By Craig Pearson on January 23rd, 2012 at 4:45 pm.
The hamsters of Ubisoft Singapore’s employees must have the most luxurious cages of all the rodents. I imagine their owners coming home with a pile of Tom Clancy books and world bibles and tossing them at the paper-loving cricetinaes, saying: “we don’t need these anymore”. Ghost Recon Online looks like a fun free-to-play shooter, but realism is not its focus, as is evident in the trailer below.
Take the Assault class: he has a portable pack that deploys ‘heat’, dropping a column of boiling hot air over your target and disrupting them. In fact, most of the special abilities are little more than legitimised hacks. There’s almost no chance of me not playing Recon, given he can turn invisible and use a ‘visual interrogator’: basically a wallhack. The Specialist class has a portable shield, a dome of light that can reflect bullets.
It does look like fun, and Ubisoft’s shooters tend to be enjoyable, if rather niche, but realism has been drop-kicked through a fan with this one. Good.
I wonder if anyone on the dev team played the original Ghost Recon. Just curious.
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Once this “future warrior” nonsense started, I think they erased the series’ history from all their employees minds, and imprisoned Red Storm in some dungeon fit only for little bits of multiplayer component development. Well, I know the latter happened…
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Nope, but they’ve probably played tons of Call of Duty…because thats exactly how this game looks.
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What’s up with the framerate?
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Everytime I see it I think Metal Gear Online, which was really fun, though pretty awkward by all accounts.
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Yeah, I’d love a rerelease of MGO with… a lot of improvements to the basic MP-shooter stuff they should have gotten right to start with:
Spammable ‘kick player’ option
Spammable chat text that takes up half your screen every time someone says something, even in HD.
Spammable ‘next map’ option that means that you only get to play 1 out of 3 maps you load.
Quite bad server browsing mechanics.
The gameplay mechanics were great, but the interface was horrible.
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Seems like a reasonable approach to drop the realism, since the heavy hitters have moved into that territory and are dominating it. I can’t imagine anyone with limited resources competing with Battlefield 3 right now.
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Uh, wow, this is a lot more Sci-fi than I was expecting.
“The Specialist class has a portable shield, a dome of light that can reflect bullets.”
And they’re still using lead projectiles?
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Ubisoft have taken two of the greatest tactical shooters ever made (Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon) and dragged them through the mud. I don’t want any of this science fiction crap. I want a team of customisable special forces soldiers, conventional equipment, a plausible mission that can be completed in a manner that I see fit and a realistic combat environment that punishes tactics that will not work in real life. It makes me rage so much. At least there’s still the ARMA series.
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Looks like it should run nicely on my old 486.
Why is there almost no colour palette? Why does it look like Metal gear Online and not a Ghost Recon game? I hope it’s just a problem with the video because that looks pretty weak.
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That portable shield is ridiculous. You can kinda excuse some of the other stuff (heat might be a portable microwave emitter), active camouflage is not that far off into the future, but it all doesn’t matter because apparently you can activate a wall of light that can stop bullets. It’s really sad to see such a great IP abused like so.
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Wow that was sad… not only does the game look like ass, it seems to play like ass. Ontop of this the developers sit there talking about how his lvl 30 guy has better everything than the new player as if thats a good thing in a shooter… THE FUCK?
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I recently purchased Bad Company 2 (I was going to skip it but then realised about the actual characters swearing every other word in bf3) and went back to project reality, BF2 vanilla if I want something dumb fun. It’s not fun to get killed by enemies who have a dozen toys you can’t even try, I will keep playing bad company 2,but it will be to blow up walls more than anything else.
Edit: clarification.
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What’s with the rise of ‘broseph’ designers in these games diaries? The guy at the end sounded like he’s just walked in off a sports field. Maybe I’m being silly (entirely likely), but I can’t help but feel it’s a deliberate attempt to appeal to the populous casual segment of the MW type fanbase.
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pretty sure he just works there
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His last comment of the video makes him look like a jerk.
Sad to see GR go away like this. We already have too many COD-like shooters, and not enough “serious” ones like the old GR.
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IP or no, I am interested unless you can pay for battlefield advantage (level up boosts are fine mind), if you can pay to win it can die in a fire.
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So, wot has Ghost Recon to do with that video?
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So long as it doesn’t end up like Battlefield P4F.
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So, it’s not a Ghost Recon / Rainbow 6 tactical shooter then?
Not interested. Sorry.
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Light shield thing reminds me of the ones from mass effect. Not that any of this matters cuz it’s UBI so if you’re wise you’ll stay away.
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Well its a neat idea done with a nod to TF2 gfx simplicity, but will it use Ubis DRM?
I guess it will require a lot of messing about making accounts; if so I’ll skip it.
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Who knows about the DRM, as that might be expensive to implement for a game where no ownership checks need be performed.
However dicking around with accounts will definitely be needed. It’s just a fact of the times we live in. There’s no Internet based non-indie game designed to make hundreds of millions with unlockable based progress and cater to a fanbase that won’t have some form of account infrastructure.
It’s the only way to uniquely identify the presence of a person, attach their e-peen stats to the person, and track who bought what.
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Haha. Do you remember it was supposed to be Ubisoft’s “big PC project”?
What a great big stinking shit. And Future Soldier doesn’t look any more “good” than Ghost Recon: Online. Advanced Warfighter was an OK game, but the truth is no other title of the series came close to the first one in terms of gameplay. Ghost Recon is another series killed by derp mainstream gamers.
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Not about to defend the move away from realism, but framerate and graphics quality are not an issue with GR:O, the video is giving the wrong impression on that score I can assure you :o)
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What you wrote was: “fun free-to-play shooter”. What I read was: “fun-free shooter”.
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I just read Ubi..and decided not to support this in any way shape or form.
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