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Ghost Recon Breakpoint - Exploring The Terrifying Future Of Militarized Drones.

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman

When Ubisoft debuted Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a fair number of series purists groaned when they saw footage of the Ghosts fighting off legions of killer drones. But if you've been paying attention to the cutting edge of the military-industrial complex, that future is already here.

When brainstorming ways to up the difficulty in Breakpoint and present new cooperative challenges to players, Ubisoft spoke with Matthieu Bonnery, a former operations officer in the French Ministère de la Défense. He told them to take a meeting with Milrem Robotics, a military contractor that’s been making drones since 2013. If you’re unfamiliar with the company, here’s what they’ve been up to recently.



Using this technology as inspiration, Ubisoft felt good about making drones a centerpiece of the adversarial experience in Breakpoint. Drones are the ultimate soldier. They are highly resistant to the environment and can operate on any terrain. They don’t need much downtime, and armed with machine learning, they can adapt to the threats they face. Their modular design means they can be equipped to handle a variety of tasks, and one militarized drone can carry more weapons and ammo than any fleshy super soldier you can name. If a drone is destroyed on the field of battle, you don’t need to send a letter to a grieving family. And perhaps most importantly for the power-hungry, morally questionable leaders in the world, a drone won’t second guess its orders.

To create some variety, Ubisoft designed more than 20 drones for the world of Breakpoint, each of which has different strengths, weaknesses, and operational objectives.

The flying drones are a problem no matter where you are. These militarized sentries are used to keep the wilderness and base camps under supervision. They often move in swarms like bees, and their unpredictable flight patterns make them a tricky target.

The toughest part about fighting the flying drones is they are smart enough to try and preserve line of sight, repositioning when you try to take cover. They also don't give up pursuit easily. Even if you hop in a vehicle and high tail it out of a fire zone, they will give chase. Either you kill them or you die.

The ground drones may not have the agility of their aviation-based brethren, but they pack a serious punch. Many of the ground-based drones have multiple mounted guns, which allows them to target multiple players at once. Each of the ground drones carries different weapons, but all are well armored. You need to shoot off protective plates to reveal the glowing heart of these steel beasts. Each also has a glowing eye. If you deal enough damage there you can momentarily stun the drone, opening up a brief window to line up critical shots with heavy payloads like grenade launchers and rocket launchers.

The most dangerous drones of all are the hulking Behemoths, which provide one of the toughest challenges in Breakpoint. At launch, 21 of these monsters will be patrolling secured regions of Auroa, and they require strategy and precision to take down. Ubisoft wants them to feel like a mythological beast that should be feared, and the multiple Gatling guns and burst rocket launchers do a good job of commanding respect. Their rockets can shoot at up to four players at the same time, and when you drain their health enough they start indiscriminately unleashing mortar salvos.
 

Tesseract

Banned
making them something to be feared is a mistake

unless they really are that challenging, don't say they are

i see the industry has learned nothing from valve
 
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DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Consider what drones can do today:



Treating them like mini-helicopters is unrealistic and un-fun. Playing with drones in videogames should be like conducting a real-time strategy game.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
I hope everybody talking about how the drones work in the game today have played the game sometime this week.
 

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
 

DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Nothing a well-placed EMP or an electromagnetic focus charge can’t take care of.

And you can accommodate for shielding.
 

Woo-Fu

Banned
Nothing a well-placed EMP or an electromagnetic focus charge can’t take care of.

And you can accommodate for shielding.
You're looking at it the wrong way. It doesn't matter that an EMP can counter a drone, it matters how much a drone costs vs. how much an EMP device costs. It matters how much it costs to deliver a drone to target vs. an EMP, it matters how much infrastructure damage is incurred using either of them.

Drones are going to dominate aerial combat in the very near future, just a matter of time, simply due to being cheaper to field, cheaper to upgrade, cheaper to repair, and you don't risk pilots you've spent years training each time one goes down. The US Air Force already trains more drone pilots than traditional pilots. Expect the same trend with naval platforms, at a slower pace.
 

mcz117chief

Member
That actually sounds pretty neat. I didn't enjoy Wildlands too much but this is shaping up to be quite interesting. I always thought drones would be a nightmare to fight. No fear, no easy to hit weakspots, practically perfect accuracy, very fast reaction times etc.
 

