Hunting Ghosts: Ghost Recon Wildlands

Ghost Recon is a military-themed shooter spanning various installments across different platforms. My first encounter with Ghost Recon was with the very first game on the PC. Unlike the wildly popular Counterstrike, Ghost Recon takes a tough no-nonesense approach with regards to missions. You can’t just barge in, bunny-hopping with guns blazing. You need to carefully maneouver your fire teams across hostile terrain. If you get wounded or killed, your status will be carried over to the next mission. What that means is that if you die, you remain dead. Plus, the game offers medals for your actions.

That said, the game fell out of my radar after enjoying it. I wasn’t exactly a PC gamer, and in time my PC games were reduced to just strategy games. While Ghost Recon games did come over to the PS2, I was already going through a shift on my military game preference, moving on from first-person to third-person. Even though Ghost Recon eventually got third-person view in later games, I simply had other games to play.

Two console generations later, I’m ready to pick up Ghost Recon once again. Having played other Tom Clancy titles like HAWX 2, EndWar, and Splinter Cell, the Ghost unit has always been “there” for me. Since my current video game fetish is open-world games, I was surprised that Ubisoft is making an open-world Ghost Recon title. Military shooters and the open-world don’t always go hand in hand. You could even say that some elements of one totally go against the other. Plus, after The Division, I am wary of another “always online” games that only ever really work in First World countries with more than capable internet speeds.

But the concept, the demos, and the assurance by Ubisoft that the game can be played offline were more than enough for me to take a long second look at Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Despite being only months before its release date of March 7, 2017, we’ve only seen glimpses of the gameplay. That is, until this gameplay video featuring the offline solo gameplay was uploaded late last weak which gives us a better picture of what lies ahead.

The video reminded me of Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction (more on this later) in both scope and optons. I had a lot of fun with that game and I really hope I get that kind of fun from this one too.

 

The Ghosts

Ghost Recon Wildlands have you control a four-man Ghost unit: a Special Forces Team operating in Bolivia that, in this game’s universe, has become a narco-state controlled b the Santa Blanca Cartel. The mission is to wreak havoc, destabilize, and break the alliance between the cartel and the corrupt government. To this end, the Ghosts need to sabotage, interrogate, kidnap, and eliminate members of the cartel who happen to control villages and whose bases are virtual fortresses not even Ezio Auditore will dare infiltrate.

True to Ubisoft form, the Ghosts can all be played by you and your friends via online-coop. We’ve seen this work in Assassin’s Creed Unity and The Division and to a certain extent, Watch_Dogs 2. Unlike The Division, this game can be played off-line, and you will have AI team-mates instead. I personaly got burned by The Division (and For Honor’s) always online requirement, since my Ultera plan uses an IP that is banned by PSN for some reason, so this is a welcome development for me.

Squad games aren’t new to me. In fact, it is my personal view that any game that lets you handle a “Special Forces team” must have a squad element. We’ve been spoiled by the Solid Snakes and the Sam Fishers of gaming. While it is cool to be some bad-ass super soldier that can take on an army by himself, you won’t survive alone in a narco-state you’re supposed to bring down.

But hang on, how reliable will your AI team-mates going to be? Ubisoft games has had AI-controlled companions for some of their titles and while they function on a limited capacity (think the Rooks in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate), their AI is extremely unwieldy and, at times, downright stupid. But the latest video seems to show that your team-mates are at least competent enough to respond properly in any situation. You have basic commands such as “regroup”, “go there”, “hold position”, and “fire”. When you get spotted and fired upon, they fire back. They also provide you with info such as a military chopper passing by, and enemies coming to your blind spot (if they see them coming, that is).

 

Charactersmith

The newest feature in the Ghost Recon franchise is the Charactersmith. This option allows you to fully customize your character’s appearance. From face, color, and gender, to outfits and equipment for a fully immersive experience.

