You still need to level up to get skill points and unlock abilities and perks. Without those, going up against the Wolves and Walker will be dicey. Doable, in many cases, but very dicey with no room for error.
As for guns, if you want to pick up guns and disassemble them, you have to turn gear score on AFAIK. With the immersion mode on, you loot gun parts from various places but you can’t disassemble weapons. And no, you will not find anything necessarily “better” than what you start with, only different and possibly more suited to your play style. If you want any gear progression you have to either turn off immersive mode or just edit your preferences to include that. You can mix and match all sorts of things, so you could have limited load outs (two weapons), realistic ammo (ammo in a magazine when you reload is lost), but still have gear score, etc.
When it was just 3 or 4 Wolves in the woods, we could handle that. I’m handy enough with a sniper rifle that I can scoot and shoot pretty well, especially if they are focused on my assault rifle-centric brother/coop partner. The drones that seem to randomly come after us when we fight a group are pretty tough to deal with this early in the game though. And yeah, it appears at this point in the game we can’t run far enough away once that spotter plane marks us. Didn’t occur to me to use the Prone Camo mode , was trying to find water deep enough to hide in.
I think after playing months of Division 2, we’re good with having gear score off and not chasing the carrot of a level 32 MK14 vs a level 30 MK14. I assume we’ll figure out our strength and if we’re getting stronger by how we’re actually doing in the field, plus whatever perks and skills we gain over time. We didn’t turn on immersion mode (yet) just turned off the gear score.
Oh - another puzzler. PS4 fwiw. There are times I press down arrow and I turn on both the minimap and the pinned missions in the upper left corner. Then I can press it again and the pinned missions (which take up a lot of the screen) disappear and the minimap stays, another press and it disappears. Other times I can only bring both up or turn both off with the same key presses. What am i doing differently when I manage to turn off only the pinned mission notes?
OK, after playing a couple of nights coop with my brother, I have to say we’re really enjoying this. We played Division 2 for months on end and really wrung everything we could out of it. And enjoyed it. But we’re enjoying the more “real” feel of this one, and the need for strategy and tactics. Also the more varied terrain. We’re playing in pure sandbox mode, not worrying about the “story” other than it being missions to take on. We just cleared the pier to get the Tac 50 sniper blueprint, and it took time, and adjusting out approach throughout the mission. Taking out as many as we could from across the water with sniper rifles, avoiding being seen by the occasional chopper flying over (which creates some real “oh crap” moments) carefully finding positions to take out bad guys throughout the compound. when spotted picking positions to cover each other and force the bad guys into our fire lanes, etc. Mainly sniper with assault rifles when the come at us. Really taking our time the way two guys would trying to clear a compound of bad guys. We’d gotten to the point in Division 2 when we just blew through missions with no stealth at all. And enjoyable to be vulnerable again. We rarely died unless we did something really stupid in Division 2. We still get killed mainly by getting careless in GR:B but also when taking on guys above our current skill levels (only two nights in) and when overwhelmed when spotted by the plane/drone going overhead.
The interface sucks more than any game I can remember in a LONG time. We’re not in pure immersive mode but like the way you can toggle options on or off; we turned off gear score and like the more “realistic” feel of a AK47 being an AK47, vs. a level 10 AK47 being a lot less capable than a level 30 (or whatever) AK47 - a weapon should be what a weapon can be.Also enjoying how much larger the map is than Div2 and the wide variety of facilities, buildings, etc.
So - really enjoying this for coop sandbox play. It’s a really nice very open world sandbox. Which is what we were looking for. Not a “perfect” game in any way and we could pick a lot of nits. But it feels a lot less like a comic book than Division 2 (and we really enjoyed our hundreds of hours together in Div 2.) And so far, the missions don’t feel as “contrived” as Division 2 with artificial ways to make them more difficult (did anyone actually enjoy the Keener mission in the Manhunt at the statue of liberty?)
One mission we’ve actually failed a number of times is trying to rescue the hostages in the compound where a couple are being held out on a pier like structure over the water. We get really close then get a little careless at the end and once you get spotted it’s mission over and you have to start over again. But it feels fair. In no way have we been spotted in some “cheap” way.
When I died in that hostage mission (the first time) it decided instead of wanting to climb down a ladder that I wanted to base jump straight into the ground below :/
Been there, done that! The spacebar is the key for both climbing the ladder and deploying the parachute, at least it is on my system, so this happens more often than I’d like.
I’ve discovered that you need quite a bit of drop time to deploy the chute. I’ve died both times I tried to use it (jumping off a cliff and a high tower.)
