Gamer's Outpost Press (archived)

by Giancarlo Valdes via Venture Beat

Four U.S. soldiers against the army of a notorious drug cartel doesn’t sound like a fair battle. But Ghost Recon players have been in dire situations before.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands (heading to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC next year on March 7) is the latest installment in the long-running tactical shooter franchise. This time around, the action takes place in Bolivia, which publisher Ubisoft says is the biggest open-world it has ever made. These massive games (including Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs) are an important part of the French company’s success in the $99.6 billion game industry.

In Ghost Recon: Wildlands, the Santa Blanca cartel has taken over Bolivia’s cocaine supply. Santa Blanca’s leader is the brutish El Sueño, and it’s up to the four Ghost operatives to take him down and dismantle his empire from the inside.

I wasn’t impressed with Wildlands at all when I first saw it last summer. I watched a presentation that was so dramatic that I couldn’t take it seriously. At the end of it, I still wasn’t sure why Wildlands needed an open world. But after playing it at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show with three other players, I can see why developer Ubisoft Paris is so bullish about it.

According to senior producer Nouredine Abboud, Wildlands is the culmination of four years of work that began shortly after the release of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier in 2012.

“And at the end of Future Soldier, the big answer [of what to do next] was to have a large playground. In this large playground, you can actually choose everything: you choose the location, the time of day, the weapons, etc.,” said Abboud in an interview with GamesBeat. “As opposed to games that have smaller maps where you have limitations … . Being in this big map, it’s exactly like the soldiers on the battleground [in real life].”

“We needed this big map because we wanted the player to be able to play depending on their play style,” added creative director Eric Couzian.

Adapting with your teammates

Wildlands has more than 100 story missions, and you can tackle them (with up to three online friends or with computer-controlled teammates) in any order you want. Everything you do — like interrogating cartel leaders or disrupting their supply chains — will bring you closer to El Sueño.

Unlike past Ghost Recon games, the designers haven’t scripting anything. Couzian told me the A.I. is “completely autonomous,” and enemies will behave differently depending on the time of day, the weather, and the ecosystem (you’ll fight in jungles, deserts, mountains, and more).

In the demo, it was a sunny day as my team embarked on a mission to capture a Santa Blanca lieutenant. After using our drones to scout the small compound from above and mark the enemies on our screens, we tried to take out as many people as we could with our sniper rifles. But our main target freaked out and ran away — Couzian later told me that guy is a coward, so he’ll always try to escape if he thinks he’s in danger. The lieutenant hopped in a car and drove away as my team scrambled down the hill on foot to chase him.

We grabbed a few vacant cars on the road and cornered the target at a nearby gas station, where he had reinforcements waiting for us. In the end, my team interrogated him for intel. But if we had been more careful in the beginning, we could’ve avoided the chase altogether and grabbed the guy in the compound.

“It’s also why the open world is so interesting,” said Couzian. “We don’t know where the action can lead you because the A.I. will escape and grab a car and then it’s up to you to decide how to chase him.”

For our next mission, we headed to the Rosario prison village to gather more information about a local cartel boss. A helicopter was next to the gas station, so we used it to get to Rosario quickly. In the full game, however, grabbing a chopper won’t be that easy; the developers placed it there for the demo. You can’t just summon a vehicle whenever you need it. Instead, you’ll have to find areas in Bolivia where the enemy keeps their helicopters (along with the 59 other types of vehicles you might want) and steal them.

At the village, the four of us split into smaller two-man teams: one to take care of the snipers, and the other to destroy the mortars. As it turns out, drug cartels don’t like it when you blow up their stuff. My partner and I killed a few stragglers as we carved a path to our objective. After downloading files from a PC, we all jumped into a jeep and drove away.

Part of Ghost Recon’s DNA

While the demo was fun, I hope Wildlands isn’t just about killing my way through a third-world country. It’d be a waste to build such a huge chunk of land solely for fighting. I want to explore and talk to the civilians and find out about their lives, too. One of my favorite things to do in Assassin’s Creed’s historic cities is to just walk around and see the sights without worrying about who I’m murdering next. Even The Division, another huge Ubisoft-made shooter, has that to some extent.

Either way, it was just a matter of time before Ghost Recon morphed into an open-world game. Both Abboud and Couzian have been working on the series for over a decade, so they’ve made significant changes to the series before. They said a Ghost Recon game has to have three things: tactical combat, reconnaissance gameplay, and the social experience of playing with your friends. For the Ubisoft Paris team, Wildlands is the next big step in that formula.

“We can clearly say that if the initial Ghost Recon team had access to the tools we have right now, they probably would have done what we’re doing,” said Abboud.  “They would have gone open world because that’s really in the DNA of Ghost Recon.”

by Alex Gibson via We Got This Covered

While Uncharted 2: Among Thieves’ might have put Naughty Dog on the map, few would disagree that the smash hit post-apocalyptic action game The Last Of Us is the studio’s finest work. In fact, The Last Of Us is arguably one of PlayStation’s greatest ever exclusive games and one of the must-play essential titles of the last generation. No surprises then that a sequel to that much revered game is eagerly awaited, and now that the critically acclaimed final chapter to the Uncharted series, A Thief’s End, is done and dusted, many gamers are frantically scouring the internet for any details or clues to its release date.

