3 Things We Hated
Vehicular Control and Physics
Part of the fun I mentioned regarding vehicles is a result of hilariously bad flips and tumbles while driving. Let’s face it, it happens to the best of us in pretty much any game. In Ghost Recon Wildlands; however, the vehicles are quite difficult to control, especially as some roads are more narrow and undeveloped than the main roads. One moment stuck out to me, in that I landed while on a motorbike from an approximately 20 feet drop, and proceeded to launch forward off my bike halfway down a mountain to my death. While this was hilariously awesome, it was probably unintentional on Ubisoft’s part. Also, helicopters felt quite awkward to control compared to other titles, and I cannot see how I’ll be able to reliably use the guns on them.
Poor Teammate AI
From the very first mission of the Wildlands closed beta, the AI teammates left a lot to be desired. This is especially noticeable when sneaking in on foot. Time and time again, I found myself sneaking into a compound while my teammates were a good 200 feet behind me in irrelevant locations. The teammates were a lot more useful when shooting from the sides of vehicles or if I ditched our ride in the middle of a compound. For those wondering, you can direct your team to open fire, move to certain locations, etc, but for us who don’t feel the need to micromanage our teams, some better AI would go a long way. Playing with three friends would solve this issue, but it is no excuse not to have better teammate AI.
Mission Variety
Most of the missions or side missions that I undertook during the beta could have been done by just running in and killing all the enemies in the area. Of course, there are other missions such as extractions, stealing cars, or taking out a convoy. But they all have one common theme: they can all be completed just by clearing the area of enemies first. Given such a massive open world, it would have benefited more from having a greater variety of missions and side missions. Overall, it was a bit disappointing that every mission could essentially be completed in the same way.
Despite what we loved and what we hated about the Ghost Recon: Wildlands beta, the experience was fun though the game was not as polished as we would have liked. We look forward to seeing more of the game and whether Ubisoft improves the experience when the full game drops next month.
Did you play the beta? What did you think?
***A PS4 beta access code was provided by Ubisoft***