We now seem to have an answer to the "why doesn't the army step in" question

An evil cult takes over an entire town, and it's up to one man or woman and a small resistance force to step in and save the day.

But why? If anything even close to this happened in real life, it wouldn't be a deputy sheriff fighting an entire evil cult, it would be the army. It would be another large group with some extremely heavy firepower. It didn't make any sense, until I read some official PR for the game. Why doesn't the rest of the country step in? They don't know about it.

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2017/05/26/far-cry-5-what-awaits-you-in-hope-county-montana/

You’re stranded behind enemy lines in cult-occupied Hope County, Montana, and nobody’s coming to help you. Eden’s Gate, a veritable army of fanatics, has finally made its move and locked down the area, leaving you and every Hope County resident in cult territory. Now you’re standing alone against deadly odds in Big Sky Country, with no bars on your phone and only one way to stop the madness: take down Joseph Seed, the self-styled prophet of Eden’s Gate, and free Hope County from his campaign to save souls by force. And if you’re going to survive long enough to do that, you’re going to need to make some friends. Welcome to Far Cry 5, coming February 27 to PlayStation 4.

It sounds like the cult will be shutting off cell towers and internet in the area. Makes perfect sense for a video game. Although with a map big enough to fly planes in, it's hard to imagine that cult would have the resources to watch every exit that could lead out of the area. And again, you can fly a plane, but you still can't leave? It's an answer that just leads to more questions, but it is an answer.

Unless the whole game takes place in a timeframe of like 24 hours, this is paper fucking thin. Why even bother? Leaving it ambiguous would seem more effective to me than that...

Yeah that seems even dumber somehow.

The army is pretty good at bringing its own communication system, so I can't imagine that will be a hindrance.

I think a simple answer is if they had hostages, a bomb, or both.

I honestly never even bothered to think about why this would need to be explained, but that is as decent a video game justification as you can expect so whatever. Makes sense I guess, in a way that most video games "make sense" pretty much. It's like watching a movie and thinking "why didn't he just leave?" Well because then there wouldn't be a movie.

It's gonna be an M. Night Shamalamalamalan ending where you defeat the evil cult, walk out, and it's 100 years in the future, and nothing but a barren wasteland.

As with many discussions around this game, we must remember it's a Far Cry game. It's always been pretty dumb and silly. Like with the other games, I'm expecting more "everyone is a bad guy" shit.

Doesn't make much sense still... are the internet and cell phones the only ways for people to communicate with each other over long distances now?

I get the whole "well it's a video game... so the logic isn't going to make sense" but come on now... surely we can think of better plot points than being "stranded somewhere with no means of outside communication."

So no cell phone signal? Doesn't that problem mean that most of the people living there would already have landline phones for that specific reason?

Also, do people not realize that Montana is a rural state, but it doesn't mean that it's in the fucking wild west. The FBI still is around, there are police stations. The whole thing is so silly.

Its a Far Cry game though, it's ridiculous. Par for the course.

There is no internet or cell towers in central Montana anyway. Their probably aren't even telephone lines for regular phones either.

Reminds me of the alternate ending to Shadow Complex, where in response to your girlfriend being kidnapped by an evil private military group, you can do this:

More so I think if you forcibly abandon any suspension of disbelief when it comes to video games you are actively going to make enjoying them a whole lot less fun by getting bogged down by really insignificant details.

EDIT: @spaceinsomniac Yah I always loved that ending, and I consider it to be the canon of that series. Rescuing her and toppling the regime is just some fever dream.

I love when people always try to look too far into videogames. Looking for "logic". Its a damn game. Play it, enjoy it.

It's a video game, it doesn't need to explain itself as long as it is good.

I feel like during the Oregon thing the cops didn't do much so that they could avoid a bloodbath. Seems like one of many plausible scenarios.

i try not to think too hard about these. i suppose i should hold them to as high of a standard as any other fiction, but whatever. 90% of things have similar plot holes. i think if we were this stringent with all fiction there wouldn't be any interesting fiction.

Wait, so that does mean you are going to be climbing up Cell Towers to restore bars to your phone (aka reveal the map)....

You know stuff not that dissimilar to this happens all the time in the various compounds in America. The most prominent and well known are the Mormon compounds where full grown male adults literally rape 12 year old girls. Yeah, you hear about raids and arrests from these places every once in awhile but these compounds are there and exist.

Sure the group in FarCry 5 are a very extreme case but if they own the land and communication is blacked out it's not that far removed from reality.

I think that's what they are doing. The no cell phone bars thing seems to at least answer the basic "why doesn't he just call someone?" thing. Id say thats all they need to do.

