Ubisoft gameplay trailers scare me. After Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Watch Dogs, and The Division showed the company’s propensity for exaggerating a game’s visuals and gameplay, I take anything I see in their trailers with a metric ton of salt. I went into their conference with this mindset, and Ubi tested me immediately with the gameplay demo for their first title, Ubisoft Paris’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands.
The premise for the game is actually pretty interesting. Ghost Recon: Wildlands puts players in the role of a covert operative in the Ghosts special operations unit. They are based deep in Bolivia, a country suddenly beset by narcotics trafficking. The Santa Blanca cartel is working with the corrupt Bolivian government, and your outfit is tasked with ruining their alliance.
The game is open world and has players complete missions meant to cripple the cartel and its operations. In true open-world style, there are 10 districts that players must “liberate”. In this game’s case, the liberation involves taking down cartel lieutenants. The overall aim is to smoke out El Sueño, the cartel’s leader, The missions are all handled by a group of four Ghosts, and they can be done either single-player, with AI teammates helping out, or with friends. The co-op is drop-in/drop-out, which is great.
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The gameplay shown in the trailer is not bad at all. The visuals, if they’re to be taken at face value, are good, and the tactical aspects of the gameplay are sweet. Your team can tackle missions in a variety of ways, and a drone was used at one point during the demo to spot targets and determine the best course of action. The game has a The Division feel to it
Still, with Ubisoft’s penchant for visually downgrading release versions of games shown at E3, I wonder how much of this game is genuine. The suspiciously scripted player audio – another Ubisoft trademark – didn’t help my suspicions. I’d like to think that Ubisoft has left those practices behind after all the backlash they’ve received…but I remain skeptical. Hopefully, they prove me wrong.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands will be available on March 2017 for Xbox One, Playstation 4, and Windows 10.
