The Far Cry series prides itself on freedom of approach – the ability to assess a situation, weigh your options and decide, ‘Yes, I’m going to ride an elephant into that military base’. But its stories have always been linear – told to you in chunks in the fashion of GTA.
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No longer. In a major narrative shake-up, Far Cry 5 has chopped up its story with a machete so that it’s “entirely up to you.”
“We’ve always been pushing for big, expansive open-worlds, but the narrative has been fairly linear,” Far Cry 5 executive producer and creative director Dan Hay told us. “Why couldn’t we just do that with the entire game? Why couldn’t we make it so you could go in any direction, meet any character, partake in any story? You could play it completely differently and it was entirely up to you how you authored it.”
When you start Far Cry 5, you will have one very specific moment with the Father, the game’s radical preacher villain. And, from then on, you pick the order of events.
“If you decide to go south you might meet Nick, you might meet Pastor Jerome, you might meet Casey,” Hay expands. “There’s a bunch of different characters down there.”
But if you headed north, your first ten hours with the game would be utterly different – coloured by different animals, different people, different segments of story.
“It’s designed so that you author your own story,” Hay finishes.
Here’s everything we know about Far Cry 5, which comes out on the far-too-distant February 27th, 2018.