We were wondering what was lurking on the skelltechnology.com website today (9 May 2019) and we found out as Ubisoft livestreamed the announcement of the next game in the Ghost Recon franchise tonight via Twitch; Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
I recorded the announcement but only got my microphone audio and unfortunately none of the audio from the actual livestream. So I’ve kept the second part of the recording with my thoughts, which you can watch in the video below and I’ve also written for you here. I’ve also included the announce trailer and the alpha gameplay walkthrough below.
Breakpoint takes place on Auroa, a fictitious archipelago owned by Jace Skell, and my first thought when watching was of Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising, which is also a military shooter set on a fictitious island in a similar scenario to this. But then watching the trailer, as Nomad approaches Auroa his helicopter is attached by drones which reminded me of Terminator as well (3 maybe).
Then we’re introduced to the antagonists (I think I mistakenly said “protagonists” in the video) who are The Wolves, and they look very reminiscent of the enemies in The Division 2. Anyone else? And the enemies in Breakpoint are now using more varied and reactive barks in this game compared to Wildlands, but again similar to what we hear in TD2. I think it’s good though, because hearing the same barks repeatedly gets stale, and what we heard in Wildlands was mainly in Spainsh.
This game looks from what we’ve seen today like it’ll be more intense than Wildlands was. Maybe it’s going to be a bit less realistic which concerns me mildly given that I really enjoyed Wildlands for its realistic setting, but we’ll see.
Release date
This is going to be released on 4 October 2019, which is so relatively close to Wildlands which was released on 7 March 2017. They said it’s been 7 years (2012) since they started on Wildlands with 30 devs, and now they have over 1000 developers working on this, so I guess it took them 5 years to get Wildlands done and this must’ve been developed off the back of the success of Wildlands, so maybe 2 years development on Breakpoint so far?
Then this alpha gameplay also reminded me of some of the details from Red Dead Redemption 2. I wouldn’t put it quite up there in terms of quality just yet but what we saw was still an alpha, now with what looked like more interaction with the environment and the way Nomad was moving, being shot, sliding down slopes and moved through the mud. That kind of stuff impressed me from Rockstar when I first rode into Valentine in RDR2, but let’s see how this gets polished up by launch for Breakpoint.
From the quality of the livestream and the fact we were seeing alpha gameplay I couldn’t tell the quality of the graphics, but there’s 4K quality in the videos linked below, and it did look good. We saw some nice graphics touches and I hope it’s been improved even more since Wildlands, which I thought looked good until I saw RDR2 and Rockstar knocked it out the park, but we’ll see.
New game dynamics
We were introduced to some new game dynamics such as prone camo, where Nomad was crawling through mud and was able to cover himself in said mud to remain unseen. When teammates are downed, we can now pick them up and move them before having to revive them which really helps. We can also move enemies out of sight when they’ve been downed, and that’s something I found annoying in Wildlands that it wasn’t possible to move enemy bodies Assassin’s Creed style.
Just going back to the premise of Auroa – which definitely does look like the Ghost Recon skull – playing on an open world island, it does naturally define a boundary for the map which is clever but I’m wondering how it’s going to work with all the environments they tell us will be in this game. Volcanos, snowy mountains, beaches, jungles and more, all in the same archipelago of islands? Assassin’s Creed Syndicate replicated London and was the largest open world map Ubisoft had created at the time, but Wildlands surpassed that. Will we hear that Breakpoint will now be the largest and that’s how they’ll explain how all these different environments will fit on some islands? We’ll see.
Rocket launchers and a variety of knives are some of the new weapons they’re introducing in this game and everyone likes a good mix of weapons, right? The gunsmith is back but now we’ll be able to do even more in there and attachments will have a bigger effect on the gun stats apparently.
AI have been improved, so enemies will now group together to find you, they’ll patrol the map constantly and I hope they’ve also improved since Wildlands because if you’re used to how they work you can manage them fairly easily.
We’re getting more vehicles, for air, land and sea which will be good. In terms of game modes, we’ll get solo, 4-player co-op and PvP at launch as well, which is an improvement on the delays Wildlands experienced with PvP which I think was eventually released in November 2017. Everyone’s forgotten about that now, right?
When moving between game modes, you will now keep your character, weapons and progression. DLC should be dropped every four months and we’ll be able to change character classes during the game starting with the four ghosts and they’ll release more classes later on.
So that’s pretty much what we know we can expect from Breakpoint for now. There’s going to be more information coming over the summer and you know I’ll be all over that.
They tell us they’ve listened to the community feedback from Wildlands to include loads of things ‘we’ want to see in the next game. It’s not Wildlands 2 but I’m not sure that matters. They’ve added in some of their own new dynamics as well as a metric shit tonne of our suggestions and it looks like it should work. Good job Ubisoft!
Finally, you can pre-order the game NOW, and also sign-up for the beta at the website https://ghost-recon.ubisoft.com yay!