Far Cry 5's villains were thinly-veiled white American chuds/fascists.
Far Cry 6's villains are thinly-veiled brown "totally-not-Cuban you guys" leftists/communists.
The cultists in Far Cry 5 were already a both sides thing. The entire narrative is designed to make you second guess yourself and wonder if the cultists have a point hidden away beyond the whole kidnapping, torture, and drugging the water supply stuff they do. Each of the 3 sub-bosses has a moment where you're supposed to say like "well you're not wrong," like when they talk about the inevitability of global war or consumerism eroding everyone's humanity. Then they just up and made the cultists the good guys in the weird sequel.
I also firmly believe Ubisoft was adamant the cultists not share any identifying political tendencies with real world conservatives, since they were deathly afraid of alienating large parts of their g*mer audience. The cultists are only American reactionaries in a completely aesthetic way. Otherwise they are deliberately unrealistic, like how diverse they are, how they don't seem to be Christian at all (at one point a cultist slaps a Bible out of a preacher's hands), and they don't really seem to blame any particular structure or group on the state of the world, they just occasionally mention wishy washy things about corporations or governments.
There seems to be less concern from Ubisoft to portray pseudo-Cuba in a negative light, so the depiction seems much more scathing to me.
The tutorial for the controls in FC6 makes you run past about 20 executions, just no effort to even try and keep it rooted. Ubisoft has always been enlightened centrists with their games, especially the Far Cry ones, but they really took the brakes off for fictional Cuba and made it into an endless meat grinder fascist island.
They've been doing that since forever, mainstream AAA publishers wouldn't want to be caught dead appearing like they promote any political ideology beyond the most milquetoast liberal centrism
counterpoint: Wolfenstein (if anti-fascism counts as a concrete political ideology)
I guess that and the Klan killing stuff in RDR 2 are the most notable exceptions. It's funny how mad chuds got about both
No, it's just Bethesda being Bethesda. There's apparently another Wolfenstein game in the works, but...you know, Bethesda.
"Good old homeboys taking back what's theres" ig. That's probably how a lot of people read it. As well as its old.
Really dumb both sides-ing? in a FAR CRY GAME???? :shocked-pikachu:
I still resent them for what they did with 4. You have one leader trying to advance women's rights in her country and stop people having child brides, and the other who wants to bring back religious fundamentalism, keep the pedo shit, and sell off a young girl to be a god. Of course, the first one is actually evil and corrupt and turns out to be the exact same as the tyrant she's replacing. I mean, i get it from a game design point of view - they both had to be kind of shitty options, but jesus christ you could at least give her some bad takes instead of just basically saying "anyone who fights for social change is a murderous, power hungry bastard". The same shit happened even worse in bioshock infinite and i'm sure a load of other big money games, they love that shit.
Bioshock was even more insulting because it felt the writers took the assignment seriously, like I wouldn't be all that surprised if Ken Levine actually read A People's History of the United States, like it sets up a fairly convincing portrait of a violently racist and unequal nation with a legacy of settler colonialism, but then just shits the bed in the second half to make some idiotic point about cycles of violence.
Yeah, I played 4 because I was interested in 5, and the way they made both as a bad choice I was like then what's the point of playing the game, then reading they also flacidly handled 5 I lost most interest.
Oof this is a rough overton window demonstration.
FarCry 5 itself bothsidesed settler militias (the demographics of the cult depicted in the game aren't exactly reflected by reality) and did colonial erasure (where the fuck are the Ndns?).
For FC6 to be a reaction against that is...rough
Yeah, there's a mission in FC5 where you have to protect a bunch of veterans' graves from cultists who want to blow them up because they're...pacifists? Anti-American? It's not well explained, but moments like that felt very bizarre. The good guys in FC5 are patriotic rural preppers, small town business owners, and cops. The bad guys are ethnically diverse weird hippie drug addicts who seem to hate America, oh but they really like guns and are vaguely Christian or something. A bunch of cutscenes after taking over outposts involve your guys taking down cultist symbols and replacing them with American flags. Your homebase in each region has at least one American flag hung prominently on the wall.
I never once got the impression the game was about demonizing conservatives/chuds outside the marketing campaign.