One wonders if you have to maybe climb some cell towers to reactivate them and reveal icons on the map

It's a fun new setting and story that hasn't been done too many times; especially as an FPS.

Who gives a fuck if there's logic behind it or not, maybe you are just Doomguy incarnate and you know the military won't be able to help out as much as you would using guerrilla tactics and taking down these mofos by yourself (with some help from local friends) or a similar situation as Die Hard where the army is aware but they can't make a move but they know they have an inside man (you)

Now i wonder if they have a jokey ending where you climb a few towers to restore wifi connection and call in the army to take care of this cult.

I am with you. It's a cool setting, who gives a shit why the Army isn't doing your job for you.

Look at the Philippines Isis is trying to get a foothold there, guess what they send in the army to deal with this not some gun guru.

Pretty much this. Everyone is ok with the premise of Far Cry 3 and 4 being things that can happen, but as soon as it's happening in the middle on nowhere America - shit, why doesn't someone just step in or get on their iPhone and Snapchat the National Guard?

But what about the huckleberries? You can't explain that.

I can't tell if Ubisoft is trying to be edge-lords or if they're really this tone-deaf, but this seems like probably the most tone-deaf premise I've ever seen for an Ubisoft game, and that's saying a lot.

Fun facts about my cell reception, Internet, and general electronics in central Montana -

If I keep my cell phone in my pants pocket and sit down, it loses reception entirely. There's no reception below waist level and above that is a questionable two bars usually at best.

Traveling outside of town, I can rely on about fifteen miles of cell coverage in any direction. We are surrounded by mountain ranges (Belts, Crazies, and.. something). There's a bit more than that if you head south, but it's a solid generality.

I keep a landline both because it's required by my ISP and because in the winter subzero temperatures for days on end mean it's genuinely dangerous to not have some way of emergency calling someone. Yes, that landline is a wired one, and not even cordless. Our cell tower is also frequently down for... well, reasons. In any case, while there's a great local hospital suited to small general emergencies and general checkups, anything major requires people to be flown out or driven in an ambulance at least sixty miles, neither of which is sometimes feasible in winter weather.

We didn't have high-speed Internet available until the last... mmm.... five years? Maybe even less than that. We have exactly one ISP in town unless you want satellite Internet, which is available because of the number of ranchers around here. As mentioned before, if you want Internet, you have to also include a phone line in the package. I get something like 25 Mb-whatevers for around $90. That's including the phone line. No idea if it's a good price or not because we have nothing else to judge it against.

We occasionally have one person in town who knows how to work on computers. Needless to say, he's in demand.

Other non-tech fun facts:

It's sixty miles to the nearest Wal-Mart, fast food, or major movie theater. While we have a local theater, it now only shows movies sporadically on the weekends (if then) and largely serves up Christian themed movies.

We had a local coffee shop and bakery. It lasted a whole five months.

We once had the highest number of bars per capita according to NPR. I think you can understand why.

Just last year, our main street installed handicap-friendly corners on sidewalks thanks to the state. It's 2017. Before that, the last time the pedestrian crossing white lines had been painted was maybe a decade and a half prior.

We have two grocery stores in town. Due to the secluded nature of the town, it takes produce trucks a couple of days to stock up, then drive here. Often times that means produce is left too long in a refrigerated truck in the middle of winter. Other times, the rotten, terrible selection of produce we have here is due to a lack of a workforce that cares about it.

Cows are regularly herded down highways. Got somewhere you need to be? Tough. The laws here state that the ranchers have the right of way in that situation. Ranchers also fill our county commissioner seats and are the primary employers around here, outside maybe the county and the hospital.

@spaceinsomniac: I just assumed that the game is set during the Trump administration

I mean as far as the plane goes that's fairly simple to explain away with it just being a basic ass crop duster, doesn't have the fuel capacity to get over the mountains that seem to surround the area. Then again we also saw multiple planes in the air so maybe they are "patrolling" the skies meaning they will find you at a certain point no matter what.

Civilian communication being jammed is fairly buyable and long range radio being controlled by the cult gives you a potential objective so it's not all that much of a stretch honestly

Finally! They solved that question I had about the game's realism. I just have a few questions remaining:

• How can the protagonist survive multiple gunshot wounds without spending months recuperating? He just bandages himself or something and he's off sprinting like a world class athlete again in no time? They need to explain this.
• How does the protagonist carry so many guns but still maintain the ability to run at a flat out sprint for long distances? He may be able to craft holsters out of animal skins, but even a highly trained soldier can't run around holding more than one rifle at a time without reducing movement speed and range.
• How does the protagonist know how to hot wire a helicopter or other aircraft? Cars I get, but hotwiring a modern aircraft is not so easy. Most modern cars have decent protections too.
• Why do animals attack the protagonist and even continue to attack after he's fired a gun? Few animals smaller than a bear will regularly attack a healthy adult human male without significant provocation, and once the shooting starts the animals are gone.
• How does the protagonist swim without getting his ammunition and guns drenched?
• Why do the cultists stop chasing the protagonist and go back to "unalerted" even after he kills some of them and they hear gunfire? If I knew someone was out there killing people in my cult I would be on high alert for weeks, not just a few minutes.

