I think I figured this out–this isn’t really a Ghost Recon game, it’s actually Far Cry 6!
I mean, the setting is sort of a spiritual successor to the tropical island of the original Far Cry. Substitute Cold War for WWII, and you have the same sort of ruins and bunkers. You’re mostly solo, the bad guys are sort of wonky and “wtf?” in motivations and stuff, and instead of genetic research you have AI and robotics!
Ugh so I can’t play this for more than 5 minutes without getting disconnected from playing my single player campaign. Oh well, it was only a 1 month sub.
That sucks.
The thing I rather like about this is how they’ve massaged the mission system. I think this is new - In Odyssey you would get multistage clues like: It’s in Ithaca / south of a big mountain / underwater.
In Breakpoint they’ve adjusted the bits of ‘Intel’ you find around bases, or that can be extracted from helpful or interrogated NPCs, to provide the various parts of these clues. So you hack a laptop to get a clue, then steal a picture from somone’s phone for another, and get the last one from an NPC. It makes hunting for stuff much more worthwhile, compared to finding the location of another suppressor or whatever in Wildlands. Though there are plenty of those too.
I think it’s a very nice marrying of the Exploration mode from Odyssey and Intel vacuuming of Wildlands. If it’s not new I missed it in their other games, but it’s a good addition to the single player experience in particular.
I haven’t had any disconnects yet, though logging in often takes several times banging on the space bar and ESC key to get it to work.
As to the quests, I agree, the exploration mode is very cool. When it works. I’ve had more than one quest totally but out, where the game will not advance to the next step after you complete a previous step. It might be that it wants you to do them only in a certain order, and you didn’t, or it might be…dunno what, but I’ve had to redo several quests this way. Sometimes logging out and back in resets it, other times, not.
There are tons of visual bugs too, none of which really hurt anything, but some are pretty funny. In one quest where you have to adjust an antenna, as it rotates the game doesn’t actually rotate the antenna, but adds a second antenna superimposed on top of the first, and rotates it. So, you see these two antennae intersecting each other in some bizarre robotic mating ritual. Quite funny…except that’s the quest (“Power Failure”) that bugged on me after moving the antenna, the last step of three or so I thought. The game refused to acknowledge that it had happened.
Luckily, fighting is fun and you keep getting loot which scales with you, so redoing stuff usually isn’t too bad.
On the matter of loot…is there any use at all for the materials you get from deconstructing clothing/gear rather than guns? I have tons of “Advanced gear parts” or whatever but they don’t seem used anywhere? Also, plain old metal parts and standard weapon parts seem to be the bottlenecks for leveling up weapons. You get tons of purple and yellow weapons to deconstruct, but after a very short time in the game you no longer find standard (with no color marker, or gray gear as we’d say in other games) weapons and getting standard weapon parts requires weird stuff like harvesting drone carcasses.
I don’t know how any of the equipment stuff works. I’ll be steering clear until there’s a ‘dismantle all’ button :)
Well, it does accumulate weight, though I don’t think I’ve seen my encumbrance go higher than like 30/300 or something. The lack of a deconstruct all button is annoying, but I guess they don’t want you to accidentally do it to a prized weapon or something.
One thing to remember is that any improvements you make to a weapon using the Gunsmith apply to all subsequent versions of that specific weapon. So, if you mod an AUG up to Mark 3, and find a higher-gear level AUG later, it too will be Mark 3. So don’t save the materials, just upgrade stuff you are likely to use.
Errr, sorry Ubisoft. I actually upgraded the firmware in my router for the first time in a couple of years and now Breakpoint plays fine.
Single Player should not still require an online connection though!
Angry Joe video is up, 30 minutes!
I can’t play this game anymore. I’m done. I think I really hate it.
Oddly, the fact that there are no AI guys or radio station to break the silence is a big issue for me. I didn’t like the chatty repetitive quips from the team in Wildlands all the time, but there has to be a happy medium between that and this.
Beyond that, the brain-dead enemy AI, the pointless loot, and the dumb drone combat, the garbage investigations, the awful quest dialogue, and the disconnections have really put me off. It’s so bad.
I think I played Wildlands for about 80 hours.
I definitely hear you, but I have come to a very different conclusion. For me, of course; no criticism of anyone else’s experience intended.
I have about 45 hours into this game so far. I’m still loving it. I like being solo–as I’ve noted before, to me, it’s a Far Cry game in many respects and I like that. I agree the AI can be, um, lacking, shall we say; stealth assaults with killer drones and suppressed sniper rifles are trivial, to the point that I tend to deliberately spook the bad guys so I can get a straight up fight once in a while. I do find that sometimes they can do ok, but usually I can sit in a hallway and stack up bodies that come running to the door to be machine gunned.But, and this is key, that’s ok by me, because I’m not in this for challenging, realistic ground combat. I’m in it for exactly what it’s delivering, semi-mindless but structured run and gun and loot gameplay in an interesting gameworld.
And I do find the gameworld interesting. The architecture, though often head-scratchingly inappropriate (yes, it’s an island in the South Pacific but, at high altitudes with alpine like biomes, building your houses in the same loose slipshod way you do on the tropical coast is just dumb), is often enough intriguing. Yes, there is a lot of repeating of modules, but overall it’s cool to tool around in, and I love the old “Cold War” (really, WWII-esque) forts and bunkers.
