FAR CRY 5's Creative Director Discusses The Drastic Change Of Setting And Cultists Themes

In the new interview Dan Hay, Far Cry 5’s creative director, explains the reasoning behind some very controversial decisions his team decided to make. It may be hard to imagine that one day your town is cut off from the world, ruled by a cult and your neighbors turned out to be murderous fanatics, but Ubisoft will try hard to prepare you for that scenario.

Hay thought about moving the series to the USA for a long time, but he and Ubisoft couldn’t find the right way to make that leap of faith and shelved the idea. The series has been exploring international landscapes, or prehistorical setting instead. But Hay’s desire to make something truly different didn’t die, as one day he hit on an idea to adapt the fears from his youth.

He grew up in the times of Cold War and never learned to fully trust the government, even after the fall of USSR. Hay always had a feeling that the dark past could return, that it’s really easy to rouse the worst instincts in people: “I remember really having that feeling during the subprime mortgage collapse when I was living in the States. I looked at people who had been brought up in the post-WWII, who were boomers and whatnot, who expected that life was going to go on a certain track and then realizing that, or at least waking up to the realization that no, it may not.”

One day, the creative director saw a man holding a sandwich board with the tag “the world will end”. He was walking in downtown Toronto and thought “he’s right”. From that point, the cults became his reality. Ubisoft contracted Rick Alan Ross, a cult specialist and writer to help them understand the mechanisms behind the fanatic religious organizations.

Ross believes that the video-game is truly unique, because it gives the player the ability to get into a destructive cult. "It allows you to interact with members, to interact with the leadership, to really get a feel for the persuasiveness, the charisma for the leader, in a way that we could only superficially understand from just reading news stories” – the writer said.

The French developer put a lot of effort to cast right, believable actors to play Eden Gate’s cult members. Popular opinion says that Far Cry games are as good as their villains, but Hay is confident in Greg Bryk (History of Violence) who will portrait Joseph Seed, the cult’s leader. "He does this eerie thing where he doesn’t blink. We all watched the performance and within three minutes we were all like, ‘you know what? I might follow that guy. He’s super charming.’ But there also was this underlying comfort with violence in the way he presents himself. There was charm, there was magnetism, and there was malevolence”, Hay concluded.

It’s a very ambitious concept and it would be a shame if the project was just another mindless shooter surrounded by the topics it couldn’t handle, because it has a big potential to be a rare example of a game that actually has something smart to say.