Our squad’s ninth unsuccessful attempt to extract the whistleblower was the most ridiculous. By that point the four of us playing co-op were fairly au fait with the mission’s set-up: a dozen or so heavily armed Santa Blanca cartel members holed up in a well-defended rocky outcrop near the shore of Bolivia’s Laguna Colorada, unaware that a man in their midst named Emilio was experiencing serious doubts about his long-term career prospects in the narco-terrorism business.
Eight previous attempts to capture him had failed in a variety of quasi-comical ways. Basic player incompetence had accounted for most, such as the time a team-mate tried to bundle Emilio into a waiting getaway car but only succeeded in shooting him in the face (attempt seven).
AI idiocy had also played its part, like when our target undermined our tactical assault by inexplicably exiting his own vehicle to stand in front of a surprised but grateful enemy machine gunner (attempt eight).
And once we were undone by plain old emergent bad luck as a passing patrol of Unidad soldiers – who serve a similar function to the police force in Grand Theft Auto games, even down to incremental levels of alertness – decided to engage the gangbangers and Emilo bought it in the crossfire (attempt two).
Number nine at least started promisingly. Our four Ghosts silently circled the encampment, spreading wide so that we could simultaneously take out the guards at either end of the dirt track running through its middle, and also the two snipers who were most likely to shoot our treacherous target if and when he broke cover.
A couple of us released drones in order to permanently ping the locations of the hostiles on each player’s mini-map and then we each selected a guard for sync shots – an update of Ghost Recon: Future Solider’s single-player squad targeting mechanic that’s been repurposed for multiplayer use too. A numbered icon appears next to each player’s name if they have a nominated hostile in their sights; when all four icons are up, the squad can orchestrate the kill in perfect unison.
Or that’s the theory; what actually happened very much put the farce into special forces. Inevitably one of our party’s aim was off, a winged guard sounded the alarm and three of us were downed in the full-on firefight that ensued. Remarkably, Emilio finally managed to stay in a vehicle long enough to escape the encampment and headed, quite literally, for the hills – our sole surviving team-mate giving chase in a helicopter commandeered from who knows where.
After bleeding out and subsequently respawning, two of the squad opportunistically stole a flatbed delivery truck and joined the cross-country pursuit, although not before the driver almost mowed down his colleague in his haste to take off. As the duo closed in on Emilio they noticed something else in the air above – a Unidad gunship, presumably dispatched to investigate the shootout and/or chopper theft and now a part of the Wacky Races-style convoy of mismatched vehicles.
For a few gloriously ludicrous moments our hapless pair of Ghosts careered across the South American countryside, one hanging out of the van’s window taking woefully ineffectual potshots at the heavily armoured helicopter while the other thrashed his highly unsuitable pursuit vehicle in an attempt to close in on Emilio.
And then, with almost crushing inevitability, our airborne ally’s overenthusiastic attempts to arrest our quarry resulted in a small but terminal explosion somewhere in the middle distance and the now all-too familiar mission failed screen signalled the end of a madcap caper that, it must be said, owed more to Tom & Jerry than the late Tom Clancy. Welcome to Wildlands …
“When we started this project almost five years ago, we wanted to bring a fresh and new experience while remaining [true] to what is Ghost Recon,” says the game’s creative director, Eric Couzian, at a special hands-on preview event in Paris. “We wanted to bring Ghost Recon to a new level.”
Most obviously, this meant taking the franchise open world – and with no half-measures, either. The virtual Bolivia created by Couzian and his team is, he reveals, the largest and most fully realised open world ever to appear in a Ubisoft game (and Lord knows there have been a few). It comprises 21 distinct regions, 11 diverse ecosystems – including jungles, mountains, swamps, canyons and salt flats – and is populated by a nation of non-player characters who live in AI-induced autonomy “depending on who they are, their world, their leisure, the time of the day or the dynamic weather system”.
Perhaps betraying its lengthy gestation period, Wildlands’ open world feels like a halfway house between the old school zoning of Ubisoft games like Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate and the more accessible approach that made the recent Watch Dogs 2 such an unexpected joy to explore. As with the latter, there are no watchtowers to clear and the entire map is clear from the off, but it’s quickly covered in a familiar rash of icons denoting resources to recover, convoys to cripple, and collectibles to pick up.
