After-Action Report: Ghost Recon Wildlands Open Beta

After running around for four days in Itacua and Montuyoc, I can claim that my missions to defeat elements of the Santa Blanca cartel were successful.  However, just as no battle plan survives the battle, there were some snags along the way which tempered the successes.

The Good

Visually speaking, Ghost Recon Wildlands is damned impressive even on a PS4.  It's definitely a big open world (even taking into account there were only two provinces accessible) and it certainly goes to some lengths to ensure you have the feeling of being in Bolivia.  Your gear looks quite authentic.  The clothes and color options for them are substantial, depending on whether you want to go for the "operator casual" look or serious SpecOps BDUs and Ghillie suit appearance.  Vehicles definitely look like you'd find them either in the boonies of Bolivia or right off the arms dealer's showroom floor.

As far as gun handling goes, it wasn't too bad.  Yes, there is bullet drop, but I was rarely in a situation where it was necessary to correct for drop (As an aside, the longest distance shot I made was 225 meters; there weren't any scopes available to let me pull off a shot further than that).  Sub-machineguns and pistols handled pretty well in close quarters.  I did not futz around with the sawed off shotgun, since I was trying to stay reasonably stealthy, and 12 gauge double ought buckshot does tend to attract attention.

Story missions had a fairly coherent plot that certainly gave me motivation to promptly service the targets presented to me.  Side missions were interesting for the most part, and while I might gnash my teeth at the random circumstances that let an Unidad attack helicopter come into the same general vicinity as my plane and shoot me down, the history of SpecOps is littered with little coincidences like that which completely screw an operation over.  The Demon Murphy is alive and well and vacationing in Bolivia.

The Bad

Vehicles may be plentiful in the game, but God help me, they handle like crap.  If you check the stats, it'll show that my favorite vehicle in the beta was the APC.  The only reason for that is because it was probably the most controllable vehicle in the game, and even it handled like a greased pig on ice once it got going fast enough.  And that's just the cars, trucks, and motorcycles in the game.

Whoever was responsible for the aircraft controls and physics needs to be taken out behind the studio and beaten to within an inch of their lives with rubber hoses.  I don't necessarily expect perfect flight simulation within a predominantly infantry focused game, but at least give me something that bears a passing resemblance to an accurate flight model.  That means being able to turn fixed wing aircraft using the rudder instead of half-assing a roll and crashing into a mountain upside down.  That means rotary aircraft actually move forward when properly pitched instead of having to fidget and fuss and hunt for just the right amount of pressure on the stick to get moving while being relatively level.

The Ugly

With AI squadmates like these, who the hell needs enemies?  When they work, they work fairly well.  The problem is that they don't work more often than not.  You might be perfectly lined up on enemy targets and your squaddies will be dicking around fifty meters or more to one side of you, trying to get a line on a target that you've marked for a Sync Shot.  Or when you're moving forward, advancing on a position, your squad is hanging back a hundred meters behind you, pointing out targets but not actually moving to engage them, or even offer up some sort of supporting fire.  Or, extra special joy, when you're advancing down a tunnel, you have to tell them to regroup on you to make sure you're not alone when half the entire cartel comes roaring up the tunnel because you've shot one guy.

To make matters worse, any sort of co-op play eliminates ALL AI squad members.  All or nothing, there is no in-between.  Which means that either you need to be playing with one absolutely badass human being, two fairly badass people, or three decent grunts if you can find any of them.  "But you can open up your game to other people!"  To hell with that.  If I open up a game and I'm saddled with morons who actually make the AI look good, I'm going to be losing a lot of interest in continuing.  Sometimes, you can't always find enough to make a full squad.  Sometimes, even one of your friends might not be enough to successfully carry out the mission in question.

Eli Whitney is probably rolling in his damned grave right about now.  The man who gave us interchangeable gun parts would have a complete fit at the way the Gunsmith system works.  Essentially, if you happen to pick up a gun that some narco dropped as a consequence of getting capped from two hundred meters out, you cannot do anything with that gun other than pick it up, shoot it dry, then find the nearest "ammo station" and go back to what you were carrying before.  The inability to pick up weapons, or at least tag them for retrieval by rebel forces, and modify them for your own purposes is utterly baffling.  I could understand if you need to take those weapons back to a central depot to unlock them for modification, but leaving them unable to be modified is idiotic, particularly when talking about AK and AR-type weapons.  Those are intended to be weapons systems, and even a halfway competent armorer can figure out how to expand and modify "stock" arms.  Even worse are the "boss" weapon drops when you take out the cartel thug running a particular sector.  They're just as locked as any other weapon drop, but they have parts which in theory should be easily transferable to other weapons of similar design.  If I pick up an AK from a narco, I should be able to swap the stock banana magazine for the drum magazine from the boss's AK without any problem.  After all, I'm the only person in the squad who actually modifies their weapons.

Summary

If I had to sum up Ghost Recon Wildlands, just based off the beta, my impression would be that it's not realistic enough to be a serious shooter in the same vein as the ARMA series of games but too realistic to appeal to a casual gamer.  It's trying to be all things to all people, and failing to be truly good at anything.  And for a game that's doing open beta a week or so before official release, that's a bad sign.  Sad to say, this one is following in the footsteps of another Tom Clancy branded title, and like The Division, I suspect it's going to suck at launch.  Whether they can rescue it is another matter entirely.