Lol the fact that preppers weren't militia members but the good guys instead was hilarious
Looking back I think the Far Cry 5 villains were copied from the Rajneeshee cult in Oregon except they took the leader and made him look exactly like David Koresh.
Are the bad guys in FC6 communist/leftists? I haven't played because I'm not a g*mer but I thought in the trailer the protests against the regime had anti-fascist signage.
I've also seen Chapos angry since that trailer convinced that it's about a communist ruler, since the game dropped did they turn out to be correct?
I'm a few hours into watching someone play FC6 and the actual politics of the island's government are extremely unclear and don't make a lot of sense to me. None of this is really spoilers by the way, I'll just elaborate on stuff that's already in the trailers. The government is clearly coded as Cuba, but it's run as a kind of hereditary monarchy where the dictator Castillo is grooming his son to be the next dictator, since he believes something something family family. It's not really clear what level of socialist politics exist on the island, at least among the normal citizenry. There is a whole lot of forced labor. Here's where it gets really wacky though. Castillo got into power after some revolutions in the 1960s which disposed of some kind of generic liberal democracy, which some characters talk about like it was the best period in the entire island's history. They say pre-revolution was a paradise in the Caribbean, then the mean Castillo family got into power and ruined everything. They tanked the economy, got the country cut off from the rest of the world, and blah blah. I believe at one point a character mentions Castillo himself deliberately got the country sanctioned or something?
It's an extremely confusing inversion of Cuban history where I'm not quite sure where to make heads or tails of it. The protest movement, Libertad, is coded as some kind of leftist/anarchist insurgency against the Castillo government, which is occasionally coded as some kind of fascist. It gets even wackier though, since the main policy being fought against by Libertad is the Castillo government's scientists have discovered a cure for cancer in tobacco plants they've dubbed Viviro. So the government is using forced labor camps to grow as much as possible to use as some kind of bargaining in the world economy, but Libertad wants to seize the tobacco fields and produce Viviro for the sake of everyone.
It's a fucking mind boggling inversion of what Cuba actually is, yet still presented as being basically Cuba. I'm maybe a fourth of the way into the game and my head is spinning at just how galaxy brain this stuff is.
The gun fighting seems kinda fun though, but it's a Far Cry game so it's largely more of the same. You get an alligator companion at one point, also there's an M1 garand that goes ping when it reloads.
It kind of seems like Castillo is like a Batista character, just transplanted in time 60 years?
I don't know if I'd say that. It's more like the game has an idea there's a good and bad kind of leftist, with the good kind being pseudo-anarchist jungle militia who have EDM concerts and the bad kind being what most Americans might say Fidel Castro was like.
I think a lot of this ends up planting itself as the history of cuba for a lot of americans, as its literally their only exposure to it. Even if it isn't truthful or even makes sense.
These games, and similar ones like Just Cause games, just present tropes. The evil latino gommunist is a media trope par excellence for the US. They just regurgitate that shit from their collective unconscious.
They're too fucking stupid to even really feel malicious, it's just spectacle cycling itself repeatedly.
I'm like an hour into it because it came with a CPU I bought last year. It is hilarious. It is so hamfisted that I think a liberal with any historical knowledge of Cuba would think it is ridiculous.
Light spoilers from the first ~1hr of the game ahead.
spoiler
I thought it was hilarious that the cancer cure is in tobacco. Tobacco of all things to have a cancer cure in it. Also the evil medicine producing man is evil because he uses slavery to force people to grow the cancer cure tobacco. One of the first missions is to burn down a field of the cure to cancer with a flamethrower, as the good guys do.
The evil man's name is literally Castillo lol so not only half way to Castro but also the name of the recent Peru socialist president.
Also apparently there was a revolution on the Islands in 67' that plunged the Island into poverty and the cancer cure guy is a counterrevolutionary force against this prior vague poverty-inducing revolution. So Ubisoft made sure to make it so that you can roleplay as both sides. I would not be shocked if this 67' revolution was never mentioned again.
Honestly I think this game is tolerable if you retcon it in your mind that you are the bad guy and all of the absurd levels of propagandized stuff is just how the bad guys see the communist government. Or you read heavily into the vague parts of the story and see the villain as a batistiano type-guy that loves curing cancer for some reason (which is bad) you can pretend to be a communist that hates curing cancer.
Regardless I love my slop.
