Headscratchers / Far Cry 5

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The Government

• The weapons and equipment of the cult seen so far wouldn't be out of place in a Somalian militia (ignoring that the rifles and submachine guns are generally western and modern models), with technicals, machine gun nests up on roofs, and rocket launchers. Leaving aside of how they got that far without already getting crushed, that's the sort of thing that gets an express upgrade past police, SWAT, FBI/other federal agencies, and possibly even the National Guard. To maintain its legitimacy the USA cannot abide armed insurrection of that scale within its borders for any longer than it takes the tanks, APCs, and helicopters to load up and make the trip. So... where are they? There are signs that the federal government is aware of what's going on - there's a US Marshal tied up on the roof of a truck in one promo poster and a different Marshal sitting handcuffed in the Last Supper parody poster, which also includes ammo containers that are almost certainly looted from an armory (hard to explain the Russian RPGs, though). Given that serving warrants is part of the US Marshal job description, that's probably what they were present in Hope County to do - which means that HQ was waiting for them to return, and when they didn't shit would get real extremely fast. Drone recon is in common use even by state agencies these days (as the protestors of the DAPL pipeline experienced) and would see all the roofs with SINNER painted on them plus the other paraphernalia and aforementioned machine gun nests on roofs. A case could be made for timidity if it was set in the 90s and the government wanted to avoid another Ruby Ridge or Waco, but it's a modern day setting, post 9/11, post Clive Bundy/the Malheur occupation. Except in story, innocent people are being actively rounded up and murdered by a group whose crazy cult status is literally visible from space (with sufficient zoom). In that situation, in this age, there's no way the government is holding back at all from crushing them before more innocents die. Word is that the DIY and distrust of government culture the development team experienced in Montana when researching for the game informed, which makes sense, as does the idea that locals would to resist - for the day it would take for The Cavalry to arrive. And again, innocent people are actively dying; even the Bundy's would be cheering for the cult to be exterminated ASAP no matter who is doing it.
  • There Are No Police.
  • But there are police, so to speak: the US Marshals. Way more police tend to come when police go missing.
  • I was making somewhat of a joke. Yes, there are police and law enforcement in game, but it's the same general principle that the trope I cited runs on: illegal actions will only draw as big a law enforcement response as is convenient to the plot. It'd be a pretty boring game if all you had to do was make a few phone calls to the national guard and FBI. In universe though, the cult is probably less numerous and well equipped than it is in game, their body count is lower, and the normally isolated country people in the, who haven't totally gotten their cultural heads around calling for outside help, see it as more of a personal problem that a well-regulated militia will handle better than any stinkin' Feds. Hopefully though, there'll be a slightly better explanation that "I didn't vote for our last president, so therefore I'd rather take on an army of wackos by myself than take a few videos of the cult and drive to the Montana's governor's house for help."
  • This could also be WMG, but this is the same universe as Assasin's Creed and Watchdogs. The government could easily be busy dealing with an even bigger crisis, and perhaps the cult is being deliberately enabled by Abstergo to sew the seeds of chaos and discredit religion.
    • That would counteract against standard Templar motives seeing as religion (especially Christianity) is one of their tools for controlling the masses.
    • The idea that the government is too preoccupied with other issues to be able to afford to stop the Cult looks surprisingly (not to mention, scarily) more likely taking into account one of the game's endings, which shows an actual nuke detonating in Hope County, implying that Joseph was right all along. With how isolated from the outside world everyone in Hope County is, it's not wholly unfeasible to imagine that throughout the entire game some seriously messed up political shit was going down between, say, America and North Korea - so much that even the army was busy - and you just didn't hear about it.
  • While you could expect somebody would grow suspicious at some point when the arresting group don’t return, the opening of the game ends with the police dispatcher being revealed to be a Peggie.
• At the beginning of the game, Dutch explains that by the time the government finds out what's happening in Hope County, it'll be too late anyway, so presumably the game takes place over a relatively short time and no one was able to contact the outside during that period.
• Agent Willis insinuates in his side mission that someone very high up the chain (implied to be at least the CIA director, if not the POTUS himself) has some shady ties to the Project. If that really is the case, Washington might be deliberately letting everything go to hell in Hope County.
• There's also the possibility that Joseph Seed was using the nuclear weapons that were likely in the nuclear silos as insurance that the government wouldn't attack him: notice that the nuclear detonations only happen in the ending where you assault Seed directly.
• Judging by the dialogue that Willis got with his contact, is possible that the government is observing what is happening to see how the Americans would deal with a foreign invasion.

