Beta Adventures in Ghost Recon: Wildlands

[Mystik]

So me and Wox (an irl friend) played 16 hours of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands Open Beta, and completed all story missions, side missions and got all unlockable things that the Beta had to offer.



The basics

I would compare the game to The Division, since the games are fairly similar gameplay wise. The game is an open world single or co-op 1st & 3rd person FPS where you complete various missions on a enormous map. The game is set on Bolivia, and you play as a operative in a joint operation between CIA, DEA and JSOC to bring down the Santa Blanca drug cartel. This is done by killing various key members of the cartel. The map shows all of the middlemen, bosses, bosses of bosses etc leading all the way up to the Kingpin, El Sueno. Bolivian army force, Unidad is also your enemy, as they have some ties with Santa Blance, but they also have some grudge with Santa Blanca cartel so they fight with them too. Bolivia also has some friendly forces: a rebel force Kataris 26. They help your team battling the enemy, and you keep building their resistance and add more rebel help to your arsenal. For example the rebels can launch a mortar strike to a spot you order to.

The different regions and provinces act as zones of varying difficulty. In the beta there were two zones unlocked with 2 very different difficulties - 1 skull and 5 skulls. The game also has a base difficulty you can choose at the beginning - Arcade, Regular, Advanced and Extreme. We played with the Regular difficulty, so all opinions reflect that. And this is important later on, since at regular the game was very easy, even in the 5 skull area. The 5 skull area has a lot more Unidad activity and way more Unidad helicopter and car patrols.

The map includes some beautiful scenery, ranging from desert to snowy mountains. And judging from the trailers, even though it was not in the beta, some forest areas too.



The game is advertised as a tactical shooter, but it doesn't have to be that. You can choose your play style, to rush in or go stealth sneaky peaky like. The stealth larping is one of the best parts of the game for me: equipping your sniper with silencer and picking lone targets off, doing synced shots with your AI squad mates or co-op friends, or going close quarters with suppressed rifles, pistols and melee. You also have the option to use nightvision and later on thermal vision. Thermal is unlocked with skill points.

The main view is in 3rd person, but you can choose wether to aim down sight with a closer 3rd person look with a crosshair or using ironsights. I obviously chose the ironsight way, which made the FPS action way better than The Division could pull off.


Image stolen from Kotaku

The game has various ways of improving your skills and equipment. You get skillpoints from leveling up (with xp system), completing missions and by collection cartel medals and other types of collectibles. On top of skillpoints you also need supplies, which you get by tagging supplies with trackers that can be found on the map. (Gasoline, Food, Medicine, Comm tools) The skills add all kinds of things and make you more flexible and dangerous to the enemies. For example skills can add more grenades, reduce the scope shaking when you aim trough a sniper scope, or add different things for your drone, so it can do other things than just spot enemies.



The Division lacks in character customization, where this is the thing where Wildlands excels. Both the character and weapon customization are very good, and they can just keep adding new features and options to them along the way.






Bolivia is littered with all kinds of vehicles, from the crappy trucks and vans of the locals to tanks owned by Santa Blanca cartel and Unidad. Motorcycles, trucks, vans, sedans, jeeps, helicopters, planes, heavy armored vehicles, boats. There are even dune buggies with miniguns, Santa Blanca owned Lamborghinis and excavators that you can use to ram everything in your path. Oh and there are also boats, but who cares... This is neat up to the point where you actually have to control the vehicles. THE CONTROLS OF ALMOST ALL VEHICLES SUCK. Too bad.








Rebel forces gain various bases of operation on the map as you complete missions, free rebels from Santa Blanca and gather supplies. Rebels then continue to assist you when you are engaged on a fight with Santa Blanca or Unidad. Rebeles can be very helpful in hard missions where things get out of hand and there are multiple Unidad and Santa Blanca units with various gunner vehicles and helicopters. In those cases Rebel help is a must if you wish to survive. However in some stealth missions rebels can be a pain in the ass, as you engage targets in a stealthy way and rebels can sometimes come and engage the enemies too, which makes the stealth approach kinda useless. The rebel bases are useful because they have rebel vehicles you can basically steal and they won't mind.



Speaking of tactical aspects, you can interrogate high ranked Santa Blanca lieutenants and veterans to gain info on locations of weapon and comms tools in the map. You can also hold enemies as a human shield and knock them out (actually kills them) with melee.




You have a lot of equipment on your disposal: your drone, grenades, flash bangs, mines, lures, flares, C4. These tools can be vital to some missions, like ones where you have to breach doors by blowing them up. Then you can throw in a flashbang and time it with AI friends or co-op friends so your attack to the building is efficient.



Enemies drop their weapons when they die, but you can only keep those weapons until you die or fast travel. To keep them permanently you have to unlock them by getting them from weapon crates. The location of weapon crates can be obtained by interrogating Santa Blanca lieutenants. This is also how you get weapon parts like stocks and sights, but some of these are on the map without getting the additional info from lieutenants. Also I like it that you can see from the map which weapon / weapon accessory crate has which weapon / accessory so you can focus on getting specific items. Mini bosses of areas can have customized guns that you unlock by defeating them, but you can't customize them. For example this pink AK-47 with a drum maganize and no stock:



The bosses are done way better than in The Division. They only have slightly higher health than normal enemies, depending on their equipment like armor. The superiority over normal enemies is gained by other means like better aiming skills and weapons, rather than just making them into bullet sponges.

