Ghost Recon: Wildlands
For those of you hoping it gets better with age...
Developer Ubisoft publisher Ubisoft price $ 59.99 UsD AvAilAble At steam, Uplay, Retail ghost-recon.ubisoft.com
One of the central philosophical debates in videogame criticism is whether or not a game should be “allowed” to only get good after ten hours. Should we, as critics, mark a game down, if it only rewards people who invest serious time in it?
Wildlands seems like an ideal candidate for further exploration of this problem. Most reviews were written soon after release, by critics who binged on the thing over a foetid weekend of 40, 50 hours of grinding through Bolivia and headshotting poverty-stricken and religiously deluded coke gangsters.
And as with so many Ubisoft games, you see the two contrasting opinions: “This game is awesome!” versus “This game is boring and repetitive and the open world is too big and empty!”
What’s the truth of Wildlands? Has it been designed for players to chew through in one epic, endless setting? Or is it supposed to be a treat, a couple of hours here and there with mates? Is the game kind of repetitive because it’s meant to be an experience you have in discrete chunks of time, rather than as a stop-everything-else-until-you-finishthe-story narrative?
A truly great developer could skilfully devise a semi-optional story that rewards hardcore fans who don’t want to play anything else, while also letting that fan’s friends drop in from time to time for a bit of co-op.
But there are a bunch of problems that prevent this, chief among them the way that completing a co-op mission will “mark off” milestone enemies in your singleplayer experience. You can find yourself dropped into a mission online mere moments before three
can you please auto-design some missions that use the skidoo and the helicopter, kthxbai
other people shoot some NPC, and then that mission is “done”. Which means not only are missions repetitive, they also occasionally complete themselves.
Around a decade ago, open world games faced a challenge: developers were coming up with amazing ideas - huge maps, semi-autonomous NPC camps, vehicles, customisable weapons! - that were just too big to work properly on the PCs of the day.
Now, the technology has eclipsed the developer. Bolivia, Wildlands’ playground, is huge. Far, far too big for any team of mortal developers to populate with enough variety in the time they had to build the game. So we’re in a new trough of design: waiting for someone to come up with a “directed procedural” algorithm, a way to let developers say to the program: “Uh, okay so we’ve put this mountain here, can you please auto-design some missions that ensure the player gets to use the skidoo and the helicopter, and make them lead up to the cable-car boss battle we’re doing manually, kthxbai.”
And then the computer does a good job of building a bunch of “random” missions that actually feel different and unique, instead of just “mark all the baddies with your drone and then press one key to have your AI teammates shoot ‘em all in the head pow pow.”
Wildlands, in small doses, with mates, will entertain. As a hearty meal though, it could leave you bloated but malnourished. Anthony FordhAm