

One path basically turns you into a Social Justice Narcoterrorist. You can make the argument that the ending of that game causes conditions in Kyrat to become even worse than before.

I love the setting and I think the choice of white supremacist (I am assuming) antagonists is great. But lets be real, this is Ubiosoft and a AAA game. I highly doubt it will have any meaningful or thoughtful commentary on the subject. It will all boil down to of "shoot bad guy" and maybe "every group of people has a bad side, the protagonist is no better than the enemy" aka the safest statement ever to make nobody mad.

@stonyman65: Yeah, rural fundamentalist cult. I wonder if there will be some white supremacist bent to it as well?

Very excited

Posted this in the huckleberry thread, but i guess this one took over. I liked the plot speculation that reddit gave for this one. It kinda cracked me up:

"in Far Cry 5, the player is out in control of Tashfeen al Rizwan Mohammed, a female transgender Muslim and the first playable female character in the Far Cry series. While visiting her girlfriend, Tashfeen finds herself captive by a racist fundamentalist right wing Christian organization led by Ronald Grump, the games main antagonist."

Pyschopathic bad guy? Check.

Big open world with mountains and bases to clear? Check.

Lots of weaponry to fuck around with? Check.

Animals that attack you? Check.

Ooh but this time we get to fly around in planes...

I really don't see how this is going to be anything but a bog standard Farcry game. Well this time we'll be fighting a redneck family cult it seems. Oh well. Guess I'm going to wait for a sale if this game turns out how I expect it to. And there I was hoping for a western setting. I had my cowboy boots polished and everything.

Is this actually controversial or is this just websites milking every bit they can out of this reveal? Are there actually people out there that are so sensitive that the very idea of Americans as villains offends them?

Side note: In the immortal words of Kazuma Kiryu. That dog is rad!

@boonsong: would be interesting, considering the less than tactful ending of FC3.

That looks cool and like the sort of thing Far Cry needs. I don't mind a politically charged story as long as it is even-handed and not mawkish or condescending.

That is not what usually happens; case in point, this very article. If you're going to bring up the potentially controversial nature of the story, choosing a predominantly fascist/nazi hangout like /pol/ as the representatives of the perfectly valid concern that Ubisoft would choose to go the easy black-and-white route of liberal good, conservative bad is an absolutely ridiculous strawman, and should not have slipped past an editor worth his or her salt.

That said I look forward to shooting the bad guys in the head.

I fail to see the controversy in this. Also, cool dog.

I just wish somebody would set a AAA-game in the American interior and not have it be about a redneck stereotype. I realize that Ubisoft and Far Cry aren't the the ones to do this, but still. I'm tired of everybody thinking that anyone not from a coast must be a card-carrying member of the KKK.

I don't see what's controversial here.