Mar 26, 2018

Far Cry® 5

While you can stumble upon any weapon in Far Cry 5’s arsenal, you can also just buy and customize about half of them right away. Rather than a matter of where to find the best weapons, it’s a matter of what you want to put your in-game money towards, and that money, like real money, represents your valuable time. This weapons guide will run down our top picks for some common use cases, recommend an attachment or two, and break down what they’re best suited for. Keep in mind, we’re still unlocking new weapons, so take our advice as something to start with. That said, we’ll be sure to update should our recommendations change.

The best weapon for close-quarters crowd control

SBS | Attachment: Reflex sight (optional)

You’re bound to mess up at some point and alert the whole damn county to your presence, and that means getting rushed by dozens of brainwashed angels, a cultist or two wielding spiked bats, and a shotgunner for good measure. Think of the SBS as a delete button, a double-barreled shotgun that chews through cultists as quickly as your ammo reserves. It downs VIP cultists and armored enemies without issue, and works at a surprisingly long range. Pair it with incendiary ammo for a good time.

Runner up: M133 or M133 M

The best long-distance silenced weapon

AR-CL | Attachment: Marksman ADV-X scope, silencer

The AR-CL is effective at quietly taking out cultists at long distances, but versatile enough to double as a mid-range assault weapon if things go haywire. Tap V to switch between firing single shots, bursts, or let loose with an automatic spray. There are rifles you can unlock later that are more accurate and lethal at long distances, but the AR-CL shoots far and hard enough for most situations.

Runner up: Compound bow w/ Marksman sight

The best stealth companion tool

1911 Handgun | Attachment: Silencer

The most common pistol in Far Cry 5 is also the best to carry with you at all time, especially if you’re a more stealthy player. And even more so if you’re a bad stealthy player. It’s powerful enough to take down most basic enemies with a headshot and has super easy handling, making it a great companion for cleaning up in case you alert someone.

Runner up: Compound bow

The best sci-fi gun for sci-fi stuff

The Magnopulser | Attachment: None

Finish up a string of sidequests with Larry, the mad scientist of Holland Valley, and he’ll ‘give’ you the Magnopulser, a strange piece of technology from who-knows-where that fires a wide blast of energy from its spinning maw that sends anything in its path flying. You can bounce cultists around endlessly thanks to an unlimited ammo supply, but get too trigger happy and it’ll overheat. It doesn’t do any damage at a distance, so don’t turn to the Magnopulser for efficiency. It’s best used to send a crowd to the ground, at which point you can clean up however you see fit. But if you pull the trigger standing right next to an enemy, they’ll dissolve into a fine red mist.

The best mid-range kitchen sink weapon

AR-C | Attachment: Red dot or reflex sight, extended magazine

The AR-C does it all. And as one of the most common weapons in the game, it should. Effective at close, medium, and the shortest of the long range the AR-C’s accuracy, handling, and alternate firing modes make it effective in almost any situation. Don’t depend on it entirely though—without the extended mag (and even with) it’s easy to run out of ammo quickly. Keep burst or single shot firing modes on by default, but if things go fully automatic and hope for the best.

Runner up: MPK5 w/ Optical sight

The best vehicle blower-upper

M249 | Attachment: Bullets

Sure, you could always use an RPG, but you’ll run out of ammo in no time. The damage isn’t too high, but with such a deep magazine and quick rate of fire, the M249 ruins vehicles of every type. It’s also capable of ripping up armored enemies with ease. Chances are it’ll be easier to keep topped off than a rocket launcher too.

Runner up: RPG-7

The best impression of CoD's carbine

MS16 Trooper | Attachment: Reflex or red dot sight

The MS16 isn’t the most efficient weapon, but it sure is one of the most satisfying to use. Consider it the Call of Duty Carbine of Far Cry 5, a rifle that plinks with every shot and shings when your magazine empties out. It’ll fire just about as fast as you can click too, making it the ideal weapon for mouse control. Pop a short range sight on and make sure you get the rifle mastery perk to decrease bullet spread, then hit the country and pretend you’re the best headshotsman in all of Hope County.

