Can You Play Far Cry 5 Co-op? How It Works, and the Catch Nobody Warns You About

By WillyB · tactical PvE + open-world since 2012 · 10 July 2026

Short answer: yes, Far Cry 5 has two-player online co-op, it covers effectively the whole campaign, and it is some of the dumbest fun you can have in an open world. But there is a catch, and it is the reason so many co-op nights end with someone quietly annoyed: only the host makes story progress. The guest keeps their money, their XP, their perk points and every gun they picked up. They do not keep a single mission, outpost or bit of story. Understand that before you start and Far Cry 5 co-op is brilliant. Find it out three hours in and one of you has just donated an evening.

Here is the whole thing, properly.

How Far Cry 5 co-op actually works

It is two players. That is the hard ceiling. You and one mate, no more, and if you have a group of three then someone is watching.

One of you is the host. The host loads their own campaign save, and their Hope County becomes the world you both play in. The other player is the guest, who drops into that world as a second gun. It is drop-in, drop-out, so your mate can join, do a few hours, and leave without anyone reloading a save or backing out to a menu. There is no lobby screen, no separate co-op mode sitting in the main menu. You invite from the pause menu and they appear.

Before any of that works, both of you need to have finished the opening on Dutch’s Island in your own campaign. That is the prologue, the bit where the game teaches you how to hold a gun and gives you your first rifle. Until you are both off that island, co-op is locked. It catches people out constantly: your mate buys the game, you invite them immediately, nothing works, and you both spend twenty minutes assuming the servers are broken. They are not. Go do Dutch’s Island.

Two more things worth knowing up front, because they are the questions I get asked most and the answer to both is no:

• No split screen. Far Cry 5 co-op is online only. There is no local couch co-op on PC, PlayStation or Xbox. You need two copies, two machines, two screens.
• No crossplay. You and your mate have to be on the same platform. PC cannot play with PS5, PS5 cannot play with Xbox. Sort that out before one of you buys a copy on the wrong storefront.

The catch: only the host banks progress

This is the whole article, really. Everything else is detail.

Far Cry 5 runs what I would call a Dark Souls arrangement. The host owns the world. Their save is the one that moves. According to Ubisoft’s own co-op progression rules, and confirmed by every guide that has picked the thing apart, this is how it splits:

Read that right hand column again. The guest walks away from a five hour session richer, better armed and further up the perk tree, and with their own campaign sitting exactly where they left it. Every outpost you cleared together, they have to go and clear again on their own. Every story mission, again. As GosuNoob put it when the game landed, the joining player keeps the money, experience and weapons they scavenge, but retains no mission progress, and plenty of people were not happy about it.

I am not going to pretend that is a good system. It is not. It is a hangover from how Far Cry has always done co-op and Ubisoft never fixed it. But it is completely liveable if you plan around it, and most people who bounce off Far Cry 5 co-op bounced because nobody told them.

How to actually play it so nobody wastes an evening

Right, practical. This is what I would tell a mate.

Host with whoever is furthest behind. Hosting is not a chore, it is the prize. The host is the only person banking anything permanent, so the host should be the player who genuinely wants to finish the story. If you have already rolled credits and your mate is fresh, you guest for them. You lose nothing you care about, because you already have your story, and you get to keep every dollar and perk point you pick up along the way anyway. This one decision fixes about ninety percent of the frustration.

Or swap hosts and run both campaigns. The other honest answer is that you do it twice. Play a session in their world, play a session in yours. It sounds like double the work, and it is, but you are not really replaying anything: you are playing the same missions with completely different chaos, and Hope County generates different chaos every single time. Nobody who has had a cougar, a truck and a plane arrive in the same thirty seconds thinks of a second run as a chore.

Do not host a completionist run for someone else. If your mate is 80 percent through their game and you are at zero, do not let them host while you tag along “to see it”. You will see all of it and own none of it, and when you finally start your own campaign you will be replaying content you have already watched, which is the fastest way to never finish a game.

Guest the side content, host the story. If you only want a bit of a laugh on a Tuesday, guest. Go and pick up money and guns and blow up a silo. It all comes home with you. Save the story missions for the world you are hosting.

Is it worth it?

Yes, easily, and I say that as someone who plays most of this game on his own. Far Cry 5 is already the most enjoyable modern Far Cry precisely because it is grounded and stupid at the same time, and adding a second person to a systems sandbox this loose is exactly what it needs. Two players, a plane and a bad idea is basically the whole pitch. It is chaos with competence, which is the same reason I keep coming back to it solo.

The co-op progression rules are genuinely a mark against it, and I would rather be honest about that than sell you an evening you end up resenting. But it is a rule, not a bug. Work with it, host it correctly, and it is one of the better two-player open worlds you can buy for almost nothing in a sale.

If you are still deciding whether to pick it up at all, I have written the full verdict in is Far Cry 5 worth it in 2026, and if you are torn between the two modern entries, Far Cry 5 vs Far Cry 6 lays out why I still land on 5. For the stealth-minded, Ghost Recon Wildlands vs Far Cry 5 covers which one actually rewards playing slow. And if you are just hunting for the next big sandbox to sink into, the full list lives in best open-world games 2026.

Everything else I have on Hope County, every free roam run and every weapon test, is on the Far Cry 5 game hub.