This all sounds pretty cool right? An open world game, with tons of missions, equipment, vehicles, locations, scenery, enemies and varying tactics of completing missions... Yes, but after all... this is a Ubisoft game...


Bugisoft® game #1287687697

Bugs. Bugs everywhere. Like always with Ubisoft games, the game seems very incomplete and buggy, even though it's set to launch very soon. We encountered numerous graphical, physics and AI bugs like electric wires spazzing out like crazy, AI enemies doing stupid shit, Anti-aliasing & anisotropic filtering not working properly. Also vehicles appearing and de-spawning is very annoying. When we first started playing the beta on the first day the performance was really shit, I couldn't play on High settings or I would drop to 30-40 fps. So we decided to wait a day and I actually uninstalled the game cause I was mad, but then Wox said on 2nd day that they had fixed the performance so I reinstalled it and it was a lot better. After that on High preset I got 60+ fps at all times, except a few dips when for example a grenade bugged and exploded 5 times a second for 10 seconds... #ThxUbisoft



Like I mentioned before, the vehicle controlling is absolute garbage in this game. Especially flying helicopters is very stupid. Also vehicles taking damage so easily is kind of ridiculous. For example the LAV pictured in this topic takes damage way too easily from minigun fire. Normal vehicles take damage way too easily from normal gunfire and bumps like hitting a rock. Even the smalles hit makes the car look like it has been rammed with a truck. There is a skill though that can fix this, but in my opinion that makes no sense at all. The skill reduces damage a vehicle you are driving, takes.

The AI usually acts like it's supposed to, but sometimes the aim of enemies feels way too unnatural, like they are firing immediately when you come out of cover with inhuman reaction. When you are doing a mission stealthy it's a bit weird that enemies don't really care about dead bodies of their friends, but they do react to sound of you running for example. Also the way they don't sometimes react to shots that killed their friends close to them is stupid at times.

Some smaller nitpicks are that when you enter a vehicle, and turn off the radio, if you leave the vehicle and re-enter it the radio is back on. This sounds like a small problem, but once you enter vehicles 200 times the Bolivian music with propaganda starts to get annoying real fast, especially when you are talking with a co-op friend at the same time.

All though this doesn't have the grinding aspects of The Division, some of the side missions are very copy-pasta like, for example "steal the plane" and "steal the helicopter" or "shut down the antennas" are done multiple times, but these are just side missions and just to get rebel re-inforcements and a lot of supplies. (Those medical, food, comms etc supplies mentioned earlier). The actual story missions of the Beta were not repetitive at all, and felt pretty interesting as you unlock the intel to reveal the next missions. You also find all kinds of miscellaneous trophies and recordings and pictures which have no real use.

Like in The Division, some enemy strongholds are not captured by rebels and made their base, but instead enemies respawn there when you have left them alone for long enough.


Summary

The basic idea of the game has been recycled by Ubisoft a million times, but somehow it managed to keep me interested enough to play the beta for 16 freaking hours, which is impressive on it's own.

The full game will have one of if not the largest explorable maps in video game history, which is quite amazing. There will be more than 20 areas you can explore and complete missions in. The sub-bosses are counted in two digit numbers too, so it's fair to say that there should be a lot to play here... But this is only if Ubisoft manages to pull something they couldn't with The Division, at least for me: To keep it interesting, even after the main story missions have been completed. Judging by the copy paste side missions of the beta, it's not looking like very valuable playing material after you have completed the story.

Pros:
+ Open world
+ HUGE map
+ Aiming down sight in a 3rd person shooter
+ Character and weapon customization
+ Lots of vehicles
+ Great graphics and scenery
+ Story missions
+ Atmosphere
+ Weapons sound like weapons, suppressors sound like suppressors and not like movie silencers where you could fire it from 2m and bad guys would not hear it at all

Cons:
- Bugs
- Vehicle handling
- Copy paste side missions
- Recycled formula
- Few skills make no sense
- Vehicles take damage too easily
- Seems a bit unfinished at times
- Takes a lot of time to find accessories for specific weapons
- Could have more weapons
- Solo: you + 3 AI Co-op: you + x friends, no AI even though there is only 2 real players, could be forced to 4, so 2 real 2 AI. Would make a lot of sense the extra squad members still have voicelines even though the AIs "disconnect"
- Not optimized yet

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So once again Ubisoft tries to deliver something that people want, and tries to fix their own mistakes they have made in past games... But still stumble to the same issues.

I'm kinda on a fence of buying this with Wox, we will first wait a few weeks to see if they iron out the bugs and show what the full game is like... Maybe I'll put that -20% Uplay points offer to use... Maybe.

[Fox]

Bugisoft xD
Thanks for the reading stuff maybe will buy it, not sure yet though.

[Maths]

Looks pretty cool

[Haures]