Ghost Recon Wildlands is what it would be like if Disney World had a section called Shootland. A swathe of geography dedicated to the theme of shooting guns, expensive looking, consisting of simple and contrived thrills interspersed with waiting in line, built to impress in a compressed burst rather than entertain over the long run. Great place to visit, sure.
But not much of a game.
That’s heard during a mission infiltrating a basecamp near the train tracks. It’s gorgeous, and the trains speeding through the mountains are another beautifully rendered spectacle in GRW. It’s daylight, and storming.
One of my AI team mates ambled too close to the tracks and was sideswiped by the speeding locomotive. As the long caravan of railcars continued to pass, another AI squad member tried to revive our downed mate, and he too got rocked by the train. You can imagine what happened to the 3rd AI dude.
I pretty much left them until I cleared the camp.
I do enjoy the amazing landscape and weather in GRW. The co-op is a blast, as most co-op is, due to friends more than the game. Tom is pretty much on target with his review. I ll continue to spend time in the game, but it’d be nice if I cared about how or why I completed the missions.
So brilliantly explains why I disliked such system in about any game.
Anyway, I take away from reading Tom’s article that it seems the game fell prey to the (usual?) internal company conflicts and some accute executive redesigning! ← wrote that before reading the last third, so I guess his article conveys very well that view ;)
I super despise the two weapon limit every modern shooter seems to have inherited from Halo. It’s apparently meant to make you make tactical choices in your weaponry but really it just means you’ll never use any of the more specialized (and thus interesting) guns outside of the game explicitly shoving a situation at you, because you’re always better off with general purpose guns with plenty of ammo drops lying around. So if Wildlands had actually just let you use all your guns I’d applaud that choice. But having to fiddle around in your inventory swapping them into your two weapon slots every time sounds like the worst of both worlds.
If I’m reading this right, and I probably am not, the game only hit two stars because it offers beautiful vistas and a gorgeous open world. Make it more cramped and uglier and it’s 1 star? i have not seen too many kind comments about the gameplay anywhere. Basically, typical Ubisoft factory produced game content, but kudos to the world designers. So I actually thought Tom was rather nice to it.
Spot on review Tom. While Wildlands is a pleasant enough place to while away some time clearing out a mission or a camp or two, it feels flat. It lacks the impact of Just Cause’s pyrotechnics rendering the world inert, and there’s little sense of threat or real tension. I’m pretty certain I’d have gotten more bang for my bucks if I’d picked up Sniper Elite 4 instead.
I understand your complaint when the system isn’t implemented well. But I disagree strongly with your take on Halo. Since it’s easier to pick up an enemy’s weapon than to find ammo for whatever you’re carrying, Halo is specifically designed to encourage “[using] the more specialized and thus interesting guns.”
Sniper Elite 4 is soooo good!
This expresses why I gave it two stars (i.e. I didn’t like it) instead of one star (i.e. I hated it) better than the 2000 words I wrote. :)
Except that it isn’t. You constantly find ammo for the assault rifle, which is universally effective, and you can usually find a plasma pistol/rifle, and more or less frequently a needler, but there’s a good chunk of the arsenal that’s hard to come by and usually only viable in specific spots where they’ve deliberately dropped one. I mean I’m not going to argue against the idea that most of the other games that use the system do it worse, but it sucked even in Halo.
If you don’t believe me, you’re welcome to replay the Halo games. There’s not a one that wasn’t intentionally designed so that you branched out from using the basic rifle. A foundation for this design goal was that you had to narrow your choice down to two weapons, that you weren’t carrying stocks of spare ammo for all guns, that enemies dropped whatever they were using, and that shields . I don’t recall playing a single Halo in which I “constantly” found rifle ammo. On the contrary, I recall long stretches of the game fighting aliens, using their weapons, as Bungie intended.
Everything in this game is designed to facilitate co-op. If you don’t have friends, it’s a really grindy boring klunky experience. Even with friends, it’s a mediocre shooter only made more engaging because you’re with your friends and 50% of the time will be spent laughing at each others’ cock-ups.
I am still diggin it. I just enjoy all the base attacking & cruising around. Stealth or frontal attack its all fun to me. Heck even the over the top fiction I enjoy for what it is, not least because the game doesnt force it down your throat. I like that as well.
Above all the game is kind to me, it lets me choose whether to watch movies, how to attack bases, how to complete the meta layer, how to get from a to b, what kind of load out will work (they all will). Its just kind to the player in so many ways. I appreciate that.
I wish it had been designed more to encourage co-op. There’s nothing in the game that rewards co-op beyond having to make your own fun. Isn’t that the designers’ job?
Well, sure, if you dialed the difficulty all the way down, it’s not surprising you thought the Halo series was playable with nothing but an assault rifle. But before you conclude that Bungie’s weapon design “sucks”, you might want to try the game as it was designed. Or maybe jump into multiplayer. There’s a reason plenty of shooters adopted the two-weapon loadout you’re railing against, and that reason isn’t because it “sucked” in Halo.
I wish I could point a finger on what is wrong with the game. Is like… you are playing a spy game with the Just Cause engine. Then you die, but is not hilarious because theres a 60 seconds cooldown, and thats too long for a joke. But at the same time, is very fun with people, but maybe is fun in the way unfinished sandbox games in early access are fun.
Maybe the key is what the review comment: some design decisions are lacking. Like a dog with only 3 legs.
No, it was because Halo sold a lot of copies and the industry is full of cargo cult design.
Also, while I may not have played on the upper difficulties (and I have never found the idea that bumping up the difficulty improves anything to hold true) I have watched other people play on them and it was still heavy on the ol’ assault rifle.
But even if you have to mix it up more than I am making out, it’s still turning weapon choice into something the level designer is largely making for you. I don’t think that’s a good design decision.
Anyway. Even if you for some reason like two-weapon limits, I hope we can agree that Wildlands’ system does not accomplish the ostensible goals of that particular design choice while making free access to all the guns unnecessarily cumbersome. Which was my original point.
It would be if Grand Theft Auto Online wasn’t sucking down millions of dollars a quarter. Wildlands is firmly from the school of design that dumps players into a janky sandbox, gives them a few repeatable activities that can be upended by wacky AI or physics, and tells them to have at it.
There’s a couple of things the game does right mechanically, but overall, the game can’t be bothered to commit to any kind of structure.
