Oh boy, where do we begin with Ubisoft’s 2017 release of Ghost Recon: Wildlands for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC? Following on a series’ hiatus for years, Ubisoft decided to bring back Wildlands with a vengeance. The promotional trailer featuring Papa Roach’s Last Resort set the gaming world afire with much anticipation leading up to the game’s initial release; the idea of traversing a fully realized Bolivia, complete with jungles, swamps, salt flats, mines, cliffs, rolling hillsides, icy mountains, beach resorts, casinos, floating drug labs, and plenty of towns to visits, vehicles to drive, and weapons to customize, seemed like a dream game come true. How could Ubisoft possibly screw up a game with so much potential… right? Well, they did, and they managed to do so in only ways Ubisoft could accomplish.
Large Map With Not Enough To Do
While Electronic Arts is known for producing games on cool tech with some neat features hampered either by time constraints or overtly predatory monetization (i.e., Star Wars: Battlefront 2), Ubisoft is mostly known for having somewhat ambitious ideas hampered by a plethora of problems tied to inconsistent gameplay mechanics, samey missions, and usually a scope that doesn’t mesh with the game’s story and loops. That’s sort of the gist of Ghost Recon: Wildlands‘ biggest issues: it was designed as an open-world game, when it didn’t need to be.
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands basically is the sum of the age-old maxim: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
And just because Ubisoft could make Wildlands open-world, doesn’t mean they should have made Wildlands open-world. Why? Because there’s not enough to do to justify the size of the map.
If it had been a few small districts, or maybe just one or two segments of the map, I think that could have worked well enough as a decent sandbox. Have a few biomes or separate them by loading screens, and it would have been fine. It wasn’t as if the game needed to be 24 square kilometers of space. Why? Because they didn’t know what to do with.
That’s not to say that the map isn’t gorgeous, because it absolutely is. In fact, it’s one of the best designed open-world maps in all of gaming, which is really saying something. The distinctly designed coca fields; the cool elevated silver mines; the densely packed marshes and swamp lands; the long stretches of desert roads that stretch up into the mountains and beyond the valleys; the hillside churches, and the massive mausoleum are all awesome sights to behold. My absolute favorite part of the map has got to be the afternoon sun-beating down on the massive salt flats. You would think that just large open spaces of flat, salted earth in every direction would be boring, but no… it has an eerie yet distinctly and artistically cool feeling to it. It feels like a real place and has such a unique personality to its design that it makes it hard not to appreciate.
Hence, it’s a real shame that there’s just nothing to do out there – you can explore and look, but the gameplay mechanics are just way too limited to take advantage of all the artists’ hard work in bringing Bolivia to life in the way they did in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands.
Limited Gameplay Mechanics
So you might be wondering what I mean when I say “limited gameplay mechanics”, well, when I say “limited”, I mean really limited. Now some people might be thinking, “Well, it’s a tactical third-person shooter game, of course it’s going to have limited gameplay. What were you expecting?” and to that I say, “Then why make it in such a massive open world if there were so few things to do in it?”
Seriously. All you do is go around and shoot enemies who instantly respawn the minute you leave the region and come back, tag supplies, grab intel, or blow things up. That’s the entire game loop for the entire game, including all the story missions, with the exception of having to escort select NPCs to a specific destination.
You might think that’s a lot of things to do, but it’s not, because you’ll do ALL those things in the very first region, and then repeat those things ad infinitum for another 100 HOURS!!!
I’m not even joking. You want to 100% this game? That’s likely 150+ hours. But if you just want to defeat all the bosses and scoop up all the weapon supply crates and intel? 100 hours minimum.
Basically the loop of the game is:
1: Travel to location
2: Kill bad guys / blow things up
3: Grab items
Rinse and repeat that mechanic over and over and over again, and you can see how this can get boring… really fast.
It’s a real shame, too, because Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands has some of the best weapon handling in the game. The guns are fun to use and customize, and the sniping is really fun to do, especially from several hundred meters out. The vehicles handle well, (likely borrowed from Ubisoft’s The Crew, not unlike how Activision had Bizarre port over the Blur driving mechanics into 007: Blood Stone). And the stealth mechanics are serviceable, but not great.
In order to help flesh out the repetitive gameplay, there are side-quests sprinkled throughout the world, where you have to steal vehicles and bring them to a certain location to help out your rebel allies, which contain resources you can use to upgrade your weapons, character, and your drone. And they also have drone mechanics you can use to mark enemy locations, utilize an explosion/EMP to knock out generators, SAMs, and radio towers, and some of the intel missions require chasing down enemy lieutenants by shooting their vehicle, grabbing them and then tapping ‘Y’ to interrogate them.
The interrogation seems like it would be a cool mechanic until you realize it just adds waypoints to your map for more rebel resources you can tag/gather, weapon caches you can gather, and upgrade points you can gather.
Opposite of Just Cause 2 and Just Cause 3 — where there were a lot of cool places to visit and mini-games to complete, from racing and wing-gliding, to time trials, explosive runs, and seek-and-destroy missions –Ghost Recon: Wildlands has no additional mini-games in the main campaign mode. You have to exit back to the main menu to do the other game modes, which are basically variations on survival and team deathmatch.
