I make no secret of
the fact that Ubisoft and I have an on-again, off-again relationship.
Every now and then they create a game like Assassin's Creed: Origins,
that I can easily sink 50+ hours into without thinking -- sure, it
may have its flaws, but there's clearly a level of love and care
imbued into the final product. Other times, they are liable to
produce content like Watch_Dogs, which paints itself as a typical,
by-the-numbers open-world revenge story that left me sour and
disappointed. From my previous experiences with 3, 4, and Primal, I
was expecting the fifth entry in the Far Cry franchise to be dumb but
otherwise milquetoast: A decent open-world shooter with a story that
brought up some interesting ideas that ultimately go nowhere.
Instead, what I
received was one of the worst stories I had ever seen in an Ubisoft
game. Even more than the villainous Aiden Pearce in Watch_Dogs, Far
Cry 5 left me contemptuous and ultimately resentful of the direction
the developers chose to go. There are some very dangerous
implications behind the story, particularly the ending, and they need
to be discussed. (Though it goes without saying, there are spoilers
abound, so read at your own risk.)
For those of you who
haven't finished the game, Far Cry 5 takes place in the fictional
county of Hope, Montana, where a cult of doomsday-preppers has set up
the mysterious ‘Project at Eden's Gate’, led by Joseph “The
Father” Seed. After a video documenting recent abductions and a
string of violent incidents involving cult members goes viral, , a
warrant is served for Joseph Seed's arrest. The player assumes the
role of ‘Rook’, a nameless, faceless deputy in Hope County,
assisting the local sheriff and a US Marshall in executing the
warrant.
Unfortunately for
the player and their fellows in law enforcement, this event was
exactly what the cultists were waiting for. Preaching that “God
will not let you take me!”, Seed raves that attempting to arrest
him is the “breaking of the First Seal” that sets in motion the
end of the world as we know it. After the arrest attempt inevitably
goes south, the deputy is rescued by a man named Dutch. Dutch claims
that if the player wants to confront The Father, they will first need
build up a resistance force by causing enough havoc to draw out and
kill his three lieutenants, referred to as “The Family”.
Three dead
commanders later, Joseph Seed invites Deputy No-Name to join him at
the church where they first tried to haul him in. There, he reveals
that he has used a previously-established magical substance known as
“Bliss” to brainwash the resistance forces the player has
gathered throughout the campaign, compelling them to hold the other
three law enforcement officers who came with the player at gunpoint.
He offers to let them and the player go if they promise to leave
immediately and cease their efforts to imprison him, which the player
can choose to do. If they instead make the only logical choice to
fight on, the deputy rains a hail of bullets on their former allies
so that they can revive them, turning them good again in one of the
dumbest final boss segments I have ever played in a first-person
shooter. Then, and only then, can The Father finally be defeated...
...or not. After the
fight, Seed laments that “The Final Seal has been broken” -- and
then a nuclear bomb goes off in the background. Yes, really. To which
the whole cast hops into a truck and evacuates to Dutch's bomb
shelter from the beginning of the game. Once again, things go poorly,
and the player wakes up inside the aforementioned shelter to find
themselves cuffed to a bedpost. Lying dead in a pool of his own blood
is Dutch himself, with Seed watching over him, cleaning the knife
that delivered the fatal blow. As the player awakens, they are
confronted at knife-point. Blaming them for “breaking the seals and
unleashing hell on earth,” the former Father says that were it not
for the fact that no one else is left, he would gladly kill the
player for what they've done. Then, credits roll. If you return to
the main menu afterwards, the previously idyllic intro screen has
been transformed into a nuclear hellscape.
At the time I
finished the game, I had assumed that The Father was the one that
called down the bomb that devastated Hope County. I believed that he
detonated them out of spite, blaming me for the consequences of his
own actions. While this annoyed me, it’s par for the course when it
comes to video games pretentiously spouting fatalistic
pseudo-philosophy in the hopes of sounding intellectual. However, a
friend of mine mentioned that if one were to listen to radio
broadcasts while driving in-game, there are talks of escalating
global tensions leading to potential nuclear war. As it turns out, a
foreign country had opened hostilities against the US at the exact
time that the player defeated Joseph Seed.
This might be
dismissed as coincidence, if it weren’t for the rest of Far Cry 5
itself. According to the rantings of both Joseph Seed and his
Heralds, after smothering his just-born daughter (whose birth killed
the mother), Joseph had a vision from god. He saw that once he was
apprehended, bound against his will, the world as we know it would
come an end, drenched in fire. Several events would precede this
moment. The ones who would eventually bind him would fail their first
attempt. They would then proceed to assassinate those closest to
Seed, reject his charity, and only then would they finally emerge
victorious, triggering the great calamity. Believing this to be
inevitable, he created the Project at Eden's Gate to safeguard enough
people that the human race could live on.
