Holy shit, what? That's interesting.

Yeah this thing looks great. I skipped Far Cry 4 and Primal, so I'm about ready for some more open world wallet crafting.

Far Cry 4? Like, the last numbered far cry literally had a sacrilegious cover? It's not a good look to complain people about persecution against christians being special when you aren't even able to recognize when the same stuff is done to other religions.

If your complaint is instead that the badguy is being shown "as Jesus"... he's been shown that he THINKS he's Jesus, and the game has already included explicitly good Christians the badguys are preying on. Which is a lot more generous than the game honestly needs to be.

saw the trailer, doesn't seem controversial to me.

I am impressed by the bravery of the developers and looking forward to playing this.

Speaking as a Brit in the week of a terrorist attack on children, I feel it is about time ALL religions are challenged for their pervasive hold on people.

Words like sacrilege, blasphemy and desecration are used to keep us in the dark ages and hold back progress.

Humanity should have left this nonsense behind thousands of years ago, but here we are, getting upset about a video game that challenges religious cults and nationalist thinking.

Good on you Ubisoft. I will be buying this game whatever the reviews are like, to support their courage in tackling these issues.

I'm actually a bit disappointed after seeing the trailer, to be honest. After the keyart reveal I was a little hesitant but hopeful that if they pulled it off correctly it would be amazing. Instead it feels a bit staid, a bit...inoffensive? Like, if you read stuff like that Mother Jones piece on American militias, it becomes very evident that those type of groups are interlinked with white supremacy and a hypernationalist take on Evangelical Christianity. What Far Cry 5 is doing, though, feels very much not that. They make noticeable steps to distance it from white supremacy by having black cultmembers, and they distance it from Christianity as a whole, by having a Protestant priest specifically oppose the group--instead of branding themselves as Christians, the group uses their own symbolism (that cross symbol). In fact, instead of feeling like "there's this Bundy-like group with a large group of followers, as well as local support, openly fighting law enforcement and federal authorties" it feels like "there's a cult with a heavily armed group of followers attacking the good, white Christian folk of Hope County, Montana." It's a small difference, but it's hugely important in representing what the game is.

Are you really asking why can't all the Christians in the game be evil murders, or did I miss something here?

@spaceinsomniac: LOL this is was my signal to check out of this thread before I start ranting...

@spaceinsomniac: No, I'm saying I expected the evil militia to be broadly claiming that they are doing God's work and to be strongly in support of local churches and Protestantism. I'm also not saying they should be evil murderers, I'm saying they should've been friendly to the local people--no violent threats, no bloodshed--but willing to take up arms against federal law enforcement, and, if forced, local law enforcement as well. Maybe this portrayal would be at complete odds with what Ubisoft can do with a Far-Cry game, but it'd add a better reflection of modern society. During the press showing, they kept mentioning the Oregon takeover, and that's what I'm thinking of. The Bundys very much believed they were doing good by Christ, were not willing to kill civilians but were heavily armed and ready to fight off law enforcement, and they had support across the country among the far right.

And like, I'm not against the idea of a local Protestant priest against the militia on the basis of thinking what they're doing is wrong, I'm more looking at it and thinking that if they wanted to do this proper, they should've had the militia members leave the priest alone, even if there's a confrontation that ends with "Leave that n****r alone, he's a good Christian like you or I." Instead the trailers seemed to imply that the militia members attacked the church and burned it partway down. I think maybe that's what I keep getting at in my mind--it would've been way more compelling if instead of some crazy cult that has hints of far-right anti-Government wackos, if it was straight up just one of those groups, like the 3 Percenters or the Oath Keepers.

@artisanbreads: I don't know how you got that out of what I said. At all. I'm saying I wish their cult-like group was more aligned with the militia-like groups that already exist in the US that very few people seem to know about or even care about. Those people tend to be incredibly racist, as pointed out in the Mother Jones report I mentioned earlier:

The guys just can't believe how many Muslims there are in the country today. "Saudi fucking Aurora is what it is," Captain Pain says of his hometown in Colorado. "We need to kill more of those motherfuckers. I never seen so many fucking towelheads stateside."

"I remember when the part of Aurora I lived in was just white people," Jaeger says.

Like Fifty Cal, Ghost laments how much the country is changing. People like him with an honest trade used to be comfortable. And he didn't hear people complaining about white men all the time like they do now. Everyone's become so uptight. It wasn't like that when he was young, living in Los Angeles, cruising up Hollywood Boulevard with his buddies. "We'd fuck with the hookers," hanging a $20 bill out the window and watching them chase the car. "Actually, there were some damn good-looking hookers compared to East Aurora. Big old fat nigger wandering around: 'Come here, baby!'" he shouts mockingly. "No! Get the fuck back! There ain't enough booze in the world, woman." He lets the N-word slip sometimes, even though it seems to make some of the guys a little uncomfortable.

