You’re given a number of tools to finish the job. Predictably, getting stuff done involves murdering your way out of the backwoods of America and ensuring that the movement who you've saved doesn’t get the raw end of the deal. Swept into the guerrilla resistance movement after an adrenaline-pumping tutorial, you’re predictably forced into the hotseat as you prove yourself as the only person around those parts who can get stuff done. Less modern while supremacist and more Branch Davidian. You’re responding to a distress call, but having to call for reinforcements soon leads to the realisation that the entire surrounding area has become controlled by a religious cult that’s murdering heathens left and right. You play as a voiceless and hapless deputy who’s sent to investigate criminal activity in Hope County: an idyllic landscape of rolling hills, free-roaming cows, and farmers with pick-up trucks. The radio silence from Far Cry 5 and its characterisation of evil results in a rather safe swathe of violent antagonism that delivers the kind of narrative bite that annoys rather than intrigues. Far Cry 5 washing its hands of any perceived controversy was timid by comparison. One that seems to have rewarded the company commercially. While the industry rightfully has many a bone to pick with Bethesda, we can all admit that Wolfenstein leaning heavily into the Nazi-punching rhetoric was a bold, even brave decision.
It didn’t take long for Ubisoft to step right back and deny any comparisons between its game and the growing hurricane of right-wing extremism brewing in the real world. In hindsight, we were expecting too much. Hot on the heels of a number of terrible decisions by the United States government’s latest elect and white nationalism crawling out of the woodwork all across the world, it was too easy for people to look at that Far Cry 5 trailer and see something akin to what Bethesda keeps delivering with the Wolfenstein games.Ī lot of international discourse about the American election centred on how the Republicans had appealed to disenfranchised middle America motifs like violent patriotism and open displays of religious extremism being enacted by white people in the trailer only encouraged comparisons to current day events, and expectations of a countryside Wolfenstein-styled jaunt were quickly formed.
We all probably remember where we were when we first saw the explosive early footage for Far Cry 5.