When Ubisoft debuted Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a fair number of series purists groaned when they saw footage of the Ghosts fighting off legions of killer drones. But if you've been paying attention to the cutting edge of the military-industrial complex, that future is already here.

When brainstorming ways to up the difficulty in Breakpoint and present new cooperative challenges to players, Ubisoft spoke with Matthieu Bonnery, a former operations officer in the French Ministère de la Défense. He told them to take a meeting with Milrem Robotics, a military contractor that’s been making drones since 2013. If you’re unfamiliar with the company, here’s what they’ve been up to recently.



Using this technology as inspiration, Ubisoft felt good about making drones a centerpiece of the adversarial experience in Breakpoint. Drones are the ultimate soldier. They are highly resistant to the environment and can operate on any terrain. They don’t need much downtime, and armed with machine learning, they can adapt to the threats they face. Their modular design means they can be equipped to handle a variety of tasks, and one militarized drone can carry more weapons and ammo than any fleshy super soldier you can name. If a drone is destroyed on the field of battle, you don’t need to send a letter to a grieving family. And perhaps most importantly for the power-hungry, morally questionable leaders in the world, a drone won’t second guess its orders.

To create some variety, Ubisoft designed more than 20 drones for the world of Breakpoint, each of which has different strengths, weaknesses, and operational objectives.

The flying drones are a problem no matter where you are. These militarized sentries are used to keep the wilderness and base camps under supervision. They often move in swarms like bees, and their unpredictable flight patterns make them a tricky target.

The toughest part about fighting the flying drones is they are smart enough to try and preserve line of sight, repositioning when you try to take cover. They also don't give up pursuit easily. Even if you hop in a vehicle and high tail it out of a fire zone, they will give chase. Either you kill them or you die.

The ground drones may not have the agility of their aviation-based brethren, but they pack a serious punch. Many of the ground-based drones have multiple mounted guns, which allows them to target multiple players at once. Each of the ground drones carries different weapons, but all are well armored. You need to shoot off protective plates to reveal the glowing heart of these steel beasts. Each also has a glowing eye. If you deal enough damage there you can momentarily stun the drone, opening up a brief window to line up critical shots with heavy payloads like grenade launchers and rocket launchers.

The most dangerous drones of all are the hulking Behemoths, which provide one of the toughest challenges in Breakpoint. At launch, 21 of these monsters will be patrolling secured regions of Auroa, and they require strategy and precision to take down. Ubisoft wants them to feel like a mythological beast that should be feared, and the multiple Gatling guns and burst rocket launchers do a good job of commanding respect. Their rockets can shoot at up to four players at the same time, and when you drain their health enough they start indiscriminately unleashing mortar salvos.



Whoaaaaaa 🙉 😲 send 200 of these bad bois to scum ISIS camps.
 
Thought the game sucked when I played the beta. Massive step down from Wildlands.

im pasting my rant from elsewhere to add to the convo.

Breakpoint is such a downgrade like holy crap.
I play 1440 on a 144hz monitor. 1080 ti. The game looks like garbage. Like stuff up close is okay, but anything medium distance looks so garbage. Sniping is broken because it doesn't feel like anything is rendered 200 meters from you. Flying around on a helicopter and just watch trees change a million times as you approach it. Wildlands has the advantage of close, medium, and far everything looks so clean.
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Another thing, this games gameplay loop is not nearly as fun.
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Wildlands you would drone, survey, cut power, sync shot. or do it go in balls deep HOWEVER YOU WANT. All these play styles just happen naturally if you decide to play that way, now this game makes sync shots a consumable. Yo we are being HAD.
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I'm sure the ability of doing the same thing is there, but there is zero incentive to do it, because they made it so gd easy. And even if it weren't easy, I just find myself just slowly walking around killing people. It's just so boring the way it plays.
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And to the people saying it's a beta, the game is the EXACT same as I was during the closed technical tests. When have you ever played a game that changed drastically a month from release?
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maybe the game will be improved a year or 2 from release, seems to be ubi's MO.
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  1. Graphics make me want to wipe the hypothetical vaseline off my monitor.
  2. Draw distance is horrible.Like everything just looks so gross, greasy, and blocky that isn't 5 feet within your character, wildlands you could snipe a dude 700 miles away and it looked good.
  3. pop in rendering horrible.
  4. menus ui is so confusing and bad, and don't seem responsive. You gotta click and drag shit all over, just so uninspired.
  5. go back to wildlands, its so smooth and clean looking. Graphics are way better and you seamlessly play however style you want to.
    6.The hub world makes Anthem feel like game of the generation.
  6. It just looks so uggo.
  7. I understand making the game more animation/immersive heavy, but you move so sluggish it's just not fun to play. Wildlands was so snappy and seamless with everything.
  8. Picking a mission doesn't seem to ever really put it on the map. Like wtf is going on.
  9. Shooting enemies isn't satifying, feels like you are shooting empty balloons
 