Video games like this are by their nature highly unrealistic. I don't find this kind of plot point bothersome in a game the way I would in a movie or TV show that's trying to portray realistic people in a real-world setting.

Does anybody have a better idea? Like legitimately. It would be interesting to see if someone on a forum could out logic Ubi at their own game.

The best I could come up with is don't set the game over too many days once the action really get's going. 8-11 hours for a typical game? Far Cry's are big, so 30 hours or so?
I could honestly see a few scuffles/skirmishes going down without word getting out. Especially given the stranglehold the cultists have on the town, but once things get a little bit more explody and murdery, having it in the confines of a day or two seems somewhat plausible to me. Things going off in a secluded Montana town that is cut off from the outside world might not be known to the outside world for at least a few days. Perhaps.

Towers, you say?

1. The protagonist is going through a huge amount of adrenaline; this allows them to ignore any wounds for the time being. You can bet after a night's rest they are going to be in serious pain.

2. It's been confirmed you play as a pro footballer that just got back from training, hence you can carry so much weight and still be fully efficient as you are at your peak.

3. It's Montana, there isn't anything else to do but learn how to hotwire all kinds of machines

4. Because you have all this gear made out of other animals; the ones attacking you are blood hungry and want some of that sweet sweet skin you are covered in.

5. All your weapons and ammunition are covered in huckleberry which is found in abundance in Montana by everyone and everywhere, which has been known to prolong equipment wear and tear, allowing them to be in tip top shape.

6. It is of higher learning to let stragglers get away; they allow you to run to spread the word of how crazy cool their cult is. Eventually you will return, and with others, to join them.

Look. I'm going to set the record straight.

I live in Montana and I'd be happy to do an AMA instead of people randomly making facts up about this state, but here's what you need to know.

1. I wake up every morning and have to fight a grizzly bear with my hands to get my newspaper.

2. I have a cell phone and it rings when people call me. If it doesn't ring I tackle an American Bald Eagle and write a letter and tie it to said bird and I bird whisper it to fly to deliver my message.

3. My favorite science fiction movie with fancy gadgets and futuristic technology is Wyatt Earp.

4. I have 3 hats. First one used to be a beaver. The other two used to be rabbits.

5. You can't own a Lamborghini Ferrari car up here because you can't shoot a bow and arrow from it to stop cattle thieves.

6. When we see airplanes flying over we all just stand and stare with our mouths open because we don't understand them.

7. We have one cell phone tower, and it supplies the whole state with a place to hang game so we can skin it and make our women fancy dresses.

8. My family tree has one branch!

9. As always. Nobody eats huckleberries here.

You're welcome.

So no one is gonna wonder why a relatively large mass of land in the United States has suddenly gone quiet with absolutely 0 communication? Huh, ok...

I almost wish they had just never acknowledged it now. That isn't plausible at all.

Video game! *jazz hands*

Also do most video games get ripped apart this hard, or is it just something about Far Cry 5?

@s10129107: I think another part of it is that you had other militias that were just itching for a fight. If the military took out one, you'd have others trying to secede.

The way the "preacher" trailer made it sound it could be the US is having some very hard economic times where large parts of the country are in bad depressions. Hell look at the US now and how Trump got in office. There are large parts of the mid-west that have had high ass unemployment. To people saying how there would be no way a cult would take over a town in the US it has happened several times before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajneeshpuram : A town in Oregon got taken over by a new age cult in the 1980's. Cult members try to take over a neighboring town by stacking cult members in local government and police, when it looked like they would lose they used salmonella to poison a salad bar. FBI called in to find pretty much a full on bio weapon lab in the cult compound. Cult leader kicked out of US, 2nd in charge tried to escape but caught in Germany. Cult broken up after

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leith,_North_Dakota : Not a cult but it's still an armed group. A small town had a bunch of its property bought up by a white supremacist name Craig Cobb. He wanted to turn the place into a white nationalist community. Tried to bully and scare people into leaving to take over the town but thankfully the town was able to stop him. He gave up there but has tried to do the same thing in a couple places but may have some trouble getting white supremacist due to being exposed on a talk show for having African American roots.