No Federal Response

• Even if Joseph had an insider in the Sherrif's Office, and communications with the outside world was blocked, wouldn't at least the Marshals Office in Billings know that something was wrong after enough time had passed with no contact from Marshal Burke?
  • The only explanations I can think of are that the game takes place over the course of a very short time, like a week or two, which is hinted at in several places, coupled with the government being severely occupied with an international emergency situation as stated in the radio news reports.
    • However... it is more then likely that, unless half of the time was spent in the Whitetail Mountians, more then a week or two had passed. As one of the efforts to brainwash the player involves knocking them out for what is stated to be around a week, as though in a attempt to starve them. The duration being somewhat confirmed as the food given shortly after waking up and being mocked about being hungry is almost right away devoured by the player as though out of desperation before they are treated to the talk about instincts and food. And reguardless, I imagine even a day of lost contact and not returning would be enough to raise concerns among the feds and provoke at the very least a search party.

Population

• What is the population of Hope County? Montana counties can dip into the hundreds, but Hope County needs to be at least in in range of ten thousand for there to be enough able bodied men in the cult for the player to slaughter as well as enough able bodied men to keep a good mix of victims of the cult. And a "convert or die" approach doesn't exactly generate dependable recruits without sufficient time to brainwash them - lots of people will logically and have historically pretended conversion, many even if they have to do terrible things to maintain the facade, then run/resist the first solid chance they get. The cult clearly has a solid core of supporters, but by the point we've seen they clearly aren't taking enough time to indoctrinate new members.
  • To your first question, Sanders County seems like everything Hope County needs to be. Besides having the right look and feel for the game, Sanders County has 11,534 people as of the last census estimate. It's also fairly isolated, which could explain how they managed to avoid notice for so long - even by Montana standards it's rural, no highways or interstates go through it, the terrain is rugged, and it's not especially tourist-y. So Hope County has at least one decent counterpart, and there are other places that fit the bill nearly as well.
  • Regarding the cult's methods, the Wikipedia article for the game suggests that one of the cult's Heralds is a pacifist who convinces people that the cult leader is benevolent, while the others have set up a fair bit of infrastructure. Given this, I expect that you're wrong to say that the people know the full truth, or that they're new enough that they haven't had time to brainwash people. Lots of people besides just the hard-line fanatics probably support it enough to disbelieve or rationalize anything that conflicts with their position. Even the more critical people likely don't realize how bad it is, and have at least some sympathy for the cult (as well as plenty of fear). While there are definitely going to be people hostile to the cult who know the truth, scattered and disorganized as they are, most probably feel too demoralized to do anything other than hope it goes away without them. Especially since pretty much any meaningful action you can take is personally risky, likely to get people you care about killed, or both.