You would think with such a massive open world, they would have had some racing checkpoints for the ground and air vehicles, or other challenges to complete, but nope.
If you haven’t figured out by now, the loops are literally as I mentioned. Travel. Kill. Gather. That’s it. And you do it in the most rudimentary and mundane ways imaginable. Now this might not seem so bad if the game didn’t feel so artificial, and this is likely due to the way the travel mechanics work.
Cool Driving Mechanics That Are Underutilized
You have a nice smorgasbord of different vehicles in the game. Someone obviously wanted to give players a lot to work with: you have motorcycles, minivans, full-size vans, trucks, jeeps, sedans, station wagons, bulldozers, tractors, planes, helicopters, dune buggies, armored transports, sports cars and SUVs. Each of these vehicle categories even have different variations, so you have lots of different options when it comes to travel. The pros/cons of each vehicle class are kind of limited, though.
The best are obviously the off-road vehicles if you want to get to places quickly while on the ground. The best overall vehicle for traveling, however, is going to be any variation of helicopter – preferably the small nimble kind. And Ubisoft ensured that helicopters are provided in abundance throughout the game, so much so that you will literally have no reason whatsoever to use any of the other vehicles for any reason whatsoever so long as you can get your hands on a helicopter – and they ensure that helicopters are available for you to use every several hundred meters or so. If there isn’t a helicopter nearby? Just call one to be air-dropped in.
This basically makes travel via any other means completely pointless. Since you can parachute from the helicopters at any time, air-dropping in always makes the most sense for just about any mission where the area is heavily guarded and you need to reach a specific location. And if you have to do a tail-mission while avoiding being detecting, once again, helicopters are the best way because you can just fly overhead, monitor your target and avoid being detected by staying a few hundred meters above them.
I know some people might say “Well then, just don’t use helicopters!” but the point is that helicopters are made to be the most efficient with no actual downsides. This raises the better question of: why not use the helicopters? It’s not my job as a player to provide gameplay balance to Ubisoft’s game. That’s Ubisoft’s job. Worse yet is that even if you opted not to use the helicopters to travel everywhere, there is still fast travel everywhere, which can easily be unlocked by just hopping into a helicopter and flying over the locations to unlock the fast travel.
In fact, if you just flew a helicopter from one section of the map to the other at the start of the game, you could easily unlock all the fast travel locations and then zip and zoop around via fast travel for the remainder of the campaign, which is a real shame, because the vehicles have really great physics, and handle decently enough. And having more missions grounded and themed around realistic travel with cost and consequences would have really added value to the game world and its immersion. But lacking things like being able to repair a vehicle, and vehicles having infinite ammo (for the ones with mounted weapons), and infinite fuel, basically means that so long as you avoid heavy damage, you can indefinitely fly around killing everything in your path.
Fast Travel Everywhere
I know I mentioned that fast travel is everywhere, but I really need to hammer home just how bad fast travel is in the game. Ubisoft is notorious for having these large open worlds and then practically begging players not to experience them by putting fast travel everywhere. Now I know some people like having the option to zip and zoop throughout the game world, but let’s be real here: what’s the point of an open-world if you have fast travel every several hundred meters? Really? Why not just make sandbox levels like the Hitman games in that case?
What makes Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands especially egregious is because the artists put some painstaking detail into a ton of unique and articulately crafted points of interests, but you have zero reason to visit these places unless you’re just trying to 100% the game by picking up all the collectibles. It just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Why spend so much time and pay so many artists to craft this lovingly detailed world when you 65% of it can go unseen by just using fast travel and helicopters to quickly get around the map without having to actually engage or interact with the world? What’s the point?
It’s the epitome of design waste.
You would think that Ubisoft would really want people to engage with the world, but then this goes back to the problem where there isn’t anything to do in the world, so they designed all these other ways to completely ignore the world and just quickly get into and out of various situations without ever really having a reason to fully experience all these neat locations.
A few missions will actually have you to put boots on the ground and thoroughly explore them – like the Breakpoint tie-in mission featuring Jon Berenthal, who does a fantastic job for showcasing what most gamers actually expected from a badass main character. He really puts himself into the role, and the mission that accompanies his appearance has you traveling deep into an underground facility within the mines, which feels like a classic Tom Clancy scenario. It’s a location that was expertly designed and feels cool to move around in and perform shootouts in. It’s one of the few places where the game really has you experience the scope and scale appropriately, rather than just flying in on a helicopter, shooting the target(s) from the air and then flying out to your next mission.
Fast travel in open-world games have always bothered me, though. Few games do it right, with GTA IV being one of them, and Red Dead Redemption 2 being another. There is fast travel, but in those games you miss out on emergent possibilities, opportunities and experiences. Those games reward you with interactivity and various locations you can discover just by staying on the ground and exploring the environments provided for you to interact with. But then again, in those games, you could do more than just shoot and collect items, and so that’s why they wanted you to explore those worlds.