His insane, absurdly
specific prophecy about the end of the world, unlike the rantings of
every doomsayer before him, is one-hundred percent unequivocally
correct. And considering just how accurate every single detail of
this account is, it would be absolutely mad to blame sheer
happenstance. That, more than anything else in this entire story, is
a problem.
Similar beliefs
exist in modern America to a much greater scale than you might
initially think. Even outside of relatively modern doomsday cults
throughout the world, the idea that the end times are upon us is more
accepted than it should be. Roughly 50 million people in America
believe that they will be “raptured” away any moment now: That
Christ will descend upon Israel and take the true believers with him
to the gates of Heaven, leading to the literal End of Days. Some of
the people in that group are very prominent politicians, many of them
still in office today. Much of US foreign policy (particularly
revolving around Israel), climate change policy, and other policies,
are subtly or not-so-subtly influenced by the idea that we are living
in the end times. Why bother tackling global warming when we know we
humans aren't going to be around to feel its effects? Why should we
attempt to bring peace to a region of strife when we fundamentally
believe that very conflict is itself a sign that heaven is not too
far away? Actual people who hold power over these crucial decisions
go in with these thoughts.
I can't claim to
know the minds and hearts of Far Cry 5's creative team. I wasn’t in
the writing’s cubicle, where these decisions were being made. I can
only speak to the content of the game they created. That said, to
present Father Joseph Seed as “correct” in his prophecy is to
give credence to these voices. Ubisoft and the dev team have chosen
to validate those who abdicate responsibility to work towards a
better world in faith that there will soon no longer be a world to
improve. As Waypoint's Cameron Kunzelman pointed out in an editorial,
there is no counterpoint to the cult's ravings: The protagonist is
silent, and the resistance forces are too focused on removing the
cult’s power base to talk about what they've done to the people of
Hope County. The doomsayers are given even more power to spread their
message in this game than they have in real life.
Even more
aggravating is how the game treats the player for daring to oppose
the rabid, murderous cult. Throughout the game, the Heralds all
admonish Deputy No-Name for their violence. In my run, I had
dismissed this as just another one of the franchises laughable
attempts to address the nature of violent video games, much like Far
Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 before now. I distinctly remember shouting at my
television “I wouldn't keep killing you if you didn't insist on
shooting me on sight” during one of these speeches. It's annoying,
but vanilla.
But it's tough to
think of it in the same way given the full context of the game. After
all, in this specific story, the cult is confirmed to be one-hundred
percent correct about the coming of the end times. It makes sense for
them to take hold of all the resources of this area, since they know
that they'll need them to survive once the bombs fall. Of course
they'd try to recruit everyone they can, even if it has to be through
torture, drugs, and brainwashing. They're just ‘mercifully’
trying to save them from their impending fate. Since the end is
coming, and not everyone can be saved, they simply don't have time to
take less drastic measures. If only this player could understand how
their selfish heroism is damning people who were otherwise going to
survive.
Proving that the
cult's prophecy was true, and that the world does end once those
conditions are met, Far Cry 5 retroactively justifies every sadistic
action performed by the Project at Eden's Gate. Conversely, it
criticizes not just the player, but anyone who would condemn such
actions, even in the real world. If you reading this are someone who
actively works to protect people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and/or
women from the many threats to their well-being, Far Cry 5 wants you
to know that you might be wrong for doing so. After all, the crazies
might be right. Your gay friends might actually be going to hell for
loving another person of the same gender. Who are you to get in the
way of their salvation?
These aren't
questions that deserve to be asked. This is not a political platform
that should be up for debate. These beliefs genuinely harm people of
all stripes across the world, and very a tacit acceptance of them is
not something I can take lightly. I felt uncomfortable just writing
the above two paragraphs because I'm genuinely afraid someone might
take that as praise for the game, excited that it's worldview aligns
with their own. As a cisgender white male, I can't speak to the level
of damage these ideas can cause, but I know that harm has been, is
being, and will be done, and this game might further that.
As previously
stated, I found it hard to believe Ubisoft intended this to be the
underlying moral of Far Cry 5, given my long and storied history with
them. That said, there was a whole team of
writers who worked on this game. They should be able to think through
the logical implications behind their own script. The creative leads for this project
presented a statement in support of doomsday cults and against people
who were earnestly fight to safeguard their fellows from those who
would openly oppress them, whether or not they intended to. (And I honestly don't care which.) I expected Far Cry 5 to have nothing of
substance to say. What I did not expect was to be left quaking in
anger and disbelief at the choices made in creating this game. Taken
holistically, Far Cry 5 is one of the most damnable games to be
released in recent history.
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