Runner up: 45/70-T

The best SMG if you don't carry an SMG

SMG-11 | Attachment: Extended clip

If you don't carry a machine gun (or if you want to carry two, I guess), keep the SMG-11 in your pistol slot. It's good for a quick, panicked spray of approximately 1 million bullets that may or may not (probably not) kill whatever has gotten within close range when you suddenly realize your shotgun is out of ammo. It's also fun for emptying at something while driving or ziplining without having to be too fussy about your aim.

Runner up: Skorpion (it's just as wasteful, but less accurate)

The best weapon that I’m not sure what to do with

Slingshot | Attachment: None (but give it a very expensive skin)

I bought the slingshot thinking it’d be the perfect stealth companion tool, something used to fire off rocks that distract nearby guards, but in my testing guards don’t really give a shit about rocks zinging past their heads. They do care when they get nailed by one though, but as far as I can tell it doesn’t do much, if any, damage. You also shoot arrows with it for some reason, though they don't’ go very far, sort of dropping off sharply after 10 meters or so. I can imagine using it to grief a friend in co-op which I will definitely do as soon as possible, but without any squirrels to chase or cruel neighbor’s windows to smash I’m not sure what good the slingshot is for.

Runner up: Fishing rod (it is not a gun, therefore it is the worst gun)

The best implement for bashing heads in

Brass Knuckles | Attachment: Human

Buy the brass knuckles and they’ll become your new default fisticuffs for quick and effective melee situations. Most melee use cases are based on feeling like a monster more than anything—if there’s more than three enemies around, melee weapons just don’t do the job well enough to make them truly useful. But if you’re cleaning up an outpost, take out your fists, hold down the punch button to wind up, then bop a cultist on the head and watch them crumple. They bring an intimate, stylistic, rock hard flourish to combat.

Runner up: Shovel (the sound it makes on impact is just awful and we love it)

Second runner up: Oar (because you can pretend you're in a screwball summer camp movie and you're knocking out the evil camp counselor)

Mar 26, 2018

Far Cry 5 performance analysis and settings guide

Far Cry® 5

We've updated this article with the full performance results of Far Cry 5, running on all the latest graphics cards and CPUs, including SLI and CrossFire testing.

Far Cry 5 isn't as taxing on hardware as a few games I've looked at during the past year, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That's not to say anyone and everyone will be running at 60fps, but if you played Far Cry 4 or Far Cry Primal on your PC, you should be fine.

The settings are somewhat limited, and scaling of performance is pretty narrow as well. Compared to maximum quality (the ultra preset), turning everything down to low/minimum only nets about a 50 percent boost to framerates. If you can't hit 30fps at 1080p ultra, low or normal quality might get you there, but 60fps is definitely not happening.

You'll need a graphics card at the level of an AMD R9 390/RX 470 or Nvidia GTX 970/1060 or better to consistently break 60fps at 1080p low. Yes, that's the minimum quality the game supports (without hacking config files or modding). For 1080p ultra, those same cards should mostly suffice, but if you want to avoid all dips below 60fps, you'll need a GTX 1070/980 Ti or RX Vega 56/R9 Fury. 1440p ultra also averages more than 60fps on the 1070/Vega 56 and above, while the only way you'll consistently break 60fps at 4k ultra is to run two GPUs in SLI or CrossFire. You'll also want a good processor if you're chasing higher framerates.

Here's the quick overview of the features we like to see on PC games.

Far Cry 5 mostly hits all the important areas, though the graphics settings, aspect ratio support, and mod options could be better. The graphics settings consist of nine adjustable items (plus things like resolution, V-sync, and FoV), but going from max to min on all the settings doesn't dramatically improve performance. That's why it gets a yellow.

Aspect ratio support mostly works, with the caveat that right now your AR is based off your desktop resolution (which feels like a bug that will get fixed in a patch). So if you're running at 2560x1440 in Windows, and change Far Cry 5 to 2560x1080, the result is the same view you had before only crunched to a 21:9 aspect ratio. Restart the game, change your desktop resolution, and you're fine—and that even includes things like 32:9 doublewide support. Your desktop resolution/AR also affect the range of FoV.