Demographics

• Montana is a very white state; from 2015 census data, whites are 90% of the population, followed by Native Americans at 6.5%, Hispanics at 3.5%, mixed race at 3%, and every other ethnicity is lucky to break half a percent (this all adds up to more than 100% because more than one ethnicity can be recorded; a person who considers themselves mixed Native and White might check three boxes). Moreover, minorities mostly reside in the cities of the state, aside from Native Americans who largely live on reservations. So how are there two blacks just among the protagonist character set, along with others who have apparently joined the cult? And that's not considering other ethnicities who may be less obvious when you're machine gunning them or are characters that have not been revealed yet. It's fine, just... not very demographically accurate.
  • For one thing, having a non-white priest in Montana is more realistic than it sounds: a lot of them get called to serve very distant congregations, so clergy (along with doctors and educators) are some of the more likely members of a rural, overwhelmingly white community to be non-white. It's less probable than having a white priest, but it's the kind of ordinary improbability you expect to see now and then. As for the cult members - not everyone need have been recruited from the locals. There's no reason to suppose he didn't have some followers of color before setting up shop in Montana.
  • More fundamentally, I don't see what's unrealistic about a racially unrepresentative person turning out to have story significance. It isn't like the author has to throw darts at pictures to determine who gets to be major characters. The author can give anyone in the town a good reason to be part of the story, so the only question is whether it's realistic for them to exist in the first place. While it's not common for a non-reservation county in Montana to have many minorities, it's less common for it to have literally none. Maybe there's only 10 black people in the county (excluding the outsiders), but if Ubisoft makes one of them an Iraq War veteran, or a paramedic, that could easily justify making them important to the story.
  • The opening question was more about how not just two protagonists, but (more significantly) also at least some of the cult members, are black. The Project's beginning is bare bones so far, but it's implied by Jeffries initially being friendly with Joseph Seed then taking his flock that the Seeds did not have much of a following before coming to Hope County. Again, this is all kind of shooting in the dark before the game comes out, but it feels a lot like poorly supported Equal-Opportunity Evil at this point.
  • But speaking of Jeffries, his denomination itself is kind of weird, since Jeffries isn't just a priest, but a Catholic one, and Montana is only 13% Catholic. Moreover, only 3 percent of Catholics are black, and there are only 250 black priests out of 40,000 in the US as of 2012. As noted, clergy are sometimes deliberately assigned to be dissonant, but it makes the odds that much longer.
    • Maybe Jeffries not being a local is relevant to the story, even in the creation of the main antagonist.
  • In one pìece of the pre-release promotional material you can see a young man driving into Hope County to seek refuge into Mr Seed's flock; he is welcomed and recruited without apparently any opposition. The cult's size, power and diversity can be easily explained by this, they just come from all over to join it. Same with the resistance, which can be a mixture of locals and outside volunteers (just like your character). There are many contemporary real life examples of warring militias being largely staffed by foreign recruits and volunteers.
  • Another explanation is given in the Book of Joseph. He started his cult in Georgia, specifically Rome. When they were chased out, he took his followers to Montana where they set up shop once more.

Cult Objectives

• Okay, so the cult thinks that the end is nigh, and is being so aggressive because they want to cleanse as many souls as possible in Hope County before the end comes. Okay. But why just Hope County? Why not the surrounding counties, or the state, or anyone they can reach by any means necessary or possible? A broadcast radio antenna is in the Last Supper poster image, so that's probably come into play.
  • Well, people have to start somewhere, right? They probably don't have the manpower or armaments needed to invade the other counties.
  • They've got enough people to make a game build around killing them fun, technicals, and World War II planes in the least populous state in the country. If that's not enough to start expanding, what is?
  • A military comparable to the U.S.'s? There might be smaller, more peaceful sects of the cult in other counties and cities, but if they try what they're trying in Hope County anywhere else in the U.S., even a major city police department has the manpower and guns to handle them. They won't stand a chance.
    • The game reveals that the Project at Eden's Gate are an Apocalypse Cult of CrazySurvivalists who are preparing for The End of the World as We Know It (complete with taking over old nuclear bunkers to both store up supplies, and to hold those that they "save" to "protect" them from the coming apocalypse), and are building their army to A) "save" as many people as possible before the end comes and B) to fight off anybody trying to stop the cult, as they think that stopping the cult means dooming all those that the cult holds captive from the apocalypse that they just "saved" them from. And if you try to arrest Joseph Seed in the end instead of walking away, you prove him right (at least if the high-on-Bliss Deputy didn't just hallucinate the following) as Hope County is nuked, and the only ones who survive are you and him (with him holding you captive).