Iceman lay awake at night and wondered about the way of things. Why don't veterans get the recognition they deserve? Why is the country so divided? He had a sinking suspicion that the government was behind it all. Racism had been nearly extinct—he didn't care about race—but then Obama stoked the flames and now black people were marching in the streets.

Like, these groups really do exist, and they seem rife for a game like Far Cry 5, and that's what I'm getting at. I'm not saying there's actual people I want to gun down (god no) or that I wish there was more racism towards black people (absolutely not). I'm saying that if Far Cry went all that way and gave a stark portrayal of what militias in this country are actually like, it would be far more compelling than what they have done here, and there would also happen to be some racism...because that's how those groups roll. And it shouldn't be portraying real people either, that's just messed up. It should be a fictional milita, with fictional leaders and group members, but echoing real life groups in how they act and in what they believe.

@jcracken: I don't want the n-word used towards black people in my game and I don't want to gun down Christians for whatever your possible reasoning is. They are making a videogame. I find the whole thing sketchy man but whatever I gotta check myself out of this thread.

@artisanbreads: That reaction is possibly why I find what I'm saying so compelling...and probably why Ubisoft didn't do it. The idea that there are people out there that are heavily religious but align themselves with groups that do horrible things is one many Americans don't like to think about, and portraying racism in games is still really hard for many to be OK with. But it's not a case of "Now That's What I Call Edgy Vol. 20" in terms of why I want to see that, it's more that by portraying the group this way there will be innately gray areas that form. something that video game stories have always been bad at working with and portraying. Then again, Ghost Recon Wildlands portrayed a villain that would've been very easy to sell as having lots of moral pitfalls....and they didn't really seem to address them at all or do much with it. So maybe I'd still be disappointed anyways.

I don't think this game is controversial. I think there are just a bunch of alt-right dudes upset that you're shooting white people instead of brown people. If you wanna be really reductive and to the point. The fact that there are some people who look at that and see themselves being painted as the villain is uncomfortable to them. And its uncomfortable because american exceptionalism has taught them that america is always right and can do no wrong.

If I see one more fucking radio tower I'm going to lose it.

Thanks for the clarification. Okay, the problem with that--aside from the general "why aren't they making the game that I wanted?" factor--is that straight up real depictions of a militia wouldn't work for a video game. This is a shooter, and you NEED an excuse to kill bad guys. Evil cult comes into town, terrorizes everyone who doesn't agree with them, and forces everyone to join them or be killed? That is a video game.

Now for what you seem to be talking about. Racist white guys start grouping together, gathering guns, and living in a compound while simultaneously being very racist and declaring that racism is pretty much a thing of the past. Those same racist white guys are friendly to local people, look to other churches as equals, and have the support of locals.

Where is the video game in that? Where's the law being broken that would even require the government to step in, and how would that play out in a way that would somehow offer more game than a slightly more complex level of Rainbow Six: Siege?

The government somehow can't help, and locals have to take their town back from an evil cult? That's a video game. The government has to step in when a local militia breaks the law and requires stopping? That's not a lot of gameplay.

@spaceinsomniac: That's a fair point. I've actually been thinking more and more of it today and I realized the only way what I want to happen to work is if there's like a two hour movie before the game explaining how hyperpartisanship degraded politics in America to an extreme degree, and even then there would have to be a qualifier like "all the people who oppose this have since fled the area and the National Guard is about to come in and wipe out the militia, but doing so will result in lots of civilian casualties so you have a week to take them out from within" which probably would not at all work for a FarCry game, or really most modern AAA games.

@jcracken: So a Kojima game, then?

Ubisoft's track record is that of making focus-tested AAA products.

I'm not saying that they don't have writers without ambitions, but the end result will be watered down because of massive focus-testing and investor decisions, so I think it's naive to assume that the end result will be divisive or deep in any way. Sure, you can expect antagonist behaviour from the main cast of villains, with them being sadistic, violent, insane, racist, perverted or otherwise evil, but in the end you'll just shoot them with your gun, stab them with your knife or blow them up with your drone, because it's a video game.... from Ubisoft.

In 10 months time, I bet we'll see a lot of reviews along the lines of "Beautiful graphics, exciting gunplay and a politically charged narrative that ultimately doesn't go anywhere - 8/10".

Now, I think the setting is massively interesting, because as a foreigner, films have convinced me that anything outside the cities of America is a mix between "Deliverance" and "The Hills Have Eyes". I really liked how the developers had spend time in Montana and gotten familiar with the hardworking locals and is able to come up with this original and interesting setting for a game like this. After a couple of hours of Far Cry 4, I was ready to call it quits with the entire franchise, but the setting alone has revitalized my interest a lot and I think it was the right direction to take the series.

bingo, That's basically what FC5 will be and why I've lost interest in a lot of Ubisoft games.

except for the bit about rural Americans since I live in the States. But I don't blame you it's not like movies and such are going to give you a realistic picture of what life is like there.

All snark aside, setting a Far Cry game smack dab in the middle of the heartland took balls. I have to give Ubisoft credit where credit is due.

The controversy is religion. People might get mad. Whatever.

This.