It would take 216 hours to cross Montana on foot. Far Cry 5’s fictitious slice of The Treasure State, aka Hope County, takes 54 minutes.
That’s according to Conor Kearney, one of my favorite YouTubers. His deal is he walks across the huge maps of open world games and keeps time of the stroll. He’s done 77 of these across-the-map walks so far.
Not only is the time-lapse video somewhat soothing to view, there’s an informational purpose to all of this walking. It gives another sense of the map’s size, other than whatever a developer or marketer is usually boasting.
And in this case it shows how consistent Far Cry maps have been in size going back to 2008’s Far Cry 2. The times for the Far Cry games (excluding Blood Dragon) since then are:
- Far Cry 2: 48 minutes
- Far Cry 3: 49 minutes
- Far Cry 4: 48 minutes
- Far Cry Primal: 42 minutes
So this is the largest Far Cry open-world map, but not by much. It’s also not anywhere near the longest walk he’s taken. That was going around half a world on foot in No Man’s Sky in 12 hours. And the longest Ubisoft stroll Conor has taken was last March’s Ghost Recon Wildlands at four hours, 10 minutes. which is nearly five times longer than Far Cry 5.
When Conor starts his walk, the waypoint he sets is said to be roughly 8 kilometers away. At a normal walking pace (1.4 m/s) that normally translates to a 98-minute hike. But, as the player’s basic pace in Far Cry 5 is always double time, that kind of lines up with real life. Also Conor isn’t literally walking in a straight line between waypoints, because of terrain.