What was the Marshal thinking?

• So the US Marshal's plan to arrest Seed who has an army of dedicated followers and not afraid of committing criminal acts, is just go in there with three locals for back-up, walk right into a full congegration, arrest Seed and then just leave? Even the sheriff at least makes sure to inform dispatch to call the authorities if they do not make it back in 15 minutes, where as the Marshal had no plan if anything went wrong.
  • I think this is a bad mixture of self-conceitedness and being ignorant of the situation from the Marshal's part. He definitely thought that by waltzing in as a federal agent, the cult wouldn't dare to touch him; sadly, he wasn't aware of the cult's true strength (remember, once the player and the Marshal escape, he tells the Deputy that he honestly had no idea that the group is as crazy and well-armed as they turned out to be). He also seems to aim for recognition, hence pushing for completing the arrest: before entering the church, he tells the sheriff that if they go through with this, all of them will be front page news items the next day.
  • Brazen overconfidence, most likely. He probably assumed that, despite the cult being heavily armed and easily able to fight him and his backup off (outnumbering them by the hundreds) they would respect that he is a federal marshal and therefore wouldn't interfere. He most likely assumed the cultists would be worried about bringing in a huge government crackdown if they resisted, and therefore assumed resistance wasn't a possibility.

The Nuclear Explosion and the Ubisoft Shared Universe

• The game's main ending features a nuclear detonation destroying Hope County. The character of Hurk connects Far Cry 5 to the rest of the mainline canon Far Cry games. Given that Far Cry 3 features an Abstergo lab that thus establishes the mainline Far Cry games as being in the same setting as multiple other Ubisoft franchises, including the Assassin's Creed and Watch_Dogs franchises, this raises the question of what exactly this means about the game's main ending?
  
  Was the detonation intentional or the result of an accident? If intentional, was it caused by non-state actors or state-actors? If caused by non-state actors, why would they use such a valuable weapon targeting rural Montana? If caused by state-actors, wouldn't a nuclear exchange end the Ubisoft shared universe? If not, how would an extremely unfortunate nuclear accident or a nuclear terrorist attack have effects on the future of their shared universe? If this is only one detonation, would it be possible for characters who were in any of the bunkers to be rescued? As an extension of that final question, how does Far Cry 5 fit-in with the rest of the canon if it is part of it rather than assumed to be a spin-off?
  
  Given how disconnected Hope County is to events in the outside world, it seems incredulous that any of the different actions from the game's two other endings would have averted a seemingly unrelated nuclear detonation; it is hard to imagine that the same elapsed time from either ending would not have also involved Hope County's nuclear destruction. It is that, or else, it implies that whatever ultimately caused the nuclear detonation amounted to random chance.
  • The Ending is a dream, the deputy is still high on bliss. They arrest Seed and all is well, the Deputy just dreams the blast.
    • K, but why though? Why go through 20-30 mins of gameplay for... seemingly no reason and then just not detailing the most important part of this? Not to mention just skipping over the 'They arrest Seed and live happily ever after' part. Its... just pointless. I am starting to have the opinion that the 'Nukes were just illusions made by bliss' are simply fans clutching to whatever they can to salvage a frankly terrible ending.

  • In fact, there will be a DLC where you have to fight the Father's influence in the underground base, and at the end you wake up to your comrades struggling to revive you from the worst Bliss trip ever. You know you want it.
    • Quite frankly, I don't want the ending locked under DLC, thank you very much.

  • Especially since, as rural as Hope County is shown to be, there's nothing worth *one* nuke at, let alone THREE of the things. (Or was that just me, getting two more blasts after telling Joseph what he can do with his "offer" to leave?)
    • You aren't wrong, there were at least three nuclear detonations, though admittedly this doesn't prove anything: there were nuclear silos in the area and would be priority targets for a first-strike nuclear attack. For my part, I assumed that the Seeds had gotten their hands on the nukes in the silos and held them as insurance that the government would never attack them: notice that Joseph Seed seems to know exactly when they'll go off, and that they only detonate in the Resist ending when he has nothing left to lose.