Here, Ubisoft gave you one of the biggest open-worlds out there to explore, and doesn’t actually want you exploring it. It’s the opposite of how Avalanche Studios approached Just Cause, which also has lots of fast travel, but also has a ton of collectibles, mini-games, and challenges located on the ground level, so you still have explore and engage in the game world in different ways, which kept those games feeling fresh and fun during the duration of the play session.
Inconsistent AI
You could tell Ubisoft borrowed some of the AI routines from the Assassin’s Creed games for Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but it didn’t quite pay off in the right ways here. The biggest problem is that Assassin’s Creed AI is designed around awareness and melee engagements, which works well enough for those games. You have smoke bombs, areas to hide in, and various equipment to help improve your stealth abilities. While you can utilize silencers and melee takedowns in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands, you don’t have the same level of stealth options at your disposal. Later on in the game you can get the active camouflage from Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, but it only works sometimes and only on the lower difficulty settings (but I’ll get to that in a minute).
The main issue is that the AI is either aimbot-tier or dumb as rocks. And you’ll never know which one you’ll end up with while you’re playing, which makes for an extremely inconsistent play experience.
There are some cool elements to the AI, though, much like in the Assassin’s Creed games where the AI have routines and daily habits, the same thing applies here. I thought it was really awesome seeing the enemy patrols stop, go into a restaurant (or back to their homes) and sit down to grab a meal, or when midnight hits, they go find a cot and lay down to take a nap while another member of the patrol takes their place. You can actually time your missions around their routines, which I thought was awesome.
But the problem is that the inconsistency of the AI makes it impossible to play effectively. Some enemies will spot you at night from 250 meters, while some enemies will be blind to you as you walk directly behind them kitted out with massive LMGs and a full ghillie suit. In some ways it seems as if Ubisoft designed the AI around the drone – wanting players to rely on the drone to tag and survey instead of moving around on foot like in the old Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell games.
The other problem is that the further up the difficulty the more ridiculous the AI becomes. I do like that higher difficulty settings reduces some of the cheating UI elements – and man, I could almost do a whole section on the ridiculous overload of screen elements with the UI, but I’m gunning for some measure of brevity here. But the AI’s difficulty as you move from “Arcade” up to “Extreme” just becomes incomprehensibly frustrating in the worst ways possible. This is definitely apparent in the Tier 1 Mode, which you can only unlock after you reach level 30, at which point the Tier 1 mode unlocks new bonus items to customize your character with, new weapons, and improved resource gathering. Also, with Tier 1 you level up by moving down the ranks until you reach Tier 1. Every so many levels the difficulty is automatically increased, and that’s where things go awry.
Frustrating Tier 1 Mode
Now the difficulty increasing wouldn’t be an issue if the game was fair.
I’m all about punishing difficulty that makes sense, or requires players to actually get good. In racing games this usually means tightening up on turns, knowing when not to brake, and when to keep the accelerator full throw, while also knowing how to cut corners without losing time or racking up penalties. The AI gets extremely difficult, but it’s not impossible when you put most racing sims on the “Elite” or “Pro” settings. It just means players have to learn to get good. That’s not the case here.
Here, the AI becomes impossible. And by impossible, I mean a low level sicario dual-wielding Mac-10 sub-machine guns and being able to headshot you from the pilot seat of a helicopter while you’re flying around at more than 230 meters away. I only wish that example was a joke and not a common occurrence on the “Extreme” difficulty in Ghost Recon: Wildlands.
In fact, that’s the entirety of that game mode: AI getting headshots once they see you, no matter what weapon they’re using or how far away you are.
As you progress through Tier 1 and the difficulty is automatically (and permanently) raised so long as Tier 1 is activated, you have to deal with increasingly impossible AI opponents, who snipe you with SMGs, and can basically smell you from impossible distances.
So you’re probably wondering how do you defeat sniping Mac-10-wielding sicarios? Well, you cheese the system.
The only way to actually play the game on that difficulty is by using your drone to “sync shots” from 200 or 300 meters out with your equally impossible AI teammates. You can sync up to three shots at a time (four if you partake in the sync with your teammates). You can tag guys that are in ridiculous places and somehow your AI teammates can still somehow tag them. As ridiculous as this sounds, if you level up your sync shot and drone’s distance capabilities, you can get through the more absurd Tier 1 moments with ease.
It makes the game 1000% more boring because you’re basically just sitting there, tagging enemies from 300 meters out and sync-shooting them three or four guys at a time. This is how I got through the remainder of the game with Tier 1 activated. It’s as banal, boring, and unengaging as it sounds. But otherwise you’re dealing with Terminator-tier AI who will one-shot you once they see you, and who will only go down by putting a full magazine into them.
In many ways, I felt like while I was playing Tomy Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands that if Ubisoft’s art team switched the aesthetics to a post-apocalyptic, dystopian Los Angeles and replaced the sicarios with titanium endoskeletons with phased plasma rifles in the 40-watt range, it would have made for a perfect Terminator game. Oh well.