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Ghost Recon : Wildlands Open Beta Impressions.

Airan

Member
What difficulty were you on? The missions weren't epics that had unqiue mechanics, but they had unique settings and certainly took me and friends longer than that on Extreme - the mine missions especially (albeit the
backdoor entry would make it a very quick run if you knew about it beforehand!

The bolded is exactly what I'm talking about. Artificially ramping up the difficulty does not make the mission any less boring. The way the torture couple was played up in their intro video I was expecting their location to house some super morbid stuff. Perhaps they'd have a corny speech or two, and a bloody monument somewhere. Actually the last room with the chopped up cadavers was when it started looking interesting, but that location really should've been on the 2nd to last mission. With the finale being a chase or something. It would give your targets some character. But as it stands the bosses could have been put in a shed and it wouldn't have made much difference, it's just another tick in a checkbox.

It's just not memorable at all.
 
Played through it solo over the weekend and killed
the American
last night. It's okay-ish. Not worth full price, but something to keep an eye on during holiday sales. Reminded me a lot of ps2 Mercenaries but more tactical and less destruction.
 
The bolded is exactly what I'm talking about. Artificially ramping up the difficulty does not make the mission any less boring. The way the torture couple was played up in their intro video I was expecting their location to house some super morbid stuff. Perhaps they'd have a corny speech or two, and a bloody monument somewhere. Actually the last room with the chopped up cadavers was when it started looking interesting, but that location really should've been on the 2nd to last mission. With the finale being a chase or something. It would give your targets some character. But as it stands the bosses could have been put in a shed and it wouldn't have made much difference, it's just another tick in a checkbox.

It's just not memorable at all.

I see what you're saying, but to play devil's advocate, flip it around: why should these bosses be anything but normal AI subject to the usual solution - a headshot? I.e, a normal takedown. That house was pretty morbid imo :D

As for difficulty, of course it affects it. Strolling in and shooting crap is totally different from me and my buddy sneaking in on Extreme, checking corners and taking it slowly.

The 'chase' was the build up to that mission, I guess (finding info, biographical snippets, clues of sorts, then they had unique dialogue in their fucked up torture room), and the mission itself had a style that was quite different to others - approaching a remote lodge, nobody about, an empty house > basement > torture den. I think the subtlety works nicely there, although given the game's wild tonal shifts, no doubt it won't work for all of us!

What I am curious about is if I played the game from the start now, could I go to the lodge and trigger that scene? I doubt it.

(Also, thank your lucky stars that you didn't have to chase them in a vehicle ;D)
 

Airan

Member
I see what you're saying, but to play devil's advocate, flip it around: why should these bosses be anything but normal AI subject to the usual solution - a headshot? I.e, a normal takedown. That house was pretty morbid imo :D

As for difficulty, of course it affects it. Strolling in and shooting crap is totally different from me and my buddy sneaking in on Extreme, checking corners and taking it slowly.

The 'chase' was the build up to that mission, I guess (finding info, biographical snippets, clues of sorts, then they had unique dialogue in their fucked up torture room), and the mission itself had a style that was quite different to others - approaching a remote lodge, nobody about, an empty house > basement > torture den. I think the subtlety works nicely there, although given the game's wild tonal shifts, no doubt it won't work for all of us!

What I am curious about is if I played the game from the start now, could I go to the lodge and trigger that scene? I doubt it.

(Also, thank your lucky stars that you didn't have to chase them in a vehicle ;D)

I wouldn't mind a chase at all. It doesn't have to be in-vehicle, because as we all know, the vehicle handling is crap at best. The underground section could be much deeper, as you enter each floor you see the increasing depravity of the couple, with corpses lying in near darkness, walls caked in blood, as well as the tools used to "experiment", the way they dispose of the corpses, all this only visible through NV goggles. Then you find a light switch and clearly see the sheer horror on display.

The only thing the difficulty changes is the way you approach the combat. But you can apply that to every combat activity in the game. What makes this finale story mission memorable, unique? For me, nothing. It lasted all of 2 minutes, maybe 5 if I tried Extreme.

