He's composed a number of film soundtracks, including Beasts of the Southern Wild, Beasts of No Nation, Digging For Fire, Finders Keepers, Gleason, Chasing Coral, and The Little Hours. Romer is a Los Angeles-based composer who wears many hats. One of the lead composers on both films ended up being the same person: Dan Romer. Gronick combined one of the darker, heavier tracks from Beasts of No Nation with the more inspirational music of Beasts of the Southern Wild together they formed the sound Far Cry 5 needed. When another developer showed Gronick Beasts of No Nation, a Netflix film about child soldiers in Africa, he realized he had found the sound they were looking for. It didn't feel like a Far Cry soundtrack though: it offered the needed inspiration, but lacked the darkness and grit needed for the game's subject material. Early in the project, he was watching Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film about a young girl and her family dealing with an oncoming storm to their Louisiana bayou-based community, and found himself struck by the music in the film. Once Gronick knew what was needed in the game, he needed to find someone who could make it work. We had to write our own music in that style," says Gronick. "When I heard that, I knew this is what we had to do, but the lyrics of the songs didn't match what the cult believed in. Songs like "Amazing Grace," "Blessed Assurance," "How Great Are Thou," and "We Shall Overcome," which you've probably heard of in films and television shows, even if you're not religious at all. Then we found traditional hymns."īy "traditional", Gronick means Americana folk hymns, popular in the South and Midwest of the United States. I tried post-rock, but that didn't quite work either because the droniness of post-rock kind of interfered with the engines of the cars. "At first, I started looking at Christian rock that didn't seem to match the characters. "Very early in the game, I realized that the cult needed its own sound," Gronick says. For Far Cry 5 to work, the cult needed its own music songs that sound like they come from a cult based in the United States, but not from any specific religion. The Project at Eden's Gate is based on various real life cults and sports its own brand of religious fervor.Īnd where there's religious fervor, there are hymns.īut this fictional cult isn't Christian or Catholic. All that stands between the citizens of Hope County being "saved" by the cult is your character, a nameless sheriff's deputy.
The Father believes that The Collapse is coming for humanity, so he's had his cult take over Hope County, Montana. In Far Cry 5, you're up against the Project at Eden's Gate, a cult led by The Father. And once you knew about the cult, they'd mean a different thing." "I wanted these songs, when you heard them, if you knew nothing about the cult they'd mean one thing. At the beginning of the game, I use that music to attract the player," Far Cry 5 audio director Tony Gronick explains to me, following a presentation on the game's music. That this beautiful music would be heard on two levels. "That was one of the things I had hoped for from the beginning.