Why doesn't the nuclear bomb hit Hope County in the 'Walk Away' ending?

• This is something that has to be questioned: Why doesn't the nuclear attack happen if the Deputy walked away? Did their decision to leave create a force field over Hope County? Did Joseph have a mole in an ICBM silo just waiting for a signal? Was it all a hallucination? Was it staged? If the nuke was coming, how could anything happening in Hope County affect it?
  • How do you know it doesn't? In that ending, you black out several full minutes before the nuke would have dropped in the 'Resist' ending.
  • How do you know the nuke DOES hit during the "Resist" ending? You get high on a shitload of Bliss just before the "nukes" explode meaning you could have been hallucinating the entire sequence (the fact some of your Bliss hallucinations before the final level see the "world on fire" just like the nuke ending doesn't rule out the "Resist" ending being an extension of the Bliss hallucination you were subjected to earlier).
  • Because that's a dumb way to chicken out of ending your story. By saying 'Yeah, the last 20-30 mins of gameplay never happened, but here are the credits' is a Massive Cop-Out. In fact, its blatantly a No Ending situation. What ever was the point of droping the nukes, killing off literally every character except the one that you've spent the entire game to kill, leaving the player ziptied to a bed with dialogue implying we're about to be said Big Bad's rape and torture toy, and literally ending on dialogue of "I was right" from the Big Bad only to go 'lolNope. That ending wasn't real'. If that's not the ending, where IS the ending? So, no, quite frankly I think any writer who pulls such nonsense isn't a particuarly good writer.
  • And how do you know that the nukes arrived by missile and weren't set off by Seed himself as a last-ditch contingency? He does seem to know, down to the second, when they'll go off and isn't surprised in the least when they do.

What did John say to Nick?

• After a Spiteful Spit from Nick, whatever it was John whispered to his ear that got him to be fully compliant must have been pretty convincing.
  • Considering how much Nick cares about his wife, I assumed it was probably some kind of threat against her, or the baby. Threatening a hero's loved ones is a classic villain trope, after all.

So was she there or not?

• Faith being a hallucination for most of the game seems obvious enough but the Boss Battle with her is a little jarring. Her attacks can actually hurt you and she can take a lot of bullets and even some rockets before finally dying of some minor looking injuries. Considering the nature of her segment of the game we don't even know if she's really dead other than Joseph grieving over her. It's just as likely the Deputy was shooting thin air instead of Faith herself. So when the Deputy was getting attacked by her exactly what was attacking the Deputy and how is the player supposed to believe she's really dead from Joseph's eulogy alone?
• As noted elsewhere, it's implied that Faith takes you back to her bunker during the hallucination scenes. Judging from the Bliss constantly leaking out from beneath her bunker door, it seems like the inside of her bunker is constantly being pumped full of Bliss fumes, which would lead to some pretty vivid hallucinations once inside.

Joseph Seed's compound

• Considering the nuke ending, and Joseph having apparently predicted it beforehand, why is his compound the only one that doesn't have a bunker? All three of the other cult leaders each have their home base inside a fortified structure made to resist an end-of-the-world scenario, but Joseph, the leader of the entire cult, has his own headquarters in what looks like a normal town. Sure, the roads are fenced off, and it's on an isolated island, but there doesn't seem to be any attempt at making any of the structures bomb-proof in any way. What exactly was his plan for when the world actually ends? Were he and his closest followers planning on just dying on their little island while everyone else is safe underground? Or was his plan always to drive down to Dutch's bunker and kill him for it?
  • He probably had the intention of divvying up his followers to the already established bunkers in the possibility that he couldn't convert all of Hope County. Remember, his whole goal was to turn the entirety of Hope County into the cult's home, and with so many bunkers already built, he most likely assumed the owners would happily share the space with their new 'siblings'.