Finally, mod support isn't complete, but the Far Cry Arcade does provide full map editing features. There's potential for more to happen in the future, but right now it's mostly just multiplayer maps.

Far Cry 5 settings overview

All the options for tweaking your graphics settings appear in the Video options menu, with most of them under the second submenu. The first submenu is for core elements like resolution, V-sync, buffering, and framerate cap, while FoV is under the fourth submenu. There are four graphics presets (plus 'custom'), ranging from low to ultra. Using the presets with a GTX 1080 at 1440p, here's a quick look at performance (with percentage increase relative to the ultra preset):

Ultra: 79 fps
High: 88 fps (11% faster)
Normal: 99 fps (25% faster)
Low: 114 fps (44% faster)

Even without CPU bottlenecks coming into play (thanks to the tested GPU, CPU, and resolution), that's less than a 50 percent improvement in framerates. Most of the individual settings cause a substantially smaller change in performance. Here they are in order, with the gallery showing the various settings using the ultra preset as the base, and setting each item to minimum.

Texture Filtering: Adjusts the quality of texture filters. Most modern GPUs easily handle anisotropic filtering at maximum quality with little impact to performance, with a two percent increase in performance by dropping to minimum.

Shadows: This mostly affects the quality of soft shadows, and the distance for the detailed shadows. Even at low, you still get decent looking shadows, which explains the relatively small six percent increase in performance.

Geometry and Vegetation: Adjusts the complexity of world geometry and vegetation, including increased LOD (level of detail) and more branches in trees at higher settings. Again, the impact on performance and visuals is relatively small, with a four percent increase using the low setting.

Environment: This adjusts the graphical details of the environment, which is a very nebulous description. However, looking at the screenshots, this appears to adjust reflections and ambient occlusion, making it the single most demanding setting you can adjust. You can boost performance by 13 percent by using the low setting, but water in particular looks much worse.

Water: This is supposed to affect the quality of the water, but the environment setting has a far greater impact. Dropping this to low does improve performance by nine percent, though, so if you're looking for good ways to boost framerates without impacting visuals, this is a good one.

Terrain: Sets the size (quality) of the textures used for the terrain, with a negligible impact on performance. Performance improves by just one percent going from high to low. Even at 4k ultra, Far Cry 5 only uses about 4GB of VRAM.

Volumetric Fog: Adjusts the quality of volumetric fog, including things like light shafts. Dropping to low only yields a three percent increase, however, and it's difficult to tell what has changed in the screenshots.

Anti-Aliasing: Sets the AA mode to either off, SMAA, or TAA (Temporal AA). TAA gives the best results, with SMAA missing many jaggies in my screenshot comparisons. Using SMAA instead of TAA increases performance by about 2.5 percent, while turning off AA gives a five percent improvement.

Motion Blur: Enables/disables motion blur. Negligible one percent increase in performance.

Cumulatively, all the performance increases stack almost perfectly, so the small improvements add up. In terms of overall image quality, there's very little difference between the ultra, high, and normal presets, but the low preset (and particularly the low environment setting) is much more visible.

Yes, you can use two GPUs for a performance boost in Far Cry 5.

MSI provided all the hardware for this testing, consisting mostly of its Gaming/Gaming X graphics cards. These cards are designed to be fast but quiet, though the RX Vega cards are reference models and the RX 560 is an Aero model. I gave the both the Vega cards and the 560 a slight overclock to level the playing field, so all the cards represent factory OC models.

My main test system uses MSI's Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon AC with a Core i7-8700K as the primary processor, and 16GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 memory from G.Skill. I also tested performance with Ryzen processors on MSI's X370 Gaming Pro Carbon, also with DDR4-3200 CL14 RAM. The game is run from a Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SATA SSD for these tests, except on the laptops where I've used their HDD storage.

For these tests, I’m using the Nvidia 391.35 and AMD 18.3.4 drivers. Both sets of drivers are Game Ready for Far Cry 5, with limited testing showing about a five percent improvement on Nvidia hardware compared to previous drivers. AMD's latest drivers didn't appear to change performance much in limited testing, but the game does wear AMD colors and possibly most of the optimizations were already baked into earlier releases.

