Breaking the seal of Breakpoint.

Try before you buy

Colour me surprised that, for the past two days, I have been able to play the Ghost Recon:Breakpoint Closed Beta. I haven't even taken the liberty to pre-order the game (As I am usually uninclined to do so.) but I suppose Ubisoft took a look at my substantial playtime for the Wildlands and decided to throw me a bone. Whatever the reason, I have been able to delve into this intriguing title to get an idea of what to expect from the full game as well formulate an idea of what the post launch content might be. What I discovered pretty quickly is that this game is quite unlike the one before it in many substantial ways, let's take a look.

First, let me reiterate, 'Ghost Recon: Breakpoint' is a fundamentally different game to Wildlands in many aspects, except from with it's core stealth-based gameplay. As an incredibly huge fan of the stealth genre, as you would likely know if you spent any amount of time around this blog, this gameplay is basically catnip to me and can do no wrong. The only substantial difference I've noticed is a positive, enemy AI seems to be a whole lot more advanced than they were in Wildlands. Once you get spotted, you can expect the soldiers of this private military force, Sentinel, to hunt you down in groups and even use their special skills to get the better of you. I've had units flush me out with mortar fire before picking me off with a sniper. These guys could run circles around the Santa Blanca (But can they idle about singing the 'Santa Blanca' song all day? I think not.)

The differences come in the core makeup of the game and it's systems, and I find myself torn with my reception towards them. This is a game that is built from the ground up to be a 'live service' in every aspect, and that is always an approach to game design that will worry me. True, the first game had 'live service' elements, but they always felt like addendums to the main experience that focused more around luring people back with events, rather than tempting them not to leave with 'recurrency incentives'. On one hand, I know how exploitable these kind of systems have been in the past, whilst on the other hand, Ubisoft have never been the kind of developers who push the envelope in that regard, (Or indeed, in any regard.) so this appears to be a situation of wait and see.

I think that the most immediately noticeable difference between Wildlands and Breakpoint is the way that the latter treats it's weapons, what I like to call 'The mobilization of items.' In Breakpoint you don't just unlock a gun and that's it, you find several different copies of that same gun with differing stats that are linked to your level. (That's right. Ubisoft have found a way to add looter shooter mechanics to Ghost Recon.) Weapons and armour are assigned different rarity tiers (With higher rarity items offering extra buffs) and better items are given a 'tier value' so that players can instantly know what weapon is better without cross referencing stats and picking which value corresponds better with their play style.

Borderlands 3 has implemented a similar system but there it makes a little bit more sense, that game is imbued with millions of randomly generated weapons, so any system that makes picking through them easier would certainly be useful to some gamers. On the other hand, such systems have the effect of degrading weapons into little more than number values and robbing each of their unique properties. I find myself swapping a 50 cal sniper for a 308. simply due to a higher assigned number rather than the need for an increased fire rate, and that seems rather antithetical to the 'military fantasy' dynamic that Tom Clancy games are geared towards. This also means that there is another bloody video game crafting system, because god knows we don't have enough of those! 

The intention with these systems are clear, Ubisoft intend to create a system wherein you can continue to collect weapons and equipment to relative perpetuity, but that does detract from the casual atmosphere of Wildlands. In Wildlands, you could theoretically beat the entire game with starter gear and that made everything you collected along the way a bonus. In Breakpoint, I can already imagine a scenario in which you are forced to scavenge camps and the like to put together enough rare gear to stand up to a particularly powerful drone. This type of 'level gating' is exactly the kind of thing that people knocked the later Assassin's Creeds for.

Another 'live service' element that has me worried is the inclusion of a brand new Hub area called Erewhon. Like Zion, without all the sweaty dancing, Erewhon is a makeshift homestead for the survivors of Auroa to congregate. Whenever you find yourself here in the game, you'll also find the cave packed with other players going about their day. This makes the Hub feel similar to Destiny's Tower; a place where players can see each others skins but not actually interact. It feels like a pointless exercise in interconnectivity to make the player feel that the world is online when it really is instanced.

Inside of Erewhon, you will find the majority of quest givers, the lady who is holding down the fort until Raids launch, and a fellow who hosts the 'Ghost War' competitive multiplayer content. (Ghost War was unavailable for the Beta.) Alongside all of this, players will find a storefront from which they can buy skins, emotes, icons, banners, weapons (built from blueprints), and summonable vehicles. So far, everything I have seen has been of reasonable price and is only purchasable through in game currency, but I find myself wondering how long that will be the case. I noticed how the start menu already has a tab for a store, although right now it only contains a link to pre-order the game, I wonder how bad the microtransactions will end up being.

