As the leaking ship that is Ubisoft slowly pulls into next month’s E3 conference, the rumors about the company’s upcoming games are coming in hot and heavy. We’re still waiting on official word about the next Assassin’s Creed, but another whispered-about sequel, Far Cry 5, was confirmed last week, and now the publisher is rolling out the first vague details about the game. Specifically, we now know the series will be trading the exotic, far-flung locales in which it’s typically set for a stop in rural Montana.
The completely game-footage free teaser trailer shows a man running through a field before the video cuts to black and a gunshot cracks out through the air. The camera then takes us past a small church while a chorus sings “Amazing Grace,” and as we get closer to the building, we see the ringing from its belltower is actually coming from someone bashing another person’s skull against the bell. And thus, we are welcomed to the fictional Hope County.
It’s hard to glean much from the short video, but it does appear to line up with a recent Reddit post by someone who claims to have been in a Far Cry 5 focus group circa 2016. According to the poster, the game will pit players against a violent religious cult:
They showed us some basic promotional videos featuring a heavily—heavily—religious angle to the evil. A person (presumably the protagonist) walking through a town that was completely empty, only to walk into a church to discover the congregation is made up of everyone in town staring in rapt attention at a shirtless lunatic leader brandishing an assault rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other.
That certainly sounds like the kind of potentially inflammatory game Ubisoft would make, but we’ll find out whether it’s the actual direction of Far Cry 5 on Friday May 26 when Ubisoft is set to give the game a proper reveal.