Far Cry 5’s Arcade Takes The Series’ Map Editor To The Next Level

The Far Cry community asked, over and over and over again, and now Ubisoft have finally answered, taking the wraps off Far Cry 5’s map editor, which is bigger than ever before. That sounds hyperbolic, but it really isn’t. The Arcade, as it’s now known, includes everything from Far Cry 5 to play around with. Then there’s a ton of stuff from older Far Cry games, oh, and Watch_Dogs, and a fair bit of Assassin’s Creed IV and Unity as well. There’s just tons and tons of assets for you to sample in order to create your custom maps, and then a much better way to share and browse those creations.

As before, the map editor enables you create a variety of different level types, and two contrasting examples we were given swung from creepy horror through to a stealthy combat mission. The first had me wending my way through a twisted house, full of weird things, odd shifts in gravity, rooms just full of grandfather clocks and eggs from Blood Dragon, just rooms with goats wandering around. I got a shovel, all gearing myself up for a couple of jump scares, but in this case none appeared. Thank goodness!

Next up was a little stealthy elimination job, sending me into a world of shipping crates and industrial-y buildings with AI wandering around and a target to get to. It was pretty standard fare, with all the AI carefully positioned so that you could get silent melee takedowns, but there’s a slight puzzle side to it as you try to figure out how to get at the target in their heavily fortified and cut off room. Oh, and in the background? The music from Blood Dragon’s soundtrack.

They’re pretty good examples of what the Arcade can let you do, but they’re also examples of how much effort will need to go into a level to make something polished and awesome feeling – the above screenshot feels rather flattering in comparison. The first mission really lacked atmosphere without a soundtrack running in the background and without any scripted events to double down on the psychological horror vide, and the second lacked the nuance and patrol routes of a great stealth game. They were almost certainly put together in relatively short order by one of the level designers at Ubisoft, and just show a glimmer of the system’s broad potential.

Also coming back to the game after having disappeared between Far Cry 3 and 4 is multiplayer support, with up to sixteen players able to hop in and duke it out in custom maps. Sadly, we had to leave and catch a cab to the airport just as the event was shifting to try this out, and we also wouldn’t have been able to capture it anyway. Just rest assured that it’s a feature that has returned.

There’s set to be some pretty good reasons to hop in, as you level up through playing Arcade maps, earning cash and perk points for the main campaign. After the game’s release, they’re going to continue adding to it, with over 1500 objects joining the 900 that will be in there at launch, as well as new developer created maps and events that tap into the Arcade on Fridays and through challenges.

Ubisoft are dropping a metric ton of crazy stuff into Far Cry 5, it seems, between the Arcade letting you, the player, create whatever crazy stuff you want, and the Season Pass that will take you to Vietnam, a zombie apocalypse and have you battling Martian arachnids.

We asked Dan Hay, Executive Producer about this and a general shift throughout Ubisoft – you can catch the rest of this interview right here – who replied, “If I think about just Far Cry, and there’s a larger conversation about how we give to the player, one of the things we try to do is to have multiple tones on top of each other or close to each other.

“Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s really tough to put those tones together. How can you have a story about the Father and a cult right next to the Mars DLC? How do those things merge?’ My answer is I don’t agree, at all.”

Dan continued, “For me, Far Cry has done a very good job of being able to take big moments, powerful moments of narrative and having them very close to bombastic moments of crazy gameplay. I think the very natural thing that we’re doing with this game is that we’re having it so that stuff collides more often and they rub up against each other more often. It’s very possible that you can be having a very earnest or emotional moment pretty close to when you were running around the world with a bear named Cheeseburger and a guy named Hurk blowing shit up with an RPG!”

So there we have it: Far Cry 5’s Arcade is the map editor on steroids, adding another layer for players to bounce off. Brace yourselves for the biggest and most varied playground of creation that the series has ever seen.