If Disney World had a shooter, it would be Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Then maybe you were playing on a different difficulty or something, because that was absolutely my experience of Halo and Halo: Reach.

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.

Nice open-world engine though.

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.

-Tom

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.

Image is not related.

Man, Tom, with the whole Disneyland introduction I really thought you were going to go all hyper reality Umberto Eco on us!

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.

Also, “Baby makes three!”

This is such a dangerous thing to do. So maybe lots of people buy to play with friends, but maybe the opposite - everyone realizes that without a player pool the game is awful so they don’t buy expecting few will be playing in a couple months. I hate it when games depend on the “community” because more often then not two things happens. The above, or what is there is a toxic unhelpful cesspool. If you don’t have a great single player experience you literally flushed $60 down the toilet.

I think its a perfectly good , indeed, very good, single player game.

Just noting the viewpoint that the single player is sub par is not universally shared.

I’m pretty sure that there are almost zero viewpoints on anything that are universally shared. :)

But, yes, there’s plenty to like in the single-player! It’s certainly been my preferred mode of play, despite the fact that the multiplayer is more “fun”. In fact, I’d go so far as to say if I was judging this as just a flight sim, I’d be pretty bowled over. Horrible flight controls notwithstanding. For me, Ghost Recon: Wildlands is most impressive when you just get in a helicopter and fly off in some random direction.

Dude.

-Tom

I agree, the world is where it really shines. Heli controls are poor for sure. But yesterday I took a ferrari for a spin around some new areas. Some of those vistas are lovely.

Wow, how odd that both The Division and Wildlands have these remarkable worlds, but the game design itself is janky and all over the place.

If you’ve been following AAA gaming in the last however many years, this seems to apply to just about everything. Developers make great worlds to explore. The games with great mechanics or story are the exceptions.

The original Rainbow Six (1998). Two weapons. One primary, one secondary.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, but if you’re seriously arguing that Rainbow Six was the game that popularized the two weapon limit, rather than Halo…I don’t think that argument holds water.

No, I’m saying that claiming that a Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon game has two weapons because of Halo is not a credible claim, given that the the Red Storm tactical shooters were doing that before Halo existed.

I think Halo is much more likely to be the inspiration at this stage in the series’ life since neither franchise has that much in common with their roots anymore and Wildlands in particular is clearly being pitched at a mass market that would be much more familiar with Halo than the original Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon either one, but it doesn’t really matter to my point.

(Apparently in GRAW 2 you could have a third weapon, at least based on a FAQ I saw)

And baby makes three:
“that does does [sic] very little”
“use that useless submachine guns [sic]”
“A llamas [sic]”