The only thing that stopped these examples were the groups being stopped in the nick of time in a way. But think about a place that is remote, hardly anyone around, hardly a police force to be afraid of during a time of economic hardship. Real easy for a cult/anti government group to take over. If they dont try to over step their boundries (like in Oregon) they could take over an area and have they way till something happens!

@alwaysbebombing: Setting it in the US is probably making it more real for some people so they are likely to harp on these kinds of niggling mistakes and pick all the nits in a way they wouldn't about a place further removed from them and less familiar.

@upperdecker:Well number 9 just seems like a darn lie.

Why doesn't the Army step in? Well, for starters, it would be illegal for the US Army to do so. But that's a boring real-world answer. We could get real technical and say that Montana has a National Guard force of about 4,000 Guardsmen. We could then try to figure out the logistics of this. If the game takes place in the mid to late 00s, we can assume that a few hundred of them are deployed overseas. How spread out are the Guard units in Montana, and how long would it take them to get activated and sent to Hope County? What's their RoE here?

Or like...we could say that for a video game in a series where the last two entries were crazy and dumb, this explanation holds up as about what we could expect.

@darkeyehails: You're exactly right about it hitting close to home for people. There was an article on a site last week that suggested that it was inappropriate to use real-world American fears of militias as marketing. That article described the settings of the previous two Far Cry games as "lush shooting galleries." The lack of self-awareness was staggering.

I also want to remind people montana has a large quantity of nuclear warheads and nuclear missile silos.

To say the military would not know about stuff up here is plain silly.

Let's enjoy the game for the world they created!

Im pretty sure even if you cant call or fly out someone on the outside would come and check it out. Videogames are dumb and Far cry especially so, this aint dumber than any previous entries.

There will be gun fights and american flags for everyone to enjoy dont worry about it.

This would make a great pachinko machine. Who the fuck cares what's happening on the screen, just give me some shit to look at while I push buttons.

"You picked up your trusty landline phone and called the [insert US militaristic force here]. Problem solved!

Thanks for playing!"

This sounds so much better.

I don't know. They probably should just ignore the question and not come up with any rationale. You can fall down a rabbit hole pretty fast if you start justifying everything. Like:

• Q: Why doesn't somebody just call the army, or the FBI, or the governor or somebody?
  • A: Because it's Montana. Who has cellphone coverage in Montana?
• Q: So literally nobody has a cellphone and not an inch of land has any coverage from any provider at all?
  • A: That is correct. Also the cult took everybody's cellphones.
• Q: And nobody has a landline either?
  • A: Oh, the cult destroyed all telephone lines too.
• Q: Does anybody have access to the Internet? Like, wouldn't somebody post on Facebook, "Hey, a cult is taking over Montana"?
  • A: Yeah, like anybody has the Internet in Montana.
• Q: Yeah I'm sure it is a pain in the ass, but there has to be Internet somewhere in that state.
  • A: Not in Hope County.
• Q: Fine. And nobody has any radios or anything?
  • A: The cult took the radios.
• Q: Ok, did anybody try to send a letter or something?
  • A: The post office is very small. And the cult took that over too.
• Q: Alright, has anybody took their car and drove to an area outside of the county? Like to an area with cellphone reception, or where another person lives who isn't in the cult?
  • A: The cult took over all of the roads. And the gas stations, so people can't buy gas to drive away even if they wanted to.
• Q: Huh. Wait, does anybody like stop by Hope County? Like does that county have any tourists? Does anybody from another county ever come by? Like a farmer or somebody?
  • A: It's Montana. Barely anybody lives in this state.
• Q: I know, but there has to be somebody nearby. Somebody has to sell boats or beef jerky or something right? Or maybe like an aunt or uncle who lives close by who visits once a year to say "Howdy"?
  • A: Yeah, no, it's still Montana. And again the cult took over all of the roads.
• Q: What about truckers? Somebody has to come by to deliver milk or Cheerios, right?
  • A: The truckers were also no match for the cult.
• Q: None of this sounds realistic at all.
  • A: Do you know what isn't realistic? The state of American society, amirite?
• Q: Urg.
  • A: Don't worry about it. It's just a videogame.
• Q: Fine. You know you could have just had this game take place in the 1960s or 1970s and be cool? Like set it in a time before cellphones or the Internet, so you can avoid half of these problems? Also since there was so much other stuff happening around that time, it's probably more conceivable that people will just shrug and say "I don't know what's happening in Montana, but look at literally anything else that is happening in the world right now."
  • A: What's that?

Platinum Trophy "Huckleberry Fin".