Conveniently, Far Cry 5 keeps with recent series tradition and includes a built-in benchmark. There are areas of the game that will run slower than the results from the benchmark indicate, but many areas will run substantially faster, and as an overall representation of performance the built-in test is good and allows users to directly compare results.

Far Cry 5 graphics card benchmarks

For the low preset, I've disabled AA and motion blur (which aren't affected by the presets). You'll need at least an R9 390 or GTX 970 or similar GPU to consistently stay above 60fps, which is in line with the game's recommended system requirements, while the minimum system requirements are for 30fps at 720p.

All the dedicated GPUs exceed the minimum requirements, but that doesn't guarantee a steady 60+ fps—the GTX 1050 and RX 560 for example come up short. Integrated graphics is even more painful, with Intel's HD 630 only averaging around 20fps at 720p low, while the Ryzen 5 2400G is about 2.5 times faster.

Moving to the normal preset doesn't really change performance much—all the GPUs run about 10 percent slower than the low preset, which is borderline noticeable. Still, this is the target I'd aim for at a minimum, if you're interested in image quality. For 60fps, the R9 390/GTX 970 and above remain good options, with only occasional dips below that mark.

Going from the normal to high preset and enabling SMAA drops performance another 10 percent or so on most GPUs. That's not enough to affect the standings much, with the only difference being a swap in position between the GTX 1080 and R9 380 (though they're basically tied).

Stepping up the quality settings to ultra, along with enabling TAA and motion blur, causes another 10 percent dip in framerates. If you're willing to play at 30fps, all the tested GPUs suffice. For a constant 60 fps or more, I'd recommend looking for a card that shows minimums in the benchmark of 75fps, meaning only the GTX 1070 and RX Vega 56 and above will suffice—or the previous generation GTX 980 Ti and R9 Fury.

AMD GPUs continue to show slightly better performance than their Nvidia equivalents (based on MSRP) at most levels, with the Vega 64 and 56 respectively beating the GTX 1080 and 1070. The RX 580 8GB also leads the GTX 1060 6GB, but interestingly the RX 570 4GB trails the 1060 3GB by a relatively large 10 percent.

For 1440p ultra, the GTX 1070 or RX Vega 56 still average 60fps or more, though dips below that are still possible. This is why we continue to recommend 1440p 144Hz G-Sync/FreeSync displays as the best overall choice for a gaming monitor—you won't feel any microstuttering if you stay in the 40-144 fps range. But the only way you're going to come anywhere near 144fps in Far Cry 5 is with multiple GPUs (or maybe a Titan V).

4k gaming as usual is mostly about bragging rights, just like the ultra setting. The good news is that SLI and CrossFire make 4k at 60fps or more achievable, but with single GPUs even the 1080 Ti comes up short. I did some testing at 4k with normal quality and it does average more than 60 fps on the 1080 Ti, but just barely (65fps).

Far Cry 5 SLI and CrossFire performance

I'll be honest in saying that I'm not really a fan of multi-GPU these days. It has always been a bit of a crapsshoot, and in the past year a large number of games haven't worked with multi-GPU at all—or at best, support came several weeks or even months after the initial game launch. Far Cry 5 bucks that trend, however, likely due in part to the lack of major changes in the Dunia engine.

If you have a second matched GPU available, both CrossFire and SLI work, with CrossFire in particular putting up some impressive scaling results. I've tested RX 580 CF, RX Vega 56 CF, GTX 1080 SLI, and GTX 1080 Ti SLI on the overclocked Core i7-8700K platform. I also ran some additional testing with 1080 Ti SLI using some other CPUs, specifically Ryzen 7 1800X, Ryzen 5 1600X, and Core i5-8400.

At 4k ultra, the 1080 Ti SLI setup on the 8700K is just slightly faster than the i5-8400 CPU (minimums showed more variation, which is typical of multi-GPU, so I wouldn't pay those too much attention). The Ryzen 7 1800X ends up about nine percent slower than the 8700K, and the 1600X is another two percent drop from there.

