Ubisoft’s 20th anniversary stream for their Ghost Recon franchise, which is one of my personal favorites of all time. That’s not to say it’s been easy to be a fan over the years. GR as a series has been one of the most tumultuous franchises ever, and has had more than its share of hits and misses, the most infamous of which was the most recent Ghost Recon Breakpoint.

The series got off to a great start with the original, being a PC-centric simulation with quiet, isolated environments and a one shot, one kill mentality. The Ghosts got in and got out, leaving no trace of their presence, except for maybe a trail of dead enemy soldiers. They were called Ghosts for a reason!

Ghost Recon 2 took the series from being a first-person view to third person, so you could now see your soldier running around and clambering over ledges. This was a person high point for the series for me, as Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike had one of the most engaging and fun co-op experiences of all time, and that’s counting the stuff that’s come out since.

Then came Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and something… changed. The single player experience was a close-up, over the shoulder view with high tech gadgets and so much shit going on on the screen that they literally had to put indicators over the bad guys so that you could see them. It was intense and still pretty fun, but the separation of those missions and the multiplayer caused a disconnect, and the enemy A.I. all but killed the fun of the co-op. GRAW2 fixed some of the problems of the first GRAW, but the core of the engine was still unchanged, and the omnipotent A.I. destroyed the purpose of having large, open maps, and spawn triggers made clearing an area completely pointless.

After that came Ghost Recon Future Soldier, and while the single player experience was decent, their focus on action and way too many walking/talking sections made things way too scripted, with linear “go here do this” maps and missions removing all sense of what a Ghost Recon game should be. It came and went and was largely forgotten.

Then there was Ghost Recon Wildlands, which ended a bit of a hiatus for the series. Gone were the scripted, action-heavy sequences of GRAW and Future Soldier, in exchange for a huge open world map. Despite the fact that it, too, had fallen victim to the Ubisoft template, it was a huge hit. And for good reason, too. Wildlands was a really, really fun game. It just wasn’t Ghost Recon.

Wildlands was so successful, Ubisoft tried to extend the life of the game by updating it and pushing it more toward a “games as a service” model, but the fact was, the game wasn’t made for it. Soooo, enter their next iteration, Ghost Recon Breakpoint. To be fair, Breakpoint had a cool premise, but it was obvious from the start it was built as a quick cash-in on the Wildlands popularity, built specifically to fit a “games as a service” model. The game was met with some pretty harsh criticism, and a lot of it was warranted. It was a pretty broken game when it launched. I bought it and though I’m loathe to admit it, I put a ton of time into it. I didn’t hate the game, and at times it showed hints of brilliance, when certain elements would (accidentally) align and an actual GR game would start to peek through. Unfortunately, it usually wasn’t long before those moments were over and the bullshit started to cover it back up again.

Ultimately, I didn’t really care for Breakpoint, or it’s stupid GaaS model. I hated that there were “season passes” and that the story ended abruptly, with Ubi asking for an additional fee in order to essentially finish it. That’s when I checked out.

So as I write this, I’m eagerly anticipating Ubisoft’s live stream (about an hour away at the moment), and the rumor is that their next GR project is going back to a “linear” structure. Now I’ve already read the comments on the internet, and I should make something clear: Ghost Recon games were always “linear.” They may have taken place on huge maps, and allowed for multiple approaches, but it wasn’t open-world. Each mission had main objectives and optional objectives, and some of those optional ones would help you later (for example, take out a tank patrol as it’s out by itself so that it doesn’t join into a bigger fight later). They weren’t scripted in the sense that you had to go here, and had to do that, but they were scripted in the sense that when you got to point A, it might trigger an attack chopper to take off from a base and begin a patrol. Anticipating those events/obstacles and being prepared for them was what made GR special.

I could make a laundry list of hopes and dreams and expectations for a new Ghost Recon, but I think it would be more prudent to end this now and then come back after the stream to share my thoughts.

So here we go…