Kacho

Member
I'm sure the ability of doing the same thing is there, but there is zero incentive to do it, because they made it so gd easy. And even if it weren't easy, I just find myself just slowly walking around killing people. It's just so boring the way it plays.

I thought I was playing the game wrong or something. Kept trying to find the fun as I navigated the boring, lifeless world. All the personality is gone.

Breakpoint is like Wildlands minus the fun fused with The Division. It’s also online only for single player and you always see other players in the hub. No idea what they were thinking and who they’re trying to serve with this game.
 

EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
I don't feel like a future theme is an issue if done correctly, everyone once in a while (MGS4, Battlefront, Battlefield 2042 etc.) developers can pull off future games.
 

Siri

Banned
I loved Wildlands. But time after time I’ve detested the second game when I loved the first - so I guess I’d better prepare for another letdown.
 
I loved Wildlands. But time after time I’ve detested the second game when I loved the first - so I guess I’d better prepare for another letdown.
I feel like I would really like breakpoint if I didn't already experience wildlands. Which is insanely good coop.
 

Winter John

Gold Member
The beta was a miserable disappointment. I wasn't too impressed with Wildlands either until I put that on it's highest difficulty and played co op with some pals. That was when it turned into a decent game. This Breakpoint thing seems like a shitty cross between Far Cry and the Division, designed to be stuffed full of half assed microtransactions, passes, dlc, lootboxes and fuck knows what else. I guess I'll wait til next year and buy tthe fixed version for $10.
 
I play 1440 on a 144hz monitor. 1080 ti. The game looks like garbage. Like stuff up close is okay, but anything medium distance looks so garbage. Sniping is broken because it doesn't feel like anything is rendered 200 meters from you. Flying around on a helicopter and just watch trees change a million times as you approach it. Wildlands has the advantage of close, medium, and far everything looks so clean.

  1. Graphics make me want to wipe the hypothetical vaseline off my monitor.
  2. Draw distance is horrible.Like everything just looks so gross, greasy, and blocky that isn't 5 feet within your character, wildlands you could snipe a dude 700 miles away and it looked good.
  3. pop in rendering horrible.

Sounds like you had the same problem I had. I searched the Ghost Recon reddit and many people had the same problem. They said to turn off "temporal injection" and that worked for me. Turning it off fixed the rendering/draw distance problems and it was no longer blurry. Seems like this option isn't working like it's supposed to for many people. Anyways, the optimization in general seemed pretty bad. Barely any difference in fps on ultra and medium. Around 50-80 fps for me on 8700k @ 4.8 GHz and 1080. I only played the beta of Wildlands so I can't really compare those two.
 

IbizaPocholo

NeoGAFs Kent Brockman
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Arachnid

Member
I'm having more fun with this beta than I did Wildlands. IMO Wildlands was as boring and tedious, with a truly awful story to boot (I still couldn't tell you what it's about or the names of any of the characters; just that the main cartel baddy had tattoos all over). Walker, at least, has charisma for days. He seems like a fun antagonist. Plus, the stealth seems improved from Wildlands (all my fun in that game came from cosplaying as a 4th Echelon operative since I'm SC starved). I'm looking forward to this.

My main grip is the new Ghost War. The maps are great, and it plays great (not too different from Wildlands Ghost War), but the lack of classes is a huge problem. EVERYONE is running around with an assault rifle w/grenade launcher attachment and a sniper. There is no real class gameplay. I miss the class balance from the first game. It emphasized teamwork more. Now it's just straight gunfights straight through without variation. They definitely need to bring classes back (and my Echelon). I'm also hoping for the trifocal NVGs to be in the full game. They already have Fishers SC-20K ingame (thank FUCK it's not the SC4000 or SC3000 from Conviction/Blacklist again) though it's missing the multipurpose launcher on the bottom.
 
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