What's interesting is how the CPU requirements change things at 1440p and lower resolutions. At 1440p, the 8700K is now nine percent faster than the i5-8400, but more critically it's 34 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X, and 41 percent faster than the 1600X. Ouch. In fact, even a single GTX 1080 Ti running on the 8700K beats the SLI configurations running on the Ryzen processors.

Looking at the multi-GPU scaling for the various GPUs I tested, all with the 8700K, the RX 580 8GB does extremely well: 91 percent scaling at 1440p and 98 percent scaling at 4k. Vega 56 is nearly as impressive: up to 92 percent scaling at 4k. The GTX 1080 SLI setup doesn't scale nearly as well: 61 percent at 4k. Similarly, 1080 Ti SLI scaling is 56 percent at 4k—and only 26 percent at 1440p. That's because CPU bottlenecks are playing a bigger role, especially with multi-GPU. It's also why SLI and CrossFire become far less useful at lower settings and resolutions.

Far Cry 5 CPU performance

For CPU testing, I've used the GTX 1080 Ti on all the processors. This is to try and show the maximum difference in performance you're likely to see from the various CPUs—running with a slower GPU will greatly reduce the performance gap. Far Cry 5 hits the CPU pretty good with a fast graphics card, and it makes good use of multiple cores as you can see in the charts.

At the low quality preset, the overclocked 8700K is up to 77 percent faster than the slowest CPU I tested, the Ryzen 3 2200G. The gap drops to 70 percent at normal quality, 60 percent at high and ultra—all at 1080p. By 1440p, things have narrowed to a 25 percent gap, and at 4k ultra we end up with an eight-way tie.

What's interesting is that Far Cry 5 carries AMD branding, and not just for graphics cards but for Ryzen processors as well. Despite that, all the Intel Coffee Lake chips surpass even the fastest Ryzen CPUs in performance, and only the previous generation 2-core/4-thread Core i3-7100 falls behind the two faster Ryzen parts.

That doesn't mean AMD's CPUs won't run Far Cry 5, but you'll still get better performance out of most recent Intel processors—again, provided you're not GPU limited. If you're doing other tasks in the background, like livestreaming, having a processor with more cores can also be beneficial, and in general the sweet spot with Far Cry 5 appears to be 6-core processors.

I don't have any older Haswell-era processors for testing, but anecdotally it looks like Intel's older chips may not fare quite so well—and the same goes for AMD's FX-series parts. You should still be able to hit 30fps or more without trouble, but for 60fps and above it's time to start thinking about a CPU/platform upgrade.

Far Cry 5 notebook performance

The heavier CPU requirements also play a role on notebook gaming performance. I should note first that the GE63VR performance was off, and I couldn't figure out a workaround. It showed higher VRAM use and lower performance than I expected, by about 10-15 percent, but here are the current numbers.

At 1080p ultra, the desktop 1070 beats any notebook tested, thanks largely to the CPU performance advantage. The desktop 1060 6GB also beats both the mobile 1070 and 1060 (and these aren't even the slower Max-Q mobile parts).

The new Intel 6-core mobile parts should show up very soon, so if you're thinking about investing in a gaming notebook, it's probably worth holding off for a few weeks before deciding which one to buy.

Welcome to the world of Far Cry 5

If you'd like to compare performance to my results, I'm using the built-in benchmarking tool. Rather than simply using the reported scores (which are mostly accurate), I collect frametimes using FRAPS and then compute the average and 97 percentile minimums. 97 percentile minimums are calculated by finding the 97 percentile frametimes (the point where the frametime is higher than 97 percent of frames), then finding the average of all frames with a worse frametime result. In other words, it's the average of the worst three percent of frames.

You can see real-time framerates in the performance analysis video. The framerate overlay graphs are generated from the frametime data, using custom software that I've created. And that's really why I have to use FRAPS or OCAT.

Thanks again to MSI for providing the hardware for testing. These results were collected from March 27-30, 2018, using the latest version of the game (1.2.0) and graphics drivers available at the time (Nvidia 391.35 and AMD 18.3.4).