The missions are confusing sometimes, and buggy, but some of the storylines, if utterly unbelievable, are interesting enough to me. I hate, hate, hate the stupidity of the NPC civilians, and the fact that you can eviscerate a half-dozen Sentinel goons in front of some dude at a terminal and after he cowers for a sec he’ll just hop back in his chair and resume typing away amid the carnage.
Loot I agree is uber-meh, but that’s the Division creeping in. One of the issues I have is that I have no idea whether gear score means anything or not. Does it affect any stats? Damage? Armor? What? At GS 50 or less I was killing GS 150 drones (with a lot of kiting, to be sure). Given the fact that you can buy nearly everything you want with the ubiquitous Skell bucks, finding gear is mostly for crafting parts (though I have yet to find a use for the deconstructed clothing pieces).
So, yeah, it’s deeply flawed, and objectively not a good game taken as a complete work. No argument there. But damn it I enjoy it a lot. Gunplay is satisfying, discovery and exploration is good, and a few of the story beats are even passable.
More I read about this game, the more I think I’ll wait until it’s on sale.
I got it via the Uplay+ thing. I figure, fifteen bucks a month for maybe a month or two and then I can cancel if I want to.
That being said, I have been having a ton of fun, more than with Wildlands. I really did not like the three AI teammates in Wildlands, as I thought they were both annoying and mostly useless. The sync drones in Breakpoint do pretty much the same thing in terms of sync shots, and they neither talk nor wander into crossfires.
For me this reminds me of Rage 2. A game I was really looking forward to. A game that did not really live up to expectations. But, a game I will jump on and play occasionally as it’s fairly enjoyable.
Now, crossing my fingers for Outer Worlds.
Ok, even though I’m pretty laid back when it comes to consistency, story, and plausibility in these sorts of games, there is one thing that does bug me, and that’s when games don’t recognize when the player has done something that fundamentally affects the game world. Here, the sin is pretty egregious. (Don’t read if you have any interest in the stupid plot).
I killed Cole Walker, that psycho-Ranger spec ops gone rogue asshole who is like the baddest of bad asses in the game supposedly. Killed him at GS 150 like I was supposed to. But that was, what, twenty? thirty? hours of gameplay ago? I’m still getting quest info and videos and stuff featuring this idiot, as if he’s still alive pulling strings and working through his evil plans, even though his corpse should be rotting and sprouting worms by now. Maybe the designers thought the player would wait til the end to kill the bad guy? Maybe they had a specific order in which they thought you should do your quests? If so, they sort of failed to tell me. It’s even worse because, according to something I saw online, you can actually kill Walker at the very beginning of the game by cheesing a few things. None of this really matters, but it’s fucking annoying that I can’t tell this dude who is bitching about how evil Walker is that I filled his ass full of 7.62mm suppositories.
Other than that, I am still having a blast shooting bad guys and stuff. But Outer Worlds is out tomorrow, so…
Oops.
The Company has revised downwards its targets for fiscal 2019-20 and now expects net bookings of approximately €1,450 million and non-IFRS operating income of between €20 million and €50 million (compared with the previous targets of net bookings of around €2,185 million and non-IFRS operating income of around €480 million).
These adjustments reflect:
- A sharp downward revision in the revenues expected from Ghost Recon Breakpoint ® and, to a lesser extent, The Division ® 2.
For Ghost Recon Breakpoint, while the game’s quality appeared on track – based on E3, Gamescom, previews and our latest internal playtests –, critical reception and sales during the game’s first weeks were very disappointing. As we have done with past titles, we will continue to support the game and listen to the community in order to deliver the necessary improvements.
First, it is harder to generate interest for a sequel to a Live multiplayer game, when prior iterations benefited from years of optimization. Consequently, we need to make sure there is more time between each iteration of Live games.
Second, our strategy of introducing gameplay innovations in our games has had a very positive impact on our brands. However, to win over players, these innovations need to be perfectly implemented in order to offer an optimal experience. This has not yet been sufficiently the case with Ghost Recon Breakpoint. While the change of formula has been very well received by some players, with an average daily playtime per player of over three hours, it also has been strongly rejected by a significant portion of the community.
Finally, Ghost Recon Breakpoint did not come in with enough differentiation factors, which prevented the game’s intrinsic qualities from standing out.
Since those reasons are completely wrong or inaccurate at best, we can conclude that Ubisoft learned nothing from this failure, and that future games will have the same issues.
“Gameplay innovations” = Microtransactions in a game that had a $120 digital Ultimate edition.
The opening minute of this is all you need to watch
I think we’re the only people playing and I’m not going to read your spoiler :)
The UI/mission log does such a bad job of conveying how missions roll up into the overall goal that I’m not that sure what the overall plot is :/ But I can click on a picture of Paula Madera so that’s good.
Yeah, the whole objectives page is a hot mess. From not being able to zoom it with the wheel (a flaw shared with the skills page) to simply being organized by some logic known only to Ubisoft, it’s nearly unusable.