Indeed, many had predicted that an announcement from Naughty Dog during E3 might well occur, and there was plenty of good reason behind that bold claim. After all, Naughty Dog stunned PlayStation fans back in late 2011 when it first teased trailers for the original The Last Of Us barely a month after the launch of Uncharted 3. Based on that logic, E3 2016 seemed like E3 was a potentially perfect outlet to tease the studios next project. Sadly, that wasn’t to be and we were instead presented with Days Gone, the long awaited unveiling of Sony Bend’s new IP.

Of course, the announcement of Days Gone was exciting in itself given that gamers have tentatively been predicting its emergence for years after radio silence from Sony Bend for what has seemed like an eternity. Ironically, the studio’s last two games, both debuting over 4 years ago now, were spinoff titles based on Naughty Dog’s own Uncharted franchise. Bend has been a lesser known entity in the Sony first party eco system, and while Uncharted: Golden Abyss was a fine game, Days Gone is Bend’s first foray into developing their own AAA IP; a third person action adventure title nonetheless, which are apparently the only sort of games that Sony are interested in commissioning at the moment.

Rumors suggesting the narrative premise for Days Gone had actually long been floating around the internet, with several inside leaks suggesting the game would indeed be an open world survival horror title from as far back as early 2015. Yet, nobody could have imagined the Days Gone would follow such a similar beat to The Last Of Us in regards to theme and aesthetic.

There are those that argue against that comparison, citing differences in tone and game design as significant enough to differentiate the two franchise, and while there is some merit in that sentiment, even the strongest advocates surely can’t deny that Days Gone, a narrative partly inspired by The Walking Dead television show, does put it extremely close to The Last Of Us in regards to overall genre and premise.

Sure, Days Gone might be less linear in its game design, incorporate a motorbike for traversal and feature much more frequent combat, but the crossover with The Last Of Us is still obvious. Both titles transcend the zombie genre, a genre that is still firmly the zeitgeist of the times. Clickers, walkers, freakers; call them what you want, give them whatever degree of intellect, bill them as infected or mentally ill, it’s all essentially the same. Similarly, you can expect familiar narrative themes like morality, ethics, family and gender intertwined in a story that explores sociology in a world devoid of law and order. These are themes we’ve not only explored in The Last Of Us but others post-apocalyptic video games as well, not to mention movies, television and comics.

So, beyond mere commentary on the obvious similarities of the two games and the slightly tired but still ever popular zombie genre, how does any of this impact The Last Of Us 2? Certainly, we’re pretty sure that Neil Druckman and co. are working on the sequel, not least because we’ve had several slips of the tongue from industry insiders and voice actors such as Nolan North regarding future workings on the title. More importantly, however, Druckman previously stated that he and Bruce Straley were throwing ideas around for a sequel prior to being asked to work on Uncharted 4, and it’s that information that perhaps provides an interesting case study in regards to studio direction.

As a publisher, Sony has control over the direction of their first party studios, and while a sequel is highly likely (Sony would be mad to walk away from the potential earnings of such a massively popular IP), one shouldn’t be surprised if the game was put heavily on the backburner so it doesn’t detract attention from Days Gone.

Indeed, the two titles are so similar in genre it seems unlikely that Sony would want either of them launching anywhere near each other. Perhaps the most the alarming news for those eagerly anticipating news on The Last Of Us 2 is that Days Gone isn’t as far through development as many people had expected. In fact, when quizzed about the release date for Days Gone, the game’s lead director, John Garvin stated that it was not safe to assume that it would launch in 2017. In light of that information, Days Gone’s long development period is likely to push a sequel from Naughty Dog to 2019 or possibly 2020.

It seems likely that Naughty Dog won’t be encouraged by Sony to divert too many resources to a sequel title to The Last Of Us. Indeed, while it’s possible the game is in a pre-alpha state already, you’d wager that Naughty Dog are busy giving attention to other projects such as Uncharted 4’s single player DLC. It’s also unclear how much time Druckman is being allocated to assisting with The Last Of Us movie. We’ve heard rumors that the film adaptation isn’t going smoothly, with Druckman himself commenting that he’s only been involved briefly as the script is being finalized. Yet, you’d have to imagine his involvement would ramp up once filming is underway, if that ever occurs.

We’ve waited a long time for Bend’s new IP, and the studio can probably be satisfied with the interest the teaser trailer piqued at E3, but equally as many eyebrows were raised when presented with yet another zombie post-apocalyptic genre of video game. Of course, The Last Of Us’s overwhelming popularity sets it apart from generic zombie titles and the same eyebrows might not have been raised if that had been the announcement at E3, even despite its extremely similar premise.

Unfortunately, those who were hoping for a quick post Uncharted 4 announcement and then a speedy turnaround time between release dates as per Uncharted 2 to the original The Last Of Us should probably taper that expectation. It would be mad to ignore that Days Gone might well seriously impact when we’re likely to see a sequel for The Last Of Us. Indeed, while its pleasing to finally get a glimpse of what the talented team at Bend have been working on, it’s a shame that it likely comes at the expense of a sequel to Naughty Dog’s masterpiece and arguably PlayStation’s best ever game.

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