Ghost Recon Breakpoint Has Some Serious Problems (Impressions) -

 shoot those [ __ ] shoot them I don't really do many betta impression videos generally speaking betas happen pretty close to the release of a game and I'd rather just review the complete product there have been two occasions where I have done beta reviews however then those games were anthem and fallout 76 in those instances the state of those betas were so shabby and raised so many concerns but I felt like I had to say something in the hope that it would stop people from wasting their money on a title that I thought wasn't ready to be shipped I'm making this video today because I feel very much the same way about Ghost Recon break point when I was at e3 I went hands-on with break point and I walked away from it feeling very concerned I actually turned to my brother as we walked out of the session and I said that needs to be delayed from only a 20-minute session I could see how clunky it felt how totally confused it was and how technically unpolished it was there was still another four months until launch but I could immediately see that more than four months were needed to get this thing into shape having put about seven hours into the most recent beta I can say with a fair amount of confidence that my fears have been realized and that this thing is not only undercooked but deeply compromised from a design perspective I'm gonna start by saying that I didn't hate Ghost Recon wildlands I thought it was okay I remember playing about 10 or 15 hours of it and enjoying that time and then I hit a total wall as I surveyed the absolutely gigantic map and shuddered at the thought of how my numbing Li repetitive would be to finish the campaign Ghost Recon wildlands had a good solid gameplay loop that worked well and after that it became a question of how much tolerance you had for repeating that loop I also want to point out that wildlands had a pretty mixed critical reception but it's sold spectacularly well for Ubisoft and has a community of players that are very loyal to it I think a large section of the gaming audience that it turns up their nose at wildlands but there are a lot of people who really liked wildlands and who stuck with it through the DLC events and the expansions and the launch of the PvP mode Ghost Recon wildlands set up a foundation of accessible tactical action it wasn't as hardcore as the og Ghost Recon was back in the day but it still had enough elements that made the game feel tactical and rewarding for those who took the time to play it carefully and coordinate with their squad it also had a fairly strong commitment to immersion totally it felt right with my squad and I alone on the Bolivian Highlands trying to single-handedly bring down a drug cartel and it's game systems all made sense since they were generally based on real-world weapons and technologies generally speaking the biggest problem with Ghost Recon break point is that at every possible level in every conceivable way this game has absolutely forsaken its commitment to immersion preferring instead to shoehorn in ridiculous out-of-place mechanics that have no place in a game like this whatsoever things actually felt pretty good at the start of the game where my chopper had crash-landed and I had to begin looking for survivors injured and armed with nothing but a sidearm I carefully made my way through the area to take out my first enemy target and secure a proper weapon badasses the US government has it really did feel very tense very tactical and ultimately very enjoyable this all began to fall apart so unbelievably quickly after this mission my first destination was the base camp which resembles something like The Lost Boy home in never-never land a weirdly ideal ik garden paradise that I thought was just for me until I finished the cutscene to see it's swarming with other ghosts to this point in the story I had been told that I had crash-landed alone and that I was pretty much the only survivor but now I'm all of a sudden surrounded by the other ghosts who are all there to do the exact same thing that I am so many story beats talk about how I'm on my own and I need  to somehow get reinforcements to the island the enforcement's are literally standing around me in this stupid cave doing dumb emotes and like why does thissocial hub exist why do I need to see 100 other ghosts running around me all the time like I know we have it in games like destiny but it feels right there because it fits the world and the story and the fantasy of being a guardian it just feels so dumb and unnecessary and immersion shattering here and honest-to-goodness my suspicion is that this space exists so you feel more social pressure to buy cosmetics since you want to be able to show off how your ghost looks to random strangers like a warrior with thunderfury standing outside the auction house in Orgrimmar we'll come back to monetization later I guess though it would be a good time for us to talk about story character and voice acting the ship was taking too old off the island these drones could be the most powerful weapon since the nuclear bomb to decide I had to stop it was anyone hurt I was told a few crew members died I'm sorry I had to choose you know I did not hit her you know the story side of the game was pretty weak in wildlands but I really don't remember it being this bad Jon Bernthal does an okay job at elevating scenes to be honest when he's in the mix things are okay but when he's absent every cutscene seems to drag on endlessly and it has this strange lifelessness to it owing to the flat dialogue and the lifeless facial animations and it's just really painful to listen to these scenes and the writing is awful who's left who made it hey you just relax pal I'm doing what I can you damned superhero here here's another superpower and seems like this really strain the immersion factor even more like look at where Jon Bernthal standing like he's standing right in the middle of this window no cover whatsoever he's basically yelling like should me like this is a game that is aiming to attract people who prefer more realism in their military shooters and my twitch chat was honestly laughing at how ridiculous the entire framing of this scene was all of this would be pretty forgivable though if the core gameplay loop was strong but from what I can tell it absolutely is not for a long list of reasons and that the absolute top of that list is the shoehorn RPG light lute game that has been implemented here there's been a lot of commentary that breakpoint is like a ludus shooter but this is really inaccurate and misleading ludus shooters are games that are defined by their hunt for loot and where the loot can have various random properties allowing you to endlessly chase