The Ghost Recon Breakpoint open beta is now live, and I’ve had a chance to play it, both by myself and with a coop partner, and I just gotta say… I don’t know what the fuck to think of it.
On one hand, Ubisoft has captured that classic feel of Ghost Recon, and by that I mean the feeling of solitude, that you’re out in the middle of nowhere, with a score of enemy soldiers between you and your objective. But on the other, it’s loaded with all sorts of loot, from basic gear, to weapons, to cosmetic facepaints, badges, banners, and more. It’s a level of customization never before seen in a GR game, and that has me a bit worried. Ghost Recon never needed that before, and it’s just another example of the over-monetization of these “games as a service.”
Classic Ghost Recon.. or OGR as us fans have lovingly referred to it over the years, was a slow, methodical trek through the wilderness, occasionally fighting small squads of soldiers in quick skirmishes that could either go uneventfully smooth, or turn into a shit-show before your very eyes, depending on how competent you were at directing your squad, or how good your coop buddies were at long range combat. Very little fighting was done at less than a hundred yards, and there was a good reason for that; Your Ghost ran like he was knee deep in quicksand. It didn’t deter us though; A slow crawl up a grassy hill, a single shot ringing out, and “Another kill” whispered into your communicator was the shit our Friday nights were made of.
That is the essence of Ghost Recon that has stuck in our minds all these years, and yet, it’s only one of a long line of style changes that Ghost Recon has had over the past few generations. Realistically, out of all of Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy licensed games, GR is the one that they’ve never seemed to be able nail down.
That’s not to say there haven’t been some good ones, but while they’ve all had satisfying single player experiences, few of them ever really grabbed an audience the way that OGR did. Ghost Recon 2 missed the mark on a number of changes, focusing on chaotic set pieces and in-the-mix firefights. Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike was excellent, as it fixed a number of the missteps and opened up the maps a bit, moving away from the linear nature of the previous title.
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter was another shift for the series, again sticking you right in the thick of the combat. This one was interesting, as it was developed by two different teams, with Ubisoft proper developing the single player campaign and Red Storm (the original devs) taking over multiplayer. By this time, other games like Call of Duty were taking up pvp market share, and while GRAW’s mp was decent, the coop, the mode that for me and my friends made Ghost Recon, was completely broken.
GRAW2 followed that up, and offered by far the most impressive selection of multiplayer maps ever for a Ghost Recon game, but because of the change in style and the fact that coop was still broken (to elaborate, the enemy A.I. was omniscient, always knowing where you were, hence killing the stealth and small skirmishes that made the game great. You could literally stay in the same spot and every enemy on the map would eventually come to you. It made traversing the large, beautiful maps completely pointless.)
After that was Ghost Recon Future Soldier, the last GR game of the Xbox 360/PS3 generation. The single player followed in the style of GRAW, up close and personal, with some action set-pieces scattered through, such as extracting a p.o.w./hostage out of a combat zone with nothing but a pistol. These scripted, on-rails segments were cool, but admittedly not Ghost Recon.
Then we had a hiatus. Ubisoft began working on a new franchise, Tom Clancy’s The Division. As a Ghost Recon fan, I watched the development trailers and preview videos and recognized the Ghost Recon DNA underneath it all. I sighed to myself and succumbed to the belief that we had seen the last of our beloved GR.
But then there was a magical moment when watching E3 a few years ago. There was a trailer during the Ubisoft conference. A soldier walking on the mountainside. Realizing I was a bigger GR geek than even I thought, I recognized the walk cycle immediately. That was a GR animation. Indeed, I was correct. It was an announcement trailer for Ghost Recon Wildlands. It would be the biggest GR game ever.
And it was. And I played the shit out of it. But, even after over a hundred hours invested in doing everything I possibly could, I still had to admit that it was a new breed of Ghost Recon that, while kind of capturing the essence of the OGR we loved so much, still had an over-the-top silliness to it that made it more of an action game than a tactical shooter. That’s not to say that you couldn’t be tactical, but if you fucked up, prepare to have the entire world crash down on you, because holy shit, that Colombian military can scramble attack choppers like you would not believe. As fun as launching a motorcycle off a cliff, jumping off, and parachuting to the bottom was, it was all a bit more James Bond than Black Hawk Down.
Which leads us now to Ghost Recon Breakpoint, yet another departure and change in style, perhaps for the better. This one is obviously more serious in tone, more subdued, and while I’m sure there will still be plenty of opportunity for silliness, it seems as though acting like a superhero will end up badly more often than not.
What I noticed in the open beta was that they really captured the feeling of isolation. There is no music. There is no sound other than that of your environment. The wind blowing through the trees, the shuffle of your feet through the grass, and the faint humming of a drone, slowly growing louder. It’s that atmosphere that made Ghost Recon great back in the day. The feeling that rushing through a bunch of brush, or charging over a hill could possibly run you face to face with a squad of hostiles is what I loved about the series, back before they were all psychic. The silence is important, especially in a game like this. With no music, you can hear the hum of that drone, so that you know to drop to the ground and cover yourself in grass and mud. You can overhear conversations, so that you know to stop and crouch low.
In my playtime so far, I’ve come across small groups of hostiles, I’ve taken them out silently and enjoyed the spoils. I’ve screwed up and alerted them, ultimately taking care of them in a much sloppier, more unprofessional manner. But I still enjoyed the spoils, without bringing the entire damn island down on me. As much as I was isolated and alone, so were they. They could disappear on a route, never to return, and it would only contribute to the rumblings of a Ghost on the island. That is what makes the idea of Ghost Recon so friggin’ cool.
You’re John Rambo in First Blood. You’re Ice-T in Surviving the Game. You’re Jean-Claude Van Damme in Hard Target.
Of course, this is just a taste of the game, and there’s plenty of room for Ubisoft to fuck it up later on, but for now, it’s checking the boxes it needs to check.
If there’s one thing I’m not warming up to, it’s the mission setup. I’m not sure if I’m feeling the bulletin board-style layout, it’s a tad cluttered and obtuse, but that could just require an adjustment period. I’m also not quite sure about how quickly Ubi accelerated the progression for the sake of the demo. For Breakpoint to be about low-key survival, I feel pretty damn overpowered. As soon as I got to the Cave Base (I forget the name at the moment) I was showered with gear and tech, had access to a helicopter, and had a literal armory at my disposal. Not exactly roughing it.
But I digress. It could just be for the sake of the demo. I hope the final release has me building up the cave base on my own, a la The Division 2, or at least earning the tech I’m using. And hopefully I don’t have a damn chopper at the outset. That made getting around way too easy.
The gunsmith and depth of the skill tree is incredible, too. This is obviously a game that Ubisoft wants us to play for a long time to come, and honestly, I’m excited for it because while I liked The Division 2 very much, the grind of killing a bunch of attacking enemies was tough when playing solo. I love that they kept the essence of Ghost Recon’s “one shot, one kill” mentality. I could take out an entire base without reloading, if I was that good. And while there’s still a gear level and weapon grade in effect, it will be interesting to see if it effects the number of headshots a guy can take before he’s out of the picture. Hopefully just one, but we’ll see. I ran into a heavily armored dude with a minigun at one point, but I still removed him relatively easily with my LMG.
Breakpoint is a big departure for the Ghost Recon series, but at the same time, it feels more like Ghost Recon than it has in over a decade. Whether or not it will hold up after hours and hours of playtime remains to be seen, but for now, this OGR fan is pretty damn excited.