Ubisoft isn’t a stranger to customization, with Assassin’s Creed Unity and The Division offering an insane amount of possibilities. The outfits for this game are aesthetic only (meaning it won’t affect gameplay if you’re running around naked), but the choice between male and female characters also comes with different voice overs so you don’t have to worry about your GI Jane having the voice of a gruff Special Forces Commando.

 

Gunsmith

Returning from Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is Gunsmith feature. Gunsmith allows you to fully customize your weapons from triggers, underbarrels, scopes, barrels, and so on and so forth, right down to the paint. Think of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’s weapons customization menu, only more extensive.

As you progress in your mission to topple the cartel, your weapons will show signs of wear and tear. No, really. This will force you to clean and repaint your weapons regularly just like real operators do. There will also be bullet-drop, and Ubisoft went to great lengths to recreate the actual feel of the weapons as much as possible.

You can’t talk about Gunsmith without talking about the guns and Ubisoft Paris took great pains to provide us with a perfect balance between realism and fun. The process is wonderfully explained in the Ghost Recon Wildlands website:

“Research is done by the game designers. They collect all the information they can find about a given weapon, thanks to multiple sources and especially regular contacts with the Ubisoft Authenticity team at RedStorm Entertainment: version types, dimensions, caliber, manufacturing materials, coating, moving parts, compatible attachments, interior parts…and also gather true weapon demonstration videos.

The team also had the opportunity to go to a shooting range to try the game’s weapons under real-life conditions, and feel how the weapon’s rate of fire, weight, recoil or sound works. According to Mihai Zorca, Technical Director at Ubisoft Bucharest: “No matter how detailed pictures can be, holding a weapon, examining its parts up close, firing it, gives you a different perspective on the models you’re about to create.”

Next is the selection of the weapons that will be in the game. “The weapons are first chosen to answer a gameplay need: we want to determine which kind of weapon the player will need depending on their playstyle (stealth, recon, assault…) or the uses they will have in game (suppression, anti-vehicle…)” explains Pierre Hornez, Game designer at Ubisoft Paris. Then, the game designers choose the final weapons depending on three criteria:

– Realism: does it make sense to find this weapon in this context,
– Difference between weapons, to ensure a variety of choice for the player,
– And finally the “coolness factor,” which aims to determine if this weapon in interesting for the player, depending on its look and feel and the sound it makes.
When combined, these three criteria ensure a coherence in the choice on the weapons that can be found in the game, both in terms of authenticity and fun.

Once selected, the work on the weapon creation itself can finally begin. Many teams work at the same time to give life to a weapon. Each job family adds specific functionality to the 3D models, like pieces in a puzzle.
The art teams handle all the visual aspects of the weapon: the modelers create the 3D model of the weapon, before adding the textures and visual effects. The animators generate the most realistic animation for each weapon, and collaborate with the programmers, who create the code for the weapon’s behaviors, by including the recoil and the AI behavior, among other things. Concurrently, the sound teams add sound effects, such as the gunshot and reloading sounds, and implement the sound propagation in the different environments of the open world (echo, reverberation, etc.).

Next comes the testing phase. The weapon model is imported into the game editor, where the testers make sure the weapon is rendered correctly, that animations and handling are working fine, that the special effects are being played correctly, that the weapon is being showcased well in Gunsmith, etc. According to Mihai Zorca: “When looking at a weapon model, the first thing that you subconsciously notice is the proportions and the spaces. And I’m not only talking about the large main shapes of the weapon, but the hundreds of little details (screws, holes, indents, hinges, rings, locking mechanisms, etc.) that are each laid out with a certain technical or ergonomic purpose on a real weapon. Nothing is random! So we pay real close attention to these spaces and proportions when we create our models, and that gives us a solid and authentic working base.” Once the weapon is finally rendered in game, its model is sent to the weapon constructor for approval, in order to make sure authenticity is guaranteed.”

 

The Open-World

Ubisoft loves to take risks with their intellectual properties like the recent Assassin’s Creed movie. But this one is bigger than anything Ubisoft has made before. Ubisoft knows how to make open-world games, but Ghost Recon has never been one and with good reason: the style of gameplay, plus the hardcore fans who are loathe to see changes they think is detrimental to their beloved franchise. There is a real risk for this game to turn into GTA Bolivia.