different bills and get better stats breck point is not like that break point is an RPG light where the equipment you find scattered throughout the world has levels attached to them and those levels combine to create your gear score and you need a high enough gear score to be able to tackle certain enemies it's almost identical to fire cry new dawn which is not a Luna shooter but an action game with RPG elements so I have two simple questions here number one why the [ __ ] is this in the game and number two how could you [ __ ] up the implementation of this system so badly on the first question why is this in Ghost Recon why does every single game in the Ubisoft portfolio need to have these RPG mechanics shoehorned in why do all of their games need to end up feeling almost identical to the other why does a tactical real-world setting military shooter need RPG mechanics that fit better in Borderlands than they do in Band of Brothers I think the answer that question is again monetization but again we'll come back to that later the second question I had is how on earth could you have stuffed up the implementation of this so badly on weapons

I have attachments I can unlock that improve specific stats like recoil or accuracy or whatever but I also have like magic perk points that I can vest in the guns to make them magically more powerful and look how little difference it makes I mean I'm zoomed right in here and you can see barely any difference it's like what is the point of this [ __ ] upgrade system if the stat differentials are going to be this small but there's a fundamental question to be asked about the value of a system like this in a game like this see looters and RPGs benefit from these stat systems because they have relative power scales thatimpact how much damage we do to board sponge enemies it works in the division and destiny and Borderlands and warframe because enemies don't die from one headshot so I need more sustained DPS here if you shoot an enemy in the head and they aren't wearing a helmet they die why the [ __ ] do I need a sniper rifle that does 22 damage instead of 21 damage when a single bullet is going to kill the target regardless the answer can partly be found in the new drone enemies which scattered the island since human enemies cannot be bullet sponges these drones are the crutch that gets leaned on they can be as spongy as the developers like and they serve as the gear check that validates all of this RPG design the problem is that fighting them is so stupid because I don't want to be finding bullet sponge enemies in a Ghost Recon game there are plenty of other games I can do that in I come to Ghost Recon for one shot one kill style gameplay and it's hopelessly compromised here by the need to have a loot system that simply shouldn't be here of everything that seems to compromise the sense of immersion that Ghost Recon has always striven for this loot system is by far the most destructive beyond this so many baffling design choices have been made that just leave me like scratching and shaking my head at the same time like you know how we had AI companions in wild lands and you could command them and position them around the battlefield and you could do that awesome sync shot thing where you kill four people at once there are no AI companions in this game they're coming later post-launch after everyone who buys it is either finished with it or bored of it why the hell would you remove AI companions when squad play is at the very heart of the Ghost Recon franchise the survival elements are another baffling implementation the game now has a stamina bar for example and when it's depleted you can't climb up even small ledges like I'm supposed to be this highly trained military operative but because my stamina bar is empty I can't climb over this ledge I can of course increase my stamina through perks and also through preparation activities at a bivouac here's how it looks to get bonus stamina in Ghost Recon break point my health auto regens in battle if ever I'm in a tough spot I just sit and wait for like three seconds and then I'm back at full health not even the division has health regen as generous as this and that's a completely crazy make-believe RPG looter shooter as I progressed through missions I uncover clues in order to solve mysteries and complete investigations into what's going on here's how that mechanic manifests this was in the computer lab at this point I now need to just click on this button I don't need to do anything else my cutscene has been interrupted so that I can get booted to a menu so that I can now push a button and then the cutscene continues what the [ __ ] is going on in this game at random intervals throughout your playthrough a plane will fly over your head if you get spotted by it like I did it immediately spawns out of nowhere high-level drones that are total bullet sponges and that just melts you here's what you're meant to do when you see one of these planes coming overhead

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why is this in the game why did the developers want me to periodically stop what I'm doing just to lie in the mud for 30 seconds do they think this is fun like what is this I guess the last thing I say is that the open world feels so empty and lifeless I remember Bolivia having stuff going on be it traffic or civilians wandering around town or whatever it's different here on this island for story reasons but that doesn't change the fact that the island feels eerily empty you'll go huge distances on foot never seeing another living soul just traversing space there are some random roadside events that I encountered but they're almost always hostage situations this is a true story in the space of less than 10 minutes I found four different roadside hostage situations one after the other I was like is there anything else going on in this world or does every mercenary just get their own personal hostage as soon as they arrived on the island there are so many other things I could list but I think you get the idea from a design perspective this game is just a complete mess and all of its weird confusing nonsensical decisions add up to just shatter any sense of immersion that you might have hoped for when you've booted up this game Ghost Recon wildlands felt like a step back away from the hardcore tactical roots of this franchise and towards a more casual friendly and accessible version of that but it was still in the same Lane breakpoint feels like they took an exit off the highway and now they're on the Rainbow Road this ain't it chief ok let's talk the technical side of the product now and in doing that I want to start somewhere a little unconventional AI when we talk about AI we usually file it under a gameplay feature