Full Auto Surplus

• How do the residents of Hope County have so many post-1986 automatic weapons?
  • Fully-automatic weapons were banned in 1986, but, considering how many doomsday preppers there are in Hope County, it's highly likely that many of them illegally modified their guns to be full-auto, hiding said guns in their bunkers or buried in their backyards specifically in case of a scenario like what happens in the game. There's also the Eden's Gate cult themselves, who don't seem overly concerned with respecting federal law. On the other hand, judging by some of the weapon descriptions, it's more likely the developers simply didn't know much about guns and made the common mistake of believing that semi-auto weapons are rapid-fire rather than single-fire.
    • It's also worth noting that the Eden's Gate cult all carry rifles with a unique weapon skin, that specifically has a white (3D-printed?) lower receiver. The lower receiver is the part that contains the trigger group, so if all of the cult's guns have home-made lowers, then it would explain the illegal burst and full-auto settings. As for the local resistance, they're all either preppers or people familiar enough with guns to have modified their rifles shortly after the cult takeover.
    • A bit more easily, if they had one inside man within the Montana sheriff's department, they could possibly have one (or more) in the Montana National Guard smuggling out military lowers - or indeed entire rifles given the ubiquity of the AR-C specifically in Hope County (which looks less like the common AR-15 and has some very distinctly HK416 components which are not backwards comparable with the typical AR.)
  • The 1986 ban was on selling new automatic weapons to civilians. Any that were legally acquired prior to then were grandfathered in and can be legally transferred between individuals as long as the recipient goes through the NFA paperwork and done according to state laws. Then again, that probably just explains any AR-Cs with non-Eden's Gate lowers more readily than it does Eden's Gate AR-Cs, since a private citizen with too much money to burn would be more likely to go through the paperwork.
  • https://www.unwantedfirearms.org/ all they need is a few people inside to get a pipeline of weapons, and they probably have people in Montana P Ds who will slip the guns being destroyed to them.
  • In any case, the AR-C isn't a pre-1986 gun. Its upper and lower receivers, the meat and bones here, are based on the Mega Arms MATEN AR-10 receivers shortened for 5.56. Mega Arms was founded in 2013. So either Ubisoft gets their knowledge of US gun laws from action movies or they simply didn't think a game where the majority of guns are commercial semi-autos would be very entertaining. I'd lean toward the latter.

Free Marshall

• Why was the Marshall allowed to roam the County Jail freely, and with a weapon no less? Shouldn't they have at least kept him locked in a cell and under constant guard until Faith was dead?
  • The closest thing I can think of to an explanation is that Burke, when he's first pulled from the Bliss, freaks out and tells everyone to leave him be before falling asleep. As to why they didn't afterwards restrain him in the slightest, disarm him, or in any way monitor his movements, I can only answer plot convenience.
  • Idiot plot indeed. Tracey rightly points out he can't be trusted after Faith had been in his head.

Why Don't the Heralds Just Kill the Deputy?

• Talk about playing with your food. All the times in which cult members are trying to kill the Deputy, what's with the theatrical meetings after certain Resistance levels are met? Yes, there is the Bliss, but it seems overall pointless and a drain of resources just to run us through our paces. And how exactly are they managing these trumped up vision quests without accidentally killing the Deputy with all the Bliss attacks he/she takes? We're resusitated over three times in the span of hours, days. And then we can just skip off to do more missions. That shit ain't healthy
  • Villain Takes an Interest. Joseph at some point clearly decides to try and "save" the Deputy as his presence along with John at the baptising river indicates. John and Faith likely would just go for Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him? if it wasn't for him. Jacob at least somewhat averts this by intending to kill Deputy after You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.

The Edens Gate logo in the ending.

