I dunno, this seems about right. Not sure how they’re going to “fix” it though–publishers do love their franchises and sequels.
And also, yes, the UI is terrible. Unsure if they’re including that in the “intrinsic qualities” category.
And they’re delaying upcoming games, including Watchdogs Legion, to make them suck less. Which does sound like a positive.
This is a bit disingenuous. Yes, there are situations where the AI is pretty bad, but the majority of the time it’s nowhere near that bad, and the player in that video is obviously making no effort do do anything but keep the bad guy spinning in circles. I dare say you can exploit a lot of systems in a lot of games to make them do odd things if you really want to. In normal play, something like that either doesn’t happen or if it does, you just plug the guy and move on. Most of the time the AI, while somewhat unobservant, does a decent job of actually shooting you.
That being said, there is something odd about the AI’s awareness, in that it seems to be triggered by very specific things only. I’ve been in small rooms with a bad guy hiding behind a pillar who simply would not notice me unless I walked right into a very specific spot, and only that spot.
In other words, Ubisoft’s games have once again become too much of an amorphous blob of shared design and mechanics across half a dozen open-world franchises. Sounds about right to me.
I was actually interested in Breakpoint when it was first unveiled, because it seemed like a slower, more deliberate, “survival-y” game than Wildlands was. Everything they showed after that just made it seem like third person Far Cry with The Division mechanics slapped into it, and I stopped caring.
I think that without the adventure-sightseeing aspect of South America to frame it, Breakpoint just seems a generic playground without any real stakes, antagonists or villains, victims or heroes.
If you take the gameplay of Breakpoint but slap it into North Korea or Russia or Somalia or some place interesting I would bet it would have been better received.
I don’t think that’s true. Fake New Zealand taken over by tech utopians is a perfectly good setting IMO. Maybe Clancy fans have certain expectations. Far Crys 1 and 3 were also on Pacific Islands though.
A bigger environmental issue is the constant groups of 2-3 men standing next to motorbikes across the wilderness. They should have sent some of the art budget to the encounter design dept.
Yes, the game has problems, no doubt. But the setting isn’t one of them. I would have to agree with Alistair, here; the New Zealand type setting is fine, and the concept is well within the techno-thriller orbit, especially as you get into the game and unearth some of the main plot lines. I mean, they’re hokey AF, and kinda dumb, but no dumber than Wildlands’ crap.
It is, though, a third-person Far Cry with Division stuff slapped on. No doubt about it. I happen to, um, enjoy that mashup though, warts and all.
The guys standing around motorbikes is super dumb, I agree, and if I tally up how many Sentinel goons I’ve killed, I am thinking it would total like a brigade’s worth of cannon fodder. Sentinel must have really deep pockets.
The loot shooter bit turns me off completely, so this is a hard pass from me.
That stuff is pretty ignorable as far as my 30 hours or so suggests to me. All they need to do is add an ‘Autojunk stuff that isn’t best in class’ toggle and it would be invisible.
Presumably there’ll be a trial version at some point too, given Wildlands the Division had those.
How are you defining loot shooter, or, rather, what aspects of looting weapons in a shooter puts you off? Admittedly, the vast, vast majority of weapons you loot are, after the first hour, totally useless except as parts bins, but that’s pretty much the extent of it. Most of the things you take in the world are info/lore bits, and the res are weapons/parts or clothing bits. There’s a fair amount of cosmetic crap you can go for, but it’s all easily ignored. I don’t even understand why they have a parallel currency system (that you can buy into for real money) because the only things they sell are the same things you get in the game extremely easily.
The constant drop of loot breaks the immersion. Aren’t the Ghosts some kind of elite war fighting unit? Do they have time to look at the lastest knee pad they just looted??? I can tolerate certain amount of abstraction but based on the gameplay videos I watched, it is a bridge too far for me.
After 35 hours (according to Uplay) I’m on the last mission of the main plot. It’s a bit of a shift from the rest of the game in that you’re in a boss fight scenario. Otherwise, the game behaved as it should. Even the daunting 150 level enemies are 1-shot kills.
I didn’t spend a dime on micro-transactions, didn’t even look at them. Well, after I collected some crazy high amount of Skell dollars in game that I just let pile up and ignored, I bought a ccouple of helicopters that I could spawn at Bivoucs. However a basic copter is available for free, and I really almost never used the armed copters.
I enjoyed a lot of the unique environments where I had to plan out how to tackle a base or extract a witness. The game is certainly repetitive, but no more so than Wildlands, which I loved for the same reasons.
For all the complaining about drones, they don’t come into play that often, and aren’t typically tougher to deal with than human enemies as long as you plan ahead.
If you enjoyed Wildlands there’s a decent chance you’ll feel the same way about Breakpoint. I will say that as much as I enjoyed Breakpoint, it really added nothing to Wildlands. It could’ve been an expansion. Worked for me.
I can see that, I suppose. Though here you’re a survivor of a disastrous mission failure and presumably are having to loot your supplies given that your whole unit got mostly wiped out. By default, you are a lone survivor trying to McGyver your way through this place to solve the mystery and get off the island, etc.
You can actually turn off loot notifications.
Here’s a hat that’s level 35! And this gun is purple! If you love loot shooters this makes you tingle, if not it totally breaks all immersion.
Oh, no doubt, though I am struggling to remember the last “realistic”-style shooter I played that was particularly immersive, given that most of them for a decade or so have been wildly unrealistic and wonky. The exceptions are the hard-core “sim” style games I guess, but the narrative-driven franchises haven’t been immersive in a “don’t through in obviously gameified stuff” way for eons.
In line with this vision and the feedback we received, we are working on a more radical and immersive version of Ghost Recon Breakpoint. We also want to let you tailor your experience to the way you want to enjoy the game…
I’m having a great time with what they shipped tbh.
Normally I’m impressed that Ubisoft always wants to double down and improve all their games even when they’re not successful at launch. This time it irritates me for some reason. I haven’t played it, so maybe I’m completely off-base here, but I feel like they should be spending those resources in other places.
Just got an email from Ubisoft, this game is now 30% off this weekend.