and we comment hey this AI is kind of dumb etc because nine times out of ten it is in the case of break point the AI is so spectacularly dumb that I honestly think it might be bugged in my 6 or 7 hours of play I encountered over a dozen examples of AI who was so hopelessly stupid but I figured there is no way they were programmed like this I mean this whole encounter where they're like four guys in this room and I just plant myself in the middle of a hallway just to test them and then I finally emerge to fire this one NPC bugged out in the middle of a doorway or this NPC who just couldn't see me even though I was directly in front of him with an NPC standing right above me or I could fly my drone into a building and just cruise around no problem only when I was within a few feet of the enemy did they finally see it and do something about it in a little shooter this stuff matters a lot less because those games focus on throughput it doesn't matter if enemies are kind of dumb since the difficulty is more about how spongy they are rather than how smart they are here the stupidity of the AI makes all the difference in the world because I can so easily bait them into places where I can just one-shot headshot them and that's the ball game another possible enemy activity what makes this all the more baffling is that the division - actually made huge strides when it came to enemy AI they actually felt really intelligent at times with their aggression their flanks their strategic use of abilities clearly Ubisoft are not sharing their resources properly because this AI is like aliens colonial Marines level stuff beyond that there are a raft of technical issues I encountered during my playthrough there were numerous animation glitches but to be fair there's not a big problem and they're pretty sort of par for course in a game like this riding a motorbike however is very broken and it seems like the animations for bumps on the road or on terrain haven't been fully finished and it looks kind of like stop motion vehicle handling is us it's so bad it's better than wild lands but not by much and I'm stunned that this hasn't been improved given how much flak wild lands caught for this graphically the game is a mixed bag I will say that it does have some pretty spectacular lighting and when the circumstances allow for it the game can feel really atmospheric and beautiful generally though the texture palettes all look kind of flat and plain it's not an ugly game but it's by no means a handsome one either and those who are looking for a substantial improvement over the you know fairly average Ghost Recon wildlands you're gonna be disappointed I played on r-tx 20 atti at 1440p ultra settings and I generally hovered at around 60 fps which is you know obviously quite low for a graphics card like that and I still got minor frame drops from time to time having read reports from a lot of other people with less powerful rigs it's clear that PC optimization is very rocky at this point and you shouldn't expect this to be a smooth launch the UI is yeah it's not good not good at all it's so confusing like sometimes I legitimately don't know what to click on like here I was trying to do this quest and I needed to go to my quest log and click this icon which was never there before so I could read an email I think even though I just clicked on the email in the game world moments before why I would need to do that twice as beyond me all of these UI choices are so weird and so counterintuitive um PvP was the final area of concern for me because it just didn't work every single time I tried to boot up PvP I would either fail to connect to a game or it would crash my game completely it would just booting me to desktop I did this like six times before I gave up and still now I have not played a single round of PvP in this game because I could not get it to work I tried I couldn't get it AI bugs optimization multiplayer infrastructure all of them looked very shaky and this game is out very very soon if you're someone that's determined to buy on day one go for it but know that you are in for a very very bumpy ride a lot of commentary out there right now about break point is that this feels like a game that borrows so many disparate systems from so many different games and genres and it kind of awkwardly thrusts them together people say it feels like a game with no unifying vision but I disagree with that I think there is a  unifying vision and that vision is a monetization when you view the games through the lens of monetization all of its weird confused out of place choices make absolute sense they are exactly what you would choose to implement if you wanted to make your game as monetizable as possible I think the vision of monetization is coursing through every part of this game and has resulted in what feels like a stillborn product I think the social hub exists so that players feel pressure to buy cosmetics and emotes with microtransactions I think the shoehorned RPG mechanics exist because they can so easily be monetized allowing people to purchase upgrades they want instead of grinding for them which is exactly how it worked in Far Cry New Dawn and Assassin's Creed Odyssey by the way I think the banal daily and weekly missions exist to keep people playing for longer so they can be monetized I was barely able to craft anything after 6 or 7 hours of play and I think that stingy economy tuning exists so that it can be monetized Ghost Recon wildlands had paid loot boxes just like Assassin's Creed Odyssey just like the division 2 has and I fully expect them to make a return here in Ghost Recon break point because this game is so right for so many forms of monetization I'm on the record as being a fan of a lot of what Ubisoft does but they have always been frustratingly avantgarde when it comes to monetization from time savers in Assassin's Creed 4 to loot boxes in the division to selling XP boosters an assassin's creed Odyssey to selling actual best in slot legendary gear in Far Cry New Dawn even though I didn't like how those games will monetize I still liked those games and I felt like they were worth your time and money Ghost Recon break point feels like the first Ubisoft game I've ever played that was developed from the ground up as a micro transaction platform it's like Ubisoft has found so many ways to design monetizable systems across so many different games and they're combining all of those here in this deformed Frankenstein of a game that holds the Ghost Recon name but absolutely none of its legacy Ubisoft has made extremely clear that this open-world systemic monetizable game design is the cornerstone on which they will build their future if break point is anything to go by I think it's a very bleak future indeed you