I have some two hours in it so far, just starting out, and there are things I really like about it over Wildlands - it seems more immersion focused, with some new survival mechanics, the storytelling seems more cinematic and less generic, the atmosphere seems strong and I just dig the “behind enemy lines” vibe of it.
I still don’t get though why I cannot holster my gun outside Erehwon when inside it is holstered, so the animations exist already…dumb.
Graphics seems better in some ways and worse in others, the world does not seem to be as gloriously beautiful as Bolivia was so far and it seems blurrier somehow, even with that sharpening at max and downsampling from 3K.
The interface seems super weird and like a huge mess of all kinds of menus. I am sure I will get used to it, but damn. Just the objectives tab is quite something. I have no idea how the “episodes” work, I guess Episode 2 is the DLC stuff? I already seem to have access to it. And then there is something something Titan, those investigations, some sidequests…
I like that I can customize the AI teammates (immediately turned one guy into a woman so I can have to guy two girl team) but I guess they are not voiced in anyway? And I hoped there would be a mission to find them or something, a missed opportunity.
Anyway I think I will enjoy this a lot. Possibly more than Wildlands if the enhanced story focus and less generic missions last.
The AI teammates do have voices, though they don’t say much beyond reminding you ad nauseum to put on your silencer if you want to be quiet, or to announce the presence of bad guys you’ve already seen (or been shot at by). They are, though, pretty capable, and don’t seem to blow your stealth at all, at least, not just by being seen.
There is a lot of cool gameplay here, for sure. A lot of locations that give you a choice of entry, like a island you can reach by swimming, finding a boat, parachuting in, flying in, etc.
I am in Act 3, where the story is branching finally. One thing I will give it over Wildlands is the performance. Vulkan is a distinct improvement over Directx 11.
15 hours in, I am really liking it, significantly more so than Wildlands. Like on surface it is near identical, but there are changes here that make it much more engaging to me, specifically the sidemissions being less generic and more like RPG sidequests, more cinematic take on dialogues even with occasional choice, more survival elements with the injury system, eating and drinking, the non-guided approach to finding mission targets…
Graphically I finally found out why it looked so blurry, it was caused by the “temporal injection” nonsense which is like a bad parody of DLSS, makes the graphics blur ugly presumably because it causes rendering in lower res and then somehow upscaling it, but does it very badly. Disabling it lowered my framerate by like 20, but the picture is clean and sharp now and I still keep 60fps vsynced. And yeah Vulkan is awesome compared to DX11 even in this game.
There are some fairly cosmetic issues I have with the game, like the walking animation being really strangely disconnecting from the ground (it looks like Nomad is sliding a bit when walking slowly) or tiny delay in lipsync animation is annoyingly distracting…but overall, enjoying it a lot.
Any idea how to address the fog / whitewash effect? In GR:Wildlands it was a setting related to sun rays that fixed it. GR:Breakpoint doesn’t have such setting.
E - The “fog background blur” setting doesn’t seem to do anything.
One thing about the helicopters I dislike is how you can’t look around while heading in one direction. That’s not how vehicles work and it stops you admiring the landscape.
I enjoyed my time in Breakpoint, but I think it’s coming to an end. Every problem in the game can be solved by a single sniper. The AI teammates were fun, but they’re so overpowered, I can let them off the leash and they will finish just about every mission without my intervention.
The sandbox gameplay with friends is fun, but devolves into GTA MilSim after an hour or so.
Was super fun for a bit, but I’m struggling to really get much more gameplay after 10 or so hours.
Yeah, about all you can do is use “Alt” to look behind you or hit F4 to go into photo mode and look around while things are paused.
In many ways, yeah, but snipers are overpowered in most games that have such a thing it seems. What hurts here is that as long as the bad guys don’t actually see you (or if they see you you don’t kill them before they can alert others), no one really goes after you. Once in a while they will send some folks out to search, but if they haven’t laid eyes on you you can snipe them all day and provoke little more than an increase in alert level (yellow exclamation points).
And why not, while Snake in all his incarnations seems to be in a permanent retirement (thanks Konami), Breakpoint serves like a pretty good MGS5 simulator in the meantime, eventhough it lacks batshit crazy story and cutscenes…at least so far (I am focusing on sidemissions for now)
I really like the volumetric fog and light shafts, very reminiscent of RDR2.
The story never goes into MGS territory, just the goofiness you’d expect from an Ubisoft studio. It’s not a bad story in outline form, though the details are hella unbelievable. I mean, the PMC you are fighting loses more helos in one engagement with rebels and your team than some national military forces have in their entire TO&E!