• In the nuclear ending where the deputy is locked in Dutch's bunker with Joseph you can see the Edens Gate logo on the flag and chair. It's never explained how these appeared and its highly unlikely that Dutch would have something like this lying around his bunker considering how much he hated the peggies. If you take the ending at face value it's still unlikely that Joseph would have enough time to put it on so neatly or that he was carrying a sticker of Edens Gate around in his pocket at random. So how did these logos get there?
  • The ending was a hallucination. If you go back to Dutch's bunker after the game is over, you'll find him alive and the regular US flag on the wall, with no indicator that the Eden's Gate flag and chair are there.

News Broadcasts?

• Given that it's been said several times that there's no signals getting in or out of Hope County, I wonder how the news of the international crisis got out. I suspect either the Deputy is hallucinating it or that it's propaganda.
  • The broadcasts that are local are handled by the cult, though there is a thing called satellite radio. Whether or not the vehicle is compatible with it depends on the year it was manufactured.
    • It would also depend if they have a satellite radio subscription. In the US, SiriusXM, the major satellite radio company, is a subscription service. It's reasonable to assume such a thing would be the same in the FC universe as well.
  • Receiving signals and transmitting them are two different things. I used to live in an area where the only route into town was down the side of a mountain into a valley. My SiriusXM and AM/FM radio worked fine, but I could forget about making any phone calls.
• Let me point out another problem- news of this international crisis is being sent to a DJ who isn't in affiliation with the cult. How is he reporting on Middle Eastern terror attacks, Korean nuclear tests, and the U.S.'s responses if he has no way of knowing these things?

Discrepancies with Joseph's story

• For the few who have read the exclusive Book of Joseph,there are several discrepancies with the story of the patriarch of the Seed family. The most prevalent is Joseph's wife. There is no mention of her or the child anywhere in the book. Second is the assumption that he was in prison based off the lyrics of one of the songs; he was neither arrested or starved. It also mentions that he heard the "Voice" (presumed to be God) only twice: once when being beaten by his father and second when being mugged. This comes into conflict with him saying that he heard God speak to him at his daughter's bedside. Lastly, it should be noted that in the "Baptism" trailer, Joseph is shown to have visited Hope County in the past, but it is stated in the Book of Joseph that he only came upon the location when fleeing from Georgia. In all likelihood, these are lies either told to his followers or the Deputy, but they are discrepancies nonetheless. On more thing: the book says that John befriended or blackmailed all the officials and sheriffs of Hope County, yet there is only one sheriff, who only tries to avoid a conflict rather than outright deny it. No mention of any of these people appear elsewhere.
  • A so-called holy book that is inconsistent with itself and reality? No surprises there.

How is Faith not an Angel already?

• Supposedly, the Angel condition is a result of overexposure to the Bliss fumes causing permanent damage to the victim's mental faculties, possibly similar to how Carbon Dioxide poisoning damages the brain by reducing its oxygen supply. Faith's entire bunker is CONSTANTLY being pumped full of Bliss fumes, in an enclosed environment that would only concentrate the fumes even more. If anything, Faith and her followers should all be dead, let alone Angels. Based on what we're told of the drug, it's difficult but not impossible to overdose on it, and high concentrations of the gas are shown to leave even Angels comatose. Faith has been exposed to Bliss longer than possibly anyone else, and if she's spent any time in her bunker at all, she should already be completely brain-dead. The Sheriff is shown to already be showing severe physical signs of Angel conversion after only spending what couldn't have been more than a few hours in her bunker. What's more, even if her followers had been able to take shelter in their bunker to survive the apocalypse like they had planned, they'd all turn into brain-dead zombies anyway.
  • A rather perplexing question. By all means, she should be no better off than you are under the bliss. My best guess (and this is really armchair, head-up-ass medical knowledge from a jackass), is that she just simply has a far greater tolerance for Bliss at high volumes than others that failed and became angels. It's like how one drink won't mess you up but it could knock another off his/her feet. That's the best answer I got and it's likely not even the right one, but it's the best I got.
    • A series of notes you can find in Henbane River reveal that the Faith you meet in the game isn't the original Faith, and there have been a series of women adopting the name and role of Faith who eventually all died. One explanation is that Joseph seeks out young women who are already drug users (and hence possibly already built up a resistance to mind-altering substances) and then he simply selects whichever one has the highest tolerance to Bliss and chooses them to be his new Faith, throwing them away once they finally succumb to the effects of the drug. The latest Faith might possibly be someone who hasn't been exposed to Bliss for much longer than the Deputy has.
  • Also, like The Father's apparent ability to predict the future (and a lot of stuff in Far Cry) Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane is at play here. It's possible that Faith(s) do have some kind of supernatural symbiosis with the bliss.