More controversial still will be the move towards what Couzian terms “total freedom of choice”. The Ghost Recon series has always offered would-be military tacticians the tools to approach encounters in a number of different ways, but its tight spots have also been subtly scripted and controlled by the unseen hands of developers. As our emergent experience extracting Emilio so ably demonstrated, Wildlands is, well, wild. “You can take the bosses and missions in any order,” Couzian explains. “You can customise your Ghost with many guns, skills and items. You are completely free.”
Our demo seems to bear this out. Wildlands opens with your Ghost being smuggled into the Itacua region of Bolivia by an undercover DEA agent posing as a humanitarian aid worker. An opening storyline mission offers the chance to gain familiarity with the controls and systems but, crucially, it’s not compulsory. There’s literally nothing to stop us stealing the nearest vehicle and heading off in search of our own adventure.
It’s hard to underplay just how seismic a shift this is for a series previously predicated on linear progressions and proscribed set pieces – and it’s also impossible to judge from a few hours of gameplay whether Couzian’s goal of remaining true to the essence of Ghost Recon has been achieved. However, there’s already enough evidence early on to suggest this could be the real conflict at the game’s heart.
Take the squad-based combat, for example. Wildlands’ freedom extends to multiplayer as well, and players can seamlessly jump in and out of co-op at will, sharing character and mission progression between the two states. Any gaps in your four-man outfit are filled by AI recruits, who can be given rudimentary orders like attack, regroup and move from a command wheel.
When everything works as intended, it’s extremely satisfying. Reconnoitring a cartel hideout with your drone, lining up sync shots on sentries and then silently dropping them with suppressed sniper rifles feels like an agreeably authentic Ghost Recon experience.
All too often, though, the emergent nature of the open-world environment mean best-laid tactical plans go tango uniform at the unscripted drop of a hat. In these moments Wildlands feels more like OTT open-world romps Just Cause or Grand Theft Auto, with all semblance of military strategy going up in smoke along with most of the local infrastructure.
A case in point: one early story mission we tackle as a single player tasks the Ghosts with stealing a sports car owned by the local cartel lieutenant in case his whereabouts can be determined from its sat nav. The vehicle is parked in the middle of a built-up area heaving with heavies but also offering plenty of sniper-friendly high rises and ambush-accommodating alleyways.
Partway through our squad’s stealthy street-by-street sweep through the town an Ubisoft rep announces the preview session is drawing to a close. Determined to reach the mission’s end, we make a snap decision to ‘go loud’, lobbing a couple of frag grenades into the garrison we’d been carefully scoping out and making a beeline for the objective, hip-firing at anything hostile-looking as though rampaging around a Call of Duty multiplayer map. The fact that this worked (and it really did) was a great proof of concept for the openness of the sandbox systems and not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it’s also not what fans will expect from a Ghost Recon game.
Incidentally, even at the sharper end of the four available difficulty levels, Wildlands’ enemy AI is extremely variable. It can take an age for the gauge indicating a hostile has spotted you to fill – even when they are in the same room and staring straight at you, presumably trying to work out whether this gillie-suited soldier with an American accent and an assault rifle is actually just a pal playing a prank.
Having made it to the lurid yellow Lamborghini-a-like relatively untroubled and unscathed, our Ghosts stage a getaway that could be another sequence straight outta Los Santos. Ignoring the guards in the garage, the quartet clamber into the car and screech off into the streets, sending bad guys tumbling like bowling pins until there’s a safe enough distance between them and us for the mission to be considered a success.
Earlier, Eric Couzian had warned us the only way to survive in these Wildlands would be to find our own play style and to get creative. This is fine, of course, and our brief time with the game suggests its systems will be robust enough to cope with whatever improvisation you can throw at them. But in doing so we can’t help but question how much of the series’s identity has been sacrificed in order to tick next-gen gameplay boxes.
Wildlands is a rush, for sure – but is it Ghost Recon? We shall see.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands is released on 7 March.
- E3 2015: Ghost Recon Wildlands will be Ubisoft’s largest ever open-world game
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier – review
View all comments >