When the very first images promoting Far Cry 5 ware released and appeared to show Christian Americans as the villains, certain pockets of the internet didn't know what to do with themselves.

Some on Twitter lashed out at a game that would dare demonise "average" and "good" US folks, despite the clear nefariousness of the characters. Others suggested that such an "unpatriotic" game should be boycotted, despite it being the product of a Canadian studio owned by French game publisher Ubisoft.

Some complained that those shown were predominately white-skinned which — while not a new complaint for video games — was interesting for the fact that many of the accounts raising this issue seemed dedicated to rejecting racial diversity.

At the other extreme, some revelled in the idea of a game where the enemy was explicitly the American "alt-right".

Of course further elaboration of the game's premise showed all these hot takes to be unjustified. The game is about an extremist doomsday cult called the Project at Eden's Gate, led by Father Joseph Seed, that stages a violent takeover of a county in Montana. Yet a buzz of controversy still seems to hang over the game.

While the Far Cry series has featured wildly varied locations and settings, it's always about a deadly, wide-open frontier filled with interesting characters, wild animals and the potential to turn to chaos at any moment. It seems many people just weren't prepared for it to touch a nerve by having the villains evoke a real life conflict, even tangentially. 

"Far Cry's always been like that though", Darryl Long, the game's producer, tells me at the E3 conference in Los Angeles earlier this month. "In Far Cry 3 you were fighting against Vaas, and he was in slave trading. That's pretty serious. Far Cry 4 with Pagan Min? He's a despot who's controlling a whole country."

"[Now in Far Cry 5] it's similar. You're battling against an enemy whose got their own agenda, they're doing their own thing and they really believe in what they're doing".

The main difference this time, Long says, is that this is the first time the game has been set in America. For us in the West, "it's a more familiar setting, a more familiar villain".

But this doesn't mean the new game is the same as previous games with an American skin.

"Narratively the story we're trying to tell is this is someone who's extremely driven. Someone who believes that they're hearing the voice of god in their own head. And they really believe that what they're doing is the right thing", Long says.

The player, naturally, is fighting to keep the town safe and stop Joseph getting what he wants, Long says, and "the question we want the player to ask themselves is 'what makes what I want right, what makes what the father wants wrong?'".

But isn't this a problem if a section of the playerbase sees themselves reflected in the villains, and not opposed to them?

While Long accepts there was a loud minority of people online who reacted to the game's reveal this way, he says the recent online "alt-right" movement isn't something the team could ever have predicted years ago when they first designed their antagonists.

The Project at Eden's Gate aren't meant to be ordinary Americans, he says, but rather an extreme projection of a subtle but pervasive feeling that society is losing its bearings. A feeling that everyone shares.

"When we started the game over two years ago … there seemed to be this common feeling among people that we were standing at the edge of something, a tipping point where anything could happen. And we just wanted to create a character who embodies that. Someone who believes that it is the tipping point. It is that the end of time is coming and society will collapse. And we started building that years before everything that's happening now even began to happen", he says.

That the cult has superficial similarities to a real movement happening today, then, does have to do with the fact the team was trying to tap into something real. But according to Long it wasn't strictly intentional.

"The fact that's it's all coming together like this, I'd say we were all just as surprised as anyone else", he says.

Closer to reality will be the setting of rural Montana, which Long says offers the perfect geographic location for a Far Cry game and a great culture in which to set a hypothetical cult uprising.  Long says when the team arrived in Montana to scout the location, "just right away they fell in love".

"It was the people that live there. When you meet these people they're so independent. They're extremely genuine. They don't put up with any shit", he says.

"They've got this self reliance, this independence, they don't fully trust in the government and we realised, this is still a frontier. In America. It's perfect. It's so familiar, but also it's special".

The big question still to be answered about Far Cry 5 ahead of its release in early 2018 is whether the intriguing promise of the narrative will be helped or hindered by the actual game.

Previous games, in my opinion, have always featured a gulf-like dissonance between the themes of the story and the actions taken by the player. While the narratives tend to be weighty and serious, the games are made up mostly of outlandish craziness — like wing-suiting into enemy compounds to blow them up with one of your several available rocket launchers — and goofy comedy.

This is not a problem in and of itself, as fighting wild animals in a jeep or taking on waves of crazed enemies with a bow can be fun, but it does tend to rob the story of any potential poignancy.

My brief time playing Far Cry 5 indicates this will be a similar affair, with a scary-looking cult roadblock / execution site quickly becoming a bombastic playground for the series' trademark wacky combat. On the way to liberate an airfield from enemies I took some time off to go fishing in a stream and made a few really nice catches I was told could be crafted into handy health items later on. 

The characters, too, appeared as familiar stereotypes with a low-brow deprecating comportment I definitely expect (and appreciate) from Far Cry but can't imagine in a town where extremists are constantly killing people.

Long reminds me not to judge the ludonarrative gap too quickly.

"Well the demo right now, it's all gameplay right? It doesn't really get into the story. I think people will see when they play the game and as we move forward in the campaign, they'll start to see how it all comes together", he says.

"It does fit. It is a Far Cry, but it's also a Far Cry that's got an interesting message".

The author travelled to Los Angeles as a guest of Ubisoft.