19 October 2019 | derryjumber
I've been playing this for a little over a week now, and whilst I was excited about it initially, I have to say that it is a real disappointment.
There are so many bugs. Most of them that I have encountered are not game-breaking, but they are immersion breaking. Crawling up to a pair of soldiers and going for a knife kill, resulting in the target and myself doing this weird overlapping leaping, where I was lying down but somehow suspended 1.5m above the ground, trying to slice the target, who would suddenly leap vertically 2m above the ground, and then we'd be bouncing around between each other for a couple of seconds until the second guy shot me dead.
Another example is the fact that the visuals of your gear loadout change from in game play to cut scenes, in strange ways. I'm wearing the Crye JPC plate carrier and primary weapon is an HK416. So for most of the game I appear to have 4 x HSGI Taco single mag carriers with my 5.56mm mags on the front of the plate carrier. Then in a cut scene it sometimes changes to either having 4 x long straight 9mm submachine gun mag pouches, to no mag pouches and a utility pouch on left and from memory a couple of pistol mag pouches on the right. Weird.
The bivouac system is stupid as well. You get to the location, select to set up your bivouac, and it goes to a cut scene of you setting up what looks like rope to tie down a tent, but there is no tent. You are sitting out in the open, with nothing around except maybe a smouldering camp fire, yet somehow you can magically buy new weapons and attachments and clothing in the store, swap out gear items, sell unwanted items, order cars, trucks or helicopters?!?!?! Ridiculous. Why not just make a small hut with a couple of the settlers or Outcasts in the hut, which would at least make it a little more plausible to conduct trading and get support.
Weapon attachments are poorly done as well. I purchased an ACOG TA31 and an Aimpoint T1 using in game currency, expecting to be able to put these on my HK416 assault rifle. But for some reason I can't. But I could attach the ACOG to a shotgun?!?! What the hell? For what reason would Ubisoft not allow me to add an ACOG of T1 red dot sight to my HK416, especially when they are marketing the game and mechanics as being realistic. An ACOG on a shotgun is nuts.
All of this is immersion-breaking, and is counter to the idea promoted by Ubisoft that this is a survival type game, you're on your own (until you walk into your main encampment and find there are 10 or so other Ghosts in the community hub area that you have to walk through to get to anything else!!!).
The story so far is ok, but the way the story is developed is poor. Voice acting is mostly wooden (it sounds like some of the voice actors were just bored or confused with what they were recording). The cut scenes are usually long winded, lack any sense of drama, and the facial expressions on the characters are flat. Lipsync is poor, and voices cut in and out, meaning if you have subtitles turned off (as I do to improve immersion) you can miss parts of the dialogue. Speaking of which, the dialogue is sometimes cheesy beyond belief.
Non-player characters in the wild react to you in bizarre ways, or alternatively don't react to you at all. I have walked right up to two individual Outcasts in the wild, and they don't even acknowledge my existence. No reaction to my presence in any way.
The helicopter camera and piloting controls are clunky.
The slip and slide thing on hillsides is something a lot of people complain about, but I like it. If you're out there in the wild on your own, taking care of where and how you walk is important. Sprained ankles, or falling and getting other injuries, is a real issue, and I like that this is in the game. If you just crouch before you walk down a hill, you can get down more slowly, but safely. However you can then apply this to walking down a 4-5m rock cliff, and somehow get down unscathed. Silly.
And why to suppressors reduce damage? They don't in the real world, and at least in Wildlands you could unlock a skill which eliminated this damage loss. Instead you have to be a totally different class in Breakpoint for this to work.
People are complaining about the microtransaction stuff, which honestly I don't care about. Have a bit of self-control and don't purchase stuff with real money unless you really want to, and almost everything you need in the game can be found in the wild or purchased with earned game currency. However I am concerned that the desire to monetise everything in the game has led to really poor choices around game design and gear and so forth. Like a Stetson hat which gives me more protection than an Ops-Core FAST ballistic helmet.
Overall I am very disappointed. There was so much potential in this game, but it feels like 30 different people with 60 conflicting ideas have all made their mark on the game, meaning that for every good idea/mechanic, there are two really bad ones. I definitely enjoyed Ghost Recon: Wildlands, so will continue playing this for the time being, but no way will I be paying real money for anything else associated with this game (like a Year 2 pass or such), and if you haven't already purchased the game I would recommend that you think twice.