Many fans want Ghost Recon to remain a tactical shooter. But games these days have either gone open-world, or big adventure, that sticking to the same old formula can stagnate the franchise. And besides, there is a ton of potential in bringing the open-world to Ghost Recon. For one, it allows you to tackle missions depending on the situation on the ground, instead of just going to a level, go from point A to point B, and fulfilling those mission objectives. Another reason is that it allows the game to put you in the country, interact with NPCs, see the people you’re supposed to be saving. An open-world game is defined not only by the vastness of the world, but in how alive it is. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has shown that it is possible to have an open-world stealth/military shooter game, failing only in that its maps are desolate, with only two to five soldiers per outpost (more if its a major location). Ghost Recon Wildlands promises “inhabited towns” where locals follow their own “schedule”.

So, where does the “GTA Bolivia” fear come from? Well, apart from the open-world setting, a lot of this game’s elements seem to be lifted from the Grand Theft Auto franchise. From the open-world, the ability to ride vehicles, lots of guns, and the opportunity to cause mayhem, this game can be mistaken for a GTA clone or maybe even Just Cause with squad play.

But if you look a lot deeper, you’d see that this game has a lot of unique features that set it apart. For one, missions are done with a squad, not by your lonesome. Plus, if your actions do have consequences in the world (as they have so teased but was careful not to elaborate), then you can’t just drive in and go on a killing spree without failing the game with all that “credit is failure” thing going on in their trailers.

 

Bolivia

I’ve never been to Bolivia. All I know is that it is a South American country with lots of jungles. Oh, and it is where Che Guevarra met his end. The development team not only went to the country, but they tried to recreate it for this game in all its beauty.

In GTA V, I used to “hike” up the mountains because they are so wonderfully made and passing by on a plane doesn’t really do it justice (and because wierd stuff happens during night). The same is also true of Watch_Dogs 2’s San Francisco. Climbing up the Golden Gate bridge at night, watching the view of the California skyline while hearing the sound of the wind is one of the most sublime experiences I’ve had in a video game.

Bolivia is a beautiful country, and this game looks to show that to me whose ass never left the Philippine islands. Ubisoft is no stranger to making vast maps (Assassin’s Creed 4 managed to make a version of the Caribbean), but this one is different. As seen on the demo videos, the visuals are one of the best among Ubisoft’s library of games. In the video, you even see the rainy night sky giving way to a beautiful sunrise, all as your helicopter passes by a cartel resupply convoy. Even with the expected downgrade of the graphics from the reveal trailer, it’s still beautiful.

 

Final Thoughts……For Now.

This latest solo gameplay trailer answers a lot of questions as to how controlling three AI team-mates could work. It has also convinced me that this game has the potential to be really big, far bigger than the Ghost Recon titles of old. Previous games put you into the mission, but this one forces you to be committed to the long haul. Many fans are worried that this game will also inherit Ubisoft’s tendency to recycle missions ad infinitum, but a Special Forces Operator does the same things all the time: search and rescue, eliminate, track and extract, those type of things that arm-chair warriors like me love to dismiss as “repetitive”.

Games do not have the obligation to be real; but it does have the job of being authentic. Games like Assassin’s Creed do a good job of feeling authentic even if the game’s story is out of this world because we are placed in an environment that feels right. From this perspective, Ghost Recon Wildlands sure seem to be on the right track. Although we won’t really know until March 7.

This game is bringing back fun memories of playing Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction on the old PS2. That game also has vehicles you can drive, aircraft you can pilot, guns you can obtain and use, and support by way of air strikes and artillery hits. It is also a sand-box game. The only difference is that Mercenaries plays similar to Just Cause than anything from the Tom Clancy universe. So yeah, while other fans are arguing about immersion, realism, and other stuff, I can’t wait to see how I can wreck the cartel in my own, explosive way.