Far Cry 5 proves to be more demanding on the CPU than previous installments in the series, likely due in a large part to the way the AI is constantly throwing 'excitement' at the player. Go fishing and you can expect to get attacked by bears, mountain lions, and cultists—with some freedom fighters joining in to fend off the attacks. It's exciting, though having traveled through rural Montana plenty of times I can't say it's very realistic.

We could see future improvements in performance through patches and driver updates, but for the time being AMD GPUs at the Vega 64/GTX 1080 level and below tend to hold a performance advantage over Nvidia offerings, and AMD gets better scaling from CrossFire than Nvidia gets from SLI. But if you're running multi-GPU, you'll also want to run the game on a modern Intel platform, as CPU bottlenecks show up on other systems.

Mar 26, 2018

15 things I wish I knew before playing Far Cry 5

Far Cry® 5

Far Cry 5’s formula hasn’t changed in monumental ways: you shoot guns, clear outposts, and die time and time again to pissed-off skunks. But there are enough new wrinkles in Ubisoft’s open world FPS to disorient new players and series vets alike. Don’t worry though, take our advice and your trip to Hope County, Montana will be as scenic and relaxing as a game about killing thousands of cultists can be.

Always talk to captives after you rescue them

All over Hope County are residents who want none of this cult nonsense, but are being convinced by some extreme marketing tactics (being kidnapped and held hostage at gunpoint). You'll see them everywhere: on the side of the road, in the woods, at the banks of rivers. You'll see them so often that at times it hardly seems worth stopping to help them because you're busy trying to do something else, and after helping them out it's tempting to just jump back in your vehicle and be on your way.

Always make sure you talk to them, though, because rescuing someone has dual benefits: you gain resistance points (which move you closer to to unlocking the boss confrontation) and each citizen has a tidbit of information about the world to impart, like the location of loot stashes or spots of interest to check out that you otherwise may have missed. So after you save them, make time for chit-chat.

Unlock extra holsters as soon as you can

You begin the game with a melee weapon slot and two slots for guns (plus, you can carry a number of chuckables, from dynamite to grenades to proximity mines to throwing knives). Two gun slots just isn't enough for a game like this, however, and unlike previous Far Cry games, you can't craft additional holsters from animal skins.

So, save up your perk points to unlock a third and fourth holster as soon as you can. This will give you a weapon for every encounter: A sniper rifle for distance, a shotgun or SMG for close encounters, an RPG for taking out planes and vehicles, and a pistol for when you run out of ammo for everything else. Or do what Sparky up there does and carry a flamethrower.

Hunting and fishing are the best ways to make money

Fishing especially. There are a few good fishing spots with fellow fisherman vendors hanging out at the same spot. Get the Fisher King perk, practice some fishing, and once you get the hang of things you can turn around trout and bass fast enough to make $1000 in a couple minutes. Be sure you’re using a fly that make sense for the fish you’re going after!

Check your challenges to see how close you are to getting perk points

If you've got your eye on a new perk that costs a lot of points, and you're just a few shy of unlocking it, take a quick look at your challenges tab (marked by a medallion). Scroll through the list: it'll show how close you are to completing the various challenges and earning points. Since you'll advance through challenges just by playing the game, you're probably close to a few already, and if you see, for example, that you only need a couple more grenade kills to complete the challenge, you can just walk into your next battle and throw a bunch of grenades to nab those points.

Open safes with perks, not explosives

A locked safe. There's nothing more appealing, especially when you can use explosives to open them. But I'd save your C4 for combat, because the safes you'll find at outposts and dwellings usually don't have much cash, and only occasionally have silver bars. Since most of your explosives come from crafting, and crafting requires scrounging resources from stashes, it's smarter to save them for blowing up cultists.

Instead, unlock the repair tool in the perk menu as soon as you can. You can use it to open safes at no expense except for a five second wait (plus you can repair your vehicles with it). There's also a lock-picking perk that can open safes as well as locked doors.

VIDEO: Where to find and how to recruit Cheeseburger the bear

Complete Nick Rye's personal quest as soon as possible

Having air support is super helpful, especially during an outpost mission gone bad. You can instruct your pilot pal Nick Rye to attack any marked enemy, so if a sniper is being a pain or someone is dug behind cover, you can have a bomb dropped on them or get them strafed with minigun fire. Just as useful is Rye's airstrip, where you can spawn an unlimited number of planes for your own use once you've completed Rye's personal mission. The planes come with a limited number of bombs, but since refilling your missile supply can be done in midair at a cost of $1,000, it's usually a better idea to just get a fresh plane from the airstrip.

