Far Cry’s settings have usually always been in the thick of the wilderness, whether it be on tropical islands or deep in the mountains. With Far Cry 5, the series is going to Montana, coming to the USA for the first time, and there’s a feeling that the setting is different from anything else the series has ever done before. We recently held an interview with Drew Holmes, lead writer of the game, and asked him about why the development team at Ubisoft decided to go with Montana as a setting, and we got an interesting answer.
“We had a few ideas on where to take the franchise,” Holmes told GamingBolt. “But Dan Hay [director of the game] always talks about bringing Far Cry to America, pretty much since they’ve done Far Cry 3. The first place that everyone decided to check out was Montana. I think that there’s a great sense of frontier, great sense of wilderness, of danger, wildlife, there’s mountains, there’s big sky. There’s lots of places that feel unknown even though it is in the backyard.”
“So I think as soon as the team went there,” he continued, “they started to meet the people there, and get a sense of, ‘Montanans are a very self-reliant type of person. They don’t like to be pushed around.’ There’s a history of standoffish-ness and leave-me-alone with the state that I think worked really, really well with Far Cry. The list of places that Far Cry wanted to go after that just fell off the table. We said, ‘this is the spot, this is where we want to go. Now let’s think of an interesting villain that could populate that space’.”
The blend of civilization and wilderness that Ubisoft seem to be going for with Montana as a setting in Far Cry 5 definitely seems interesting, and there’s no doubt that it seems like a very exciting prospect for a setting in the Far Cry series. Far Cry 5 launches in February of next year for the PS4, Xbox One and PC. Our full interview with Drew Holmes will be going up on the site soon, so stay tuned.