[edit]to answer above, I had a fantastic time with friends, the janky vehicle physics (trying to chase a convoy and crossing the rocky terrain with your jeep violently bumping around was a hoot) made it frustratingly fun (if I was playing solo I would've quit) and we all laughed as we simply rammed the truck off road, which made the driver give up and exit only to be promptly shot. I just feel the story missions need more meat to them, because as it stands they're no different to the other activities available.
 

Brakara

Member
Anyone play this with friends and actually have a great time with it?

Yeah, I had a blast playing this with friends. That doesn't mean it has a lot of shortcomings: some minor, like it's a bit fiddly to get ammo (you have to stand just right next to the box), and some major, like how fiddly the bike and car controls are (had no problem with plane and chopper though). But it's not like there are many other open-world co-op third person shooters to choose from, and the core gameplay is a lot of fun... with friends.
 

RedSwirl

Junior Member
As-is, I think I'd only get this if I looked up on Steam and found out that like 10 of my friends owned it. Otherwise I'll wait for Ubisoft to keep adding to and changing the game like with Siege.

Now that the beta is over, if you got it through Steam, remember to manually uninstall it outside Steam. I don't like how when Steam betas end they just disappear from your games list but don't actually unintsall. Same thing happened with Mortal Kombat XL -- I didn't realize it was still taking up 30GB of my SSD until Windows found it in my apps list.
 

Hystzen

Member
Whats hilarious about the torture couple is how your network has no clue where they are but the lodge is pretty much across the road from one your safehouses.
 

Peroroncino

Member
That feeling when you need to kill 5 guys, and you use mortar in order to STEALTHILY finish 3 of them because sync-shot is out of the question for only 2 people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_lugkkU2WA

But hey, it worked, we finished the mission and the base was cleared without a hitch!

Later on I was a chauffeur for my friend, we didn't wanna bother with sneaking into a building, so I flew us on the roof, he got out, took what he needed and we bolted before anybody noticed, lol.

I love games where you have so many options and your imagination is the only obstacle.
 

James93

Member
Its just another ok open world game. If it came out the summer i might consider it, but its out in a busy time, so its a hard pass for now.
 

Unity2012

Member
Anyone play this with friends and actually have a great time with it?

I did...didn't expect to see so much negativity.


I honestly wasn't expecting this much negativity either. Yes, I can see where the game can use some improvement but I had a great time with the Beta. I played with friends for hours and had a blast laughing at all the crazy things we could do within the game's world; then played, a bit more focused on tactics, with one of my best friends over the weekend and really enjoyed the game.
 

lcd

Member
How does it work then? I couldn't figure it out. We marked both targets and were ready but the engage button didn't do anything. Do both players have to press A or what?

I mean with an actual human player with you.

This is what my group didn't understand either.

I understand marking your targets with numbers so as to call out who you're going to take out, but why then have an on-screen button indicator that when pressed shows a circling highlight animation but doesn't actually do anything? Kind of expected it to behave like in Future Soldier or at the very least show some sort of audio/visual cue that your friends were ready to engage as well.

We just figured that maybe it wasn't finished in the open beta build.

Other than that though had a blast playing the beta all day Saturday and Sunday evening and pre-orderd the gold edition. It's been too long since we've had a game that hasn't just tacked 4-player co-op on as side missions or different mode.
 

Varth

Member
Am I the only one aghast By the team conversation about how La Yuri and co are incompetent torturers and how professional torturers behave differently?
 

Yibby

Member
The game is ok with some friends, but the missions were already very repetitive and it was hilarious seeing four people running around in a camp, throwing 4 GPS tracker into the same barrel :D
 

Kin5290

Member
What difficulty were you on? The missions weren't epics that had unqiue mechanics, but they had unique settings and certainly took me and friends longer than that on Extreme - the mine missions especially (albeit the
backdoor entry would make it a very quick run if you knew about it beforehand!
The mine mission was extremely bad on Advanced. All I did was take my suppressor off and start gunning people down and they came to me, one by one, perfectly silhouetted.
 

Pandy

Member
Am I the only one aghast By the team conversation about how La Yuri and co are incompetent torturers and how professional torturers behave differently?

While there's a lot of military humour and a few outlandish characters in the beta, I did pick up on a couple of conversations that hinted at deeper issues. Talking about how the people growing up in the area had very few options apart from joining the cartel if they wanted to get ahead, and how the cartel training was so brutal that many of the people you're killing had little or no choice but to do what they were doing.
Really put the brakes on the gung-ho attitude that is often overly prevalent in these things, and I felt the need to start attempting more knockouts after that.