Rye & Son's Airstrip can be found in Holland Valley, the western region of the map, so make a beeline once you're off the starting island. The downside of having Rye circling over head is that pal's plane will often attract enemy planes, which may lead to a lengthy dogfight every now and then.

Ladders are bad

You don't activate climbing or descending ladders with a keypress, you just sort of stick to them when you get close enough. Occasionally that's good: when lots of things are happening you might want to just automatically climb, and no doubt it's saved me from missing a ladder and falling off a ledge. Usually, though, it's bad, and I've had so many accidental ladder encounters—almost all of them when I was on a ledge and trying to look down at an enemy below, at which point the ladder grabbed me and forced me into the descent animation, thus baring my butt to gunfire from the guy I was trying to peek at. Unless you really want to use a ladder, don't walk anywhere near it.

Don't forget that you can make super-potions

Without an explicit tutorial, it's really easy to miss out on the elixir crafting system early on. In the weapon selection menu (Q), press E and you’ll end up on a potion crafting menu where you can make and imbibe a handful of juices that buff your defense, speed, perception, resistance to damage, or just get you wasted.

How to open those loot trucks

There are a few different kind of cult vehicles cruising around Hope County, and while you want to destroy many of them, like convoys and drug transport trucks, for others you want to just cap the driver and stop the vehicle intact. One of those trucks is a loot truck, and for a while I didn't quite know what I was supposed to do with it once I stopped it. Finally, I figured out there was a control box (framed in yellow) just behind the rear wheels. Walk close to it and you'll get a prompt to interact with it. It lowers the truck's gate and opens the rear doors so you can loot it.

Get the Harvest Master perk early to double your cash gains

If you’re really trying to grind out cash for a new ride or skin for your flamethrower, be sure to get the perk that doubles the loot you get from harvesting animals and plants. Double the rewards means (approximately) double the cash.

Cycle between the regions

Far Cry 5’s new take on progression is like a spoked wheel, meaning you can head off to any of the three major regions from the start. You’re encouraged to head west to start, but don’t take that as Far Cry 5 telling you the other regions are too difficult to take on right away. You can and should go anywhere you like, so if you’re getting a bit tired of the scenery in one region, head to another to freshen things up. You’ll find new characters, weird quests, and some interesting twists in enemy design.

Vendors sell a map for those Vietnam-era lighters you might be looking for

Eventually you might run into a side mission that requires you to find 12 lighters hidden throughout the world. That’s all you get, too—no map icons or leads whatsoever. Visit a vendor check out the miscellaneous items section where you buy health packs, ammo, and the like and scroll all the way to the bottom to find a map that points you in the right direction. It’s not that cheap, but worth every penny.

Bows can shoot through helicopter windshields

In a moment of pure desperation, out of ammo for all my meaner weapons, I (James) fired an arrow at the pilot in a helicopter. It went clean through, bringing the whirlybird down. So, don’t discredit the bow if you’re up against chunky metal obstacles. With decent aim they’re as easy to knock out of the sky as turkey vultures.

Guns for Hire will talk to one another

Once you unlock the ability to have two companions at once, there’s a chance they’ll talk to one another, Mass Effect style. So if you want to get to know one of your unlocked characters better (or get them to stop saying the same damn lines they repeat nonstop when they’re without a buddy), bring them and another friend along with you and listen in. It’s not a necessity, but a nice little touch that makes them feel like a bit more than shooty one-liner spewing robots.

If don't already hate the song Amazing Grace, you soon will

I (Chris) already hated it: the hymn is in the public domain so nearly any film or TV show that needs a religious song can use it for free, and so they always do. Far Cry 5 uses it a lot, too, and holy shit am I double-sick of it now. I wish it had been written by The Beatles instead of John Newton because then the rights to use it would cost so much hardly anyone would ever use it again.