Only the Hosting Player Retains Story Progress
Straight from Reddit via a German gaming site, it appears that Ubisoft’s Far Cry 5 will only have progress for the host in its online-only co-op mode that lets players play through the campaign mode together. While I can’t quite confirm the credibility of the source, this style of host-only progress was similar to how Ubisoft approached co-op progress in Far Cry 4 which lets you tackle side quests, but only the host player retained progress in the world mapwise. Thus, this info is certainly within the realm of possibility for the upcoming shooter.
That said, it’s likely that Far Cry 5‘s co-op mode will at least let both players walk away with experience, items, and money. No official character progression system has been revealed for it yet, but if it’s anything like Ubisoft’s past co-op progress, then we should expect both players to retain those perks after a co-op game.
Another online co-op shooter that let players take on story missions was Borderlands 2, which had a pretty solid solution for co-op progress. As a non-host player, when you return to your own game after co-play, you will still be at your last uncompleted Story Mission if there was a gap in between the story missions you completed with the host. Furthermore, once you catch up to completed Story Missions, you get a dialog asking if you’d like to ‘fast forward’, skipping missions you’ve already completed via online co-op.
Thus, it’d be a bit of bumble if Far Cry‘s first true co-op that lets players take on the main story together would be stuck with the host-only progression. After all, non-host players would then have to play through a story mission more than once which may hurt the incentive to do co-op for some players. That said, one can only hope that it wouldn’t be too difficult for the developers to implement Borderlands 2-style of co-op progression in a future patch. And of course, the developers probably have a legitmate reason for going down this route too, if this info holds true.
Far Cry 5 is scheduled to launch on February 27 in 2018 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.