I'm hoping the full game has a lot more stuff like this. I'm not expecting Spec Ops: The Line, but I think it might surprise us from time to time.
 

Samikaze

Member
While there's a lot of military humour and a few outlandish characters in the beta, I did pick up on a couple of conversations that hinted at deeper issues. Talking about how the people growing up in the area had very few options apart from joining the cartel if they wanted to get ahead, and how the cartel training was so brutal that many of the people you're killing had little or no choice but to do what they were doing.
Really put the brakes on the gung-ho attitude that is often overly prevalent in these things, and I felt the need to start attempting more knockouts after that.
.

I thought that was really cool too, but I hope it ends up meaning something later. There was a similar scene in Division where the leader of the Rikers gang (escaped convicts) challenges your team, saying that she knows she's just going to be another black body in the count, showing she's still troubled with racial tensions in the mid-apocalyptic environment.

Unfortunately it's only a throwaway line in her boss fight, and ultimately amounts to nothing in the game's world. Something that game suffered from quite a bit. I hope GR won't have similar issues.
 
I'm sure plenty of people ran into the glitch where a party member doesn't enter vehicles and instead runs beside or on top of them...

...but has anyone encountered THIS? lol

In the El Polito boss fight my AI team marked half the people in the room and even sync shot them all from outside the house.
 
I left this too long to catch up on everything.

Can anyone confirm that there's a Socom-style PVP?

It looks very socom and the thought of even a 5v5 elimination mode is very exciting but I'm not sure if it's co op only!
 

Pandy

Member
This is what my group didn't understand either.

I understand marking your targets with numbers so as to call out who you're going to take out, but why then have an on-screen button indicator that when pressed shows a circling highlight animation but doesn't actually do anything? Kind of expected it to behave like in Future Soldier or at the very least show some sort of audio/visual cue that your friends were ready to engage as well.

We just figured that maybe it wasn't finished in the open beta build.


Other than that though had a blast playing the beta all day Saturday and Sunday evening and pre-orderd the gold edition. It's been too long since we've had a game that hasn't just tacked 4-player co-op on as side missions or different mode.
Eh? It was working great.

Three targets are marked. Three spinny icons.

Player 1 aims up at a target. The target's icon stops spinning.
Player 2 aims up at another target. Their target's icon stops spinning.
Player 3 aims up at the final target. The final target's icon stops spinning.

Now all three players can see that they are each aiming at unique targets, and can either co-ordinate their shots in chat, or just open fire in the reasonable expectation that the others are ready for it.

I used it several times playing with random players online without mics. It's simple, effective and well executed (if you'll pardon the pun). I wish it was in more co-op shooters.
 
Eh? It was working great.

Three targets are marked. Three spinny icons.

Player 1 aims up at a target. The target's icon stops spinning.
Player 2 aims up at another target. Their target's icon stops spinning.
Player 3 aims up at the final target. The final target's icon stops spinning.

Now all three players can see that they are each aiming at unique targets, and can either co-ordinate their shots in chat, or just open fire in the reasonable expectation that the others are ready for it.

I used it several times playing witn random players online without mics. It's simple, effective and well executed (if you'll pardon the pun). I wish it was in more co-op shooters.
Yeah, but whats supposed to happen when you select to "execute" that sync shot in co-op?

It was functional in Future Soldier, but have no idea what its supposed to do in Wildlands.
 

Pandy

Member
Yeah, but whats supposed to happen when you select to "execute" that sync shot in co-op?

It was functional in Future Soldier, but have no idea what its supposed to do in Wildlands.
Doesn't it just send the "Fire!" message to the other players. I never felt the need to use it myself, I felt the sync-target icons more than did the job, but I did get a few messages from other players.
 
Doesn't it just send the "Fire!" message to the other players. I never felt the need to use it myself, I felt the sync-target icons more than did the job, but I did get a few messages from other players.
No bullshit, but the first time I held X to see what would happen with a co-op sync-shot I was immediately shown the intro cinematic for the game.

Haven't tried since then, because WTFBBQ. Who knows what damage I could do to the fabric of time and space.
 
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