 But I won't pretend that everything is doom and gloom, what I have seen of the game so far (although sans monetisation) appears to be fun enough. Weapon customisation is back and appears to be as robust as ever and character customisation is still... adequate. They still give as the 'Choose a face' mechanic which automatic ties skin colour to the face chosen. (Which is just great when you happen to be mix race with differing facial features.) but the choice to apply face paint now means that I can just hide my face anyway, so no harm no foul.

I'm also a big fan of the new enemy types that promise to mix up gameplay, hopefully without making every encounter unbearable nearer to the end. (Al a 'Fallen Ghosts') We have Snipers, who seem deadlier than they were in wildlands; Heavies, who's ballistic armour makes them impervious to a single headshot; radio troops, who call in backup; and rocket launcher folk, who are pretty self explanatory. Then there are also the drone troops who make up a big part of the storyline. So far I have seen the patrol drones who can spot you from far away and simply call for soldiers to come find you; the Succubus drones, who hunt with SMG's and are the preferred battle mates of the Wolves; and the large deadly tanks who's spongey health bar feel more akin to something out of 'The Division' than 'Ghost Recon'.

In order to fight these new specialisations, the player is equipped with brand new selectable classes that each have their own inherent power. I focused mainly on the Panther in my playthrough, ensuring that I saw the versatility of the class, and I found the classes interesting enough. The Panther has the ability to spray themselves with an anti-drone masking spray and also use their ultimate to deploy a disorienting smoke screen that can hide the player mid-combat. I think that the full breadth of their abilities will be more useful in dedicated groups, or during raids, but maybe I just picked a class without a super active skillset. There are also classes with skills that revolve around medics, sharpshooters and demolition playstyles.

As a Panther, I had several passives (using the all new 'web' skill tree) that allowed for greater stealth movement and actions. As well as class level up incentives that encouraged me to favour close range takedowns and uses of my smokescreen. This was helpful in encouraging me to learn the uses of my skill and get familiar with the situation in which it would be applicable. Maybe if this incentive system is successful, it will mean that casual players will have a better understanding of how to use their class. It could make playing online with randoms actually feasible, which is great for people who lack actual friends to play with. (Like me.)

Ubisoft also went out of their way to ensure that the player is never without missions to pursue, with another system built and designed around the 'live service model'. On their mission board, players have separate divisions for story missions and faction missions. Players of Wildlands will be familiar with the 'headshots' layout of the story tab, but the 'faction mission' is wholly new. It is a collection of daily mission that encourage players to explore all over the landmass and infiltrate enemy strongholds with the intention of pulling off small tasks. This solves Wildland's problem, of bases that were only useful for one mission, then forgotten, by reusing these spaces for new dailies for the rest of time. Players are also incentivised to pursue these missions with the promise of seasonal tiered 'Battle Rewards' that are unlocked only through earning faction mission tokens.

With all of these systems happening at once, you might be wondering how Breakpoint manages to fit them all onscreen in a concise and elegant manner. Well, they don't. On the Beta build that I played, the UI was an unreserved mess of menu's, pins and status bars. I'm usually immune to the whole 'overwhelmed' sensation that people complain about with open world games (Unless we're talking about Korean MMOs) but with Breakpoint I was hit with that helplessness at first. It was only through dedication that I got everything to make sense, and even now I still think that the UI is a cluster. Seems the team agreed to some extent, as they included a prompt to hide all the HUD elements so that you can see what is in front of you.

Also, I know it's a low blow to talk about the stability of a beta, but the game is coming out very soon so I must express that I am worried about the bugginess of the game. There have been several times when I have crashed or been kicked from the game due to server difficulties, especially in the Hub area. And I have had to relog to solve some visual bugs on my character and the inability to see the offers in the newly implemented store front. Most distressing of all, however, was when I turned off the game at one point and came back to find that they had lost several hours of my progress. Again, in a Beta this isn't too much of a problem, but I worry that we are too close to launch to fix this many bugs. I'm sure that we were all playing an obsolete build, but I wonder just how obsolete.

I've already written an article detailing who Breakpoint is my 'Jam', and playing the thing has just cemented it's future place in my games library. However, the presentation has left me worried enough to the point where I won't be picking her up week one. The game itself plays like the best in the series, but I'm familiar enough with greedy corporation to recognise the bones of invasive monetisation when it is apparent. Consider me cautiously optimistic, with an extra side of caution, when it comes to Breakpoint. I just hope the title can prove me wrong.  

P.s. No, I don't have cornrows in real life. This was just the closest hairstyle to my own the game had availble.