“To be honest, it was a very random idea at the time," Mojo Swoptops tells me of their idea to rebuild Greggs in Far Cry 5. “I just sat down with the editor and decided I wanted to make something a bit silly but also still somewhat challenging, and so came up with Greggs. It’s iconic and every British person knows it, and spending time recreating a virtual version of it in a game that’s intended for violence and destruction seemed very silly indeed.”
If you’re not British and have no idea what Greggs is, it’s a pastry shop that first opened in Newcastle in the 1930s, but that doesn’t quite tell the full story. Greggs is Britain, in a way. When it started doing vegan versions of its famous sausage rolls, it was the leading story in the national news. When it scrapped the macaroni pie, it was debated in the Scottish Parliament. It’s a huge part of our culture, which was part of Mojo’s motivation to build the map in the first place. “I’m British myself, so I enjoy making something relatable and recognisable,” they say. “The realistic and slightly mundane side of UK life isn’t really represented in digital entertainment much. It’s often over-glamorised with grand castles, beautiful highland views, and the Royal family. We do have those - but we also have Greggs.”
On Mojo’s YouTube channel, you can also find a map of a Tesco car park at peak pandemic times, and they plan on creating more “realistic and slightly mundane” British settings soon. While they have used a range of map creation tools in the past, they exclusively use Far Cry 5 on consoles now, owing to its ease of use and the speed at which maps can be designed - with two kids, Mojo often has to make the maps in two or three sittings after their children have gone to bed. For British viewers, what’s most impressive is not just that these are the types of settings we see every day - but never in video games - it’s the attention to detail that make them feel so quintessentially British. There’s even someone slumped over, worse for wear, just by the Greggs doorway. It’s a common sight for many of us, and it’s in the map because “it just felt right."
It’s not just the people looking rough outside Greggs or shoppers hoarding toilet paper though. Mojo Swoptops’ channel has a whole range of maps, from realistic recreations of more typical real life landmarks to settings from pop culture, to maps and locations from other video games. For example, there’s a Mojo Swoptops build for the Joker stairs, Rick & Morty’s house, a Tatooine sunset, Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, the Forth Rail Bridge, Zelda’s Temple of Time, and Animal Crossing’s Nook’s Cranny, amongst many, many more.
As for the challenges these different settings pose, it’s not so much the places themselves as it is Mojo’s access to exploring them “I suppose the difficulty depends on the reference quality,” they say. “If I have a clear idea of how it was made, even just the general shape of the structure, I can probably have a good bash at making it myself. But if it’s a fairly complex structure that I’ve never visited in real life, like Angkor Wat? I’m basing my entire scene on one angle - it’s a bit of guesswork as to how it’s actually constructed. But at the end of the day, if it looks good and accurate from that one angle anyone is ever going to see it from, even if I’ve had to use some bizarre assets to make it look more like the reference, job done - right?”
Sometimes though, even with a full range of references available, the size of the maps Mojo creates can still pose issues. “The most difficult would be recreating the entire Pointe du Hoc map from Call of Duty: WWII,” they say. “It wasn’t the construction itself that was the challenge, but the sheer scale of the project. When I decide I’m going to do something, I do it completely, 100 percent, despite the consequences. I knew I could rebuild the map but didn’t quite comprehend just how long it would take - roughly 100+ hours. And you know something? Greggs took three hours to build and already has more views on my YouTube channel than that bloody Call of Duty map!”
Greggs is one of Mojo’s most recent creations and, thanks to how bizarre it is, one of the most notable, but it’s not the one they themselves hold up as the apex. “My opinion on my ‘best work’ is always changing and I like to think that is because I’m improving! I think my personal favourite in terms of final quality would be my recreation of the entire Shipment map from Call of Duty.”
Despite the 100+ hours time spent on Pointe du Hoc, that’s something of an outlier - no surprise when you look at just how many maps Mojo produces regularly. “On average, most of my scenes take about three hours to complete until I have to draw a line and tell myself to stop. As a wise man once told me, art is always evolving and can never truly be considered ‘Perfect’.”
