The 'Far Cry 5' Location Is In Montana, Why It's A Good Move For Ubisoft

This month, Ubisoft gave us the first glimpse of Far Cry 5. But along with the basics — the February 2018 release date and some of the game’s main characters — Ubisoft also confirmed speculation around one of the more interesting parts about its latest Far Cry title, the Far Cry 5 location.

As the teaser art suggested, the game is set in current-day Montana in the fictional Hope County. In a rural town, you play as a sheriff — whose gender and race can be chosen by the player — eventually tasked with going up against Joseph Seed, the leader of a cult called Eden’s Gate. The group has slowly taken over the county and its residents want to prepare to take control back.

Read: Ubisoft Unveils First Look At Far Cry 5, Set In Montana

We’re still a long way from the game’s release, but compared to previous Far Cry games, Far Cry 5’s teased direction is a hefty left turn for the series on paper. Since Ubisoft took over the franchise with 2008’s Far Cry 2, the series has been built around transplanting first-person shooter and open world gameplay to locales like an African country, a tropical island and the Himalayas.

Past titles in the series have wrestled with bigger arguments and themes. Critic Tom Bissell once described Far Cry 2 as a game that “never comments on what you’re doing — not internally, not externally — and so you’re a monster, mostly, that does monstrous things.”

But at times, the Far Cry series struggled to balance its ambitions against the constraints of the blockbuster first-person shooter. Statements about violence and its implications had to go hand in hand with action set pieces where you’re mowing down wave upon wave of faceless foreign enemies. And more often than not — with the exception of Far Cry 4, which made you a returning resident of the game’s fictional country instead of an interloper — this thematic incoherence was played up by the franchise’s focus on the exotic and an unknown other.

Read: Far Cry 5 Main Characters Revealed In Trailers - Joseph Seed Has Many Enemies

With Far Cry 5, though, Ubisoft is drawing from a more distinctly American — and notably loaded — palette. As a group of white Americans the player has to fight, Eden’s Gate has echoes of past cults like the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate, along with more current instances of rural militias arming themselves like the 2014 Bundy standoff.

Even within the margins of the game’s promotional rollout, there are smaller details like the Eden’s Gate logo echoing the Iron Cross used by the German army during WWI and WWII that feature intentionally drawn parallels. The promotional teaser for the Far Cry 5 character Jerome Jeffries also features the black preacher talking about his mistakes during the cult’s growth against the backdrop of a burnt out church.

And at the moment, the most interesting part of Far Cry 5’s new setting is how it shrinks the distance that’s typically put between the player and his actions. You won’t be going through alien temples or a dystopian cityscape far in the future in the game, but you’ll instead be driving past farmlands and downtown baseball fields, fighting enemies who now look just like you in streets that look just like yours.

All of this isn’t to declare prematurely that Far Cry 5 is the next Spec Ops: The Line. But at the same time, Ubisoft, for its shortcomings and missteps, isn’t an intentionally obtuse developer.

Within games like the Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy franchises, Ubisoft has shown a willingness — sometimes successfully, sometimes less so — to draw from real life to tackle more interesting and esoteric ideas than the typical blockbuster franchise model usually allows. The Far Cry series hasn’t always been able to strike a balance between sensationalizing and wanting to question the violence at its core, but in a real-world climate defined by similar paranoia and anxieties, Far Cry 5 might finally have the setting and timing to be able to do so.