Leap of Faith, Where You Land

• This might be better suited for Nightmare Fuel, but I felt like this needed to be confirmed by at least two players. When having your first Bliss vision/hallucination with Faith, she leads you up onto The Father statue, specifically the book. You have to jump off to conclude the quest. But playing through this a few times, I've noticed that you can either land in two places: either on the edge of a Bliss flower field near Hope County Jail, or at the bottom at the base of the statue amidst dead bodies (thus the Nightmare Fuel). I think the different location depends on whether if you killed John and/or Jacob before starting Resistance in Faith's region
  • Where you land after the Leap of Faith depends on whether or not you have reached and ended the siege at the Hope County Jail. If you triggered the first Bliss meeting with Faith without reaching the jail, you will be teleported there to trigger that story mission. If you have completed that mission before triggering said hallucination, you will wake up at the foot of Joseph's statue.

Lost on Mars, how does it change the endings?

• Seems the nuke didn't happen and the county is free of cultists. Though, this is set after Nick's daughter is born. What does this say about the ending?
  • Fridge Horror. The worst ending is canon then.

Why foreign people aren't in this game?

• The United State are a principal immigration country, but with the exception of Dmitri, seems that no foreigners are in Hope County. Well considering that the series got characters from all over the world, this is jarring.
  • Likely because the developers wanted an "authentic" experience regarding small-town American countryside, at least in regards to general public conceptions of an authentic experience.
  • Because the more rural areas of the US generally have a very small foreign population. Most immigrants congregate to the larger major cities.

Jacob's plot requires knowledge he shouldn't have

• Okay so there's load of crazy contrivances around what bliss can do, allies being idiots and missing obvious clues that the heralds are infiltrating them with brainwashed agents (See: Faith and how complacent the sheriff is about the marshall wandering free with a weapon, and this complaint about Jacob's Manchurian Agent shenanigans with the player character) and such, but Jacob's brainwashing you to kill Eli really rubs rubs me the wrong way. Firstly, a point is made that the Whitetails are taking efforts to prevent Jacob knowing where the wolf's den is. Makes sense and okay, that's the least contrived bit, he either tracked someone there (he does big up his guys being super trackers, even if that's an Informed Attribute outside of the capture parties), or someone cracked. But beyond that, his conditioning of the deputy relies on him knowing both the internal layout of the bunker and where the soldiers and Eli himself will always happen to be within it, which are much harder to explain! It can't be the deputy showed him during one of the brainwashing sessions, because if you'd been playing out the conditioning drill for real in the actual bunker the fact that you were being conditioned would be even more blatant than it already was...

Blood Dragon is a Movie?

The appearance of a director working on "Blood Dragon 3" seems to imply that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was an in-universe movie and presumably a fictional story even within the Far Cry world. So how was Takkar able to find a Blood Dragon skeleton and eggs during the stone age in Far Cry Primal?

Terror Attacks? Really?

• If these radio broadcasts are true- and that’s already a big stretch- then apparently what causes humanity to destroy itself boils down to terror attacks. How? How do terror attacks cause all this? The highest confirmed casualty of these reports- if we don’t count that one about the South American virus outbreak- is 19. Meanwhile, blowing up Moscow causes causalities in the millions. And don’t say the terrorists had a nuke- terrorists don’t know how to make nukes and there would be a higher response if any of them got one. How in God's name do minor, inconsequential terror attacks cause humanity to devolve into a state where nuking each other is the best option?