Quick Look: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

I only now realize they are trying to be funny with their mission introductions and poke fun at Hitman. You'd expect them to detail the mission and its objectives, but instead they tell you the procedure for creating coke, which is completely irrelevant. It is a good joke in theory. They don't nail it well though.

I don't think they are commenting on the Mark & Execute mechanic in that context though. In both Conviction and Blacklist, M&E only became available after stealth takedowns. Here, you can just wait for it to recharge while staying in the back out of sight. That's kind of lame.

Sums it all up about the game basically.

I don't know the details of cocaine production myself so I couldn't pick this out but thought it was odd. But it's amazing. It'd be hilarious if it was some Bolivian guy they paid to tell them about the coke trade fucking with them.

I've really been enjoying this game single player and with a friend. Sometimes I just want to jump into the world do a couple side missions and move on. Other times I want to take the time to do the story missions. Yeah it has jank and it isn't perfect but it's far from as terrible as people think it is. I guess the good thing about GB thinking it sucks is I don't have to listen to them endlessly talk about it on every Bombcast.

Holy hell, that woman speaking over the radio sounds just like one of the advisers from Tropico.

I'm usually one to agree with Jeff on most things, but his persistence to play this game solo is also one of the main reasons why he dislikes it the most. This game from the onset was meant to be multiplayer and cooperatively be played, albeit better with friends and not strangers (sure...). You wouldn't play Gears of War 4 horde mode solo, so why do that with this?

Need a Sicarrio video game that achieves the movie's goal of making me feel like absolute shit

Man, no kidding. I'm a bit of a military gear fetishist but it weirds me right the fuck out when their logos are plastered everywhere in games. That last Medal of Honor game was maybe the worst offender. Reminds me of the weirdness around the military lending out stuff to Hollywood movies and adding weird semi-propaganda restrictions to go along with it.

What a dumb fucking mediocre game.

Mediocre Morsov!

Exactly what I was going to say.

I feel like the people that made this game also were the creative "geniuses" behind games like Battlefield: Hardline.

So incredibly tone-deaf.

While the games SHOULD be similar, I could only wish that was true, because otherwise that's an incredible insult to how much fun The Division actually is.

@nukleon: May have been intentional. They might not want to provide a "drug recipe" in their game, even though the information is super available online. They must have done some amount of research, otherwise they wouldn't have mentioned potassium permanagnate. Plus how she went out of her way like "Lime, yes I said lime", fully expecting that people would find that detail a bit ridiculous.

Also the mention of pyrolusite, a precursor to potassium permanaganate. I wonder if they did research into the clandestine production of potassium permanaganate. I have heard that that was going on, but I don't know what production routes they would use for that.

@nukleon: Hungry_Yet?

It's a very intentional choice to run down the recipe, creatively. If their creative decision was somehow to make a joke about using citrus instead well that is a real shitty joke and this whole briefing being a jokey recipe for cocaine... what is going on with that? I wouldn't get that either.

I really wanted to see a Jeff, Brad, Dan, and Vinny Quick Look of this. Damnit Ubisoft. You screwed it up!

What, haven't you ever heard the famous song "You Put the Lime in the Coca Pot"???

I said doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?

I said doctor, sync shots turn this game to cake

I said doctor, terrible ain't hyperbole

I said doctor, and the baby makes three

What is the time to "fuckstick" for this quick look?

Weird that Jeff's had issue with public multiplayer randos all doing their own thing. In my experience some people do that, but most people entering multiplayer want to actually play multiplayer. They want to be part of a single unit. Sometimes they're absolutely terrible at stealth, but for the most part they follow the other players and do the mission other players are doing. I used public matchmaking to find people who played the game similarly to me and now I have a handful of people on my friends list who I can play well with.

Also though, I've been playing on PC. If people don't have a mic they at least all have a keyboard. Tight, quick communication isn't really necessary, so a team on mics is nice but not crucial. Also, by default they set mics to always on. You can change it to push-to-talk but that works terribly because sometimes the game gets glitched and that push-to-talk button doesn't activate the mic in situations. Like I had an issue where whenever I was in a vehicle or using the drone it wouldn't let me use push-to-talk.

I'd play Tron Clancy's Cyberlands.

I played the beta of this game with a friend for four hours. We played on the second hardest difficulty, and then the hardest difficulty. It felt like one of the most rote open world games ever made. The game is really boring and isn't a challenge unless you put it on the hardest difficulty, at which point combat becomes less boring, but more monotonous. It isn't exciting to explore new areas, despite the map being absolutely beautiful. The scenery really is the star of the show here. It really just feels like they made Ubisoft: The Game.

Was this running at 4K on a PS4 Pro?

I'm thinking it might be on my end, because I haven't seen anyone else mention it, but the framerate in this video seems really, really bad. I admit I'm a bit of a framerate snob, but this video made me feel a bit ill, like watching something with really bad frame pacing can do.

The foliage seems like the worst of it, so maybe the engine just animates the grass at half frame rate or something and that's throwing me off?

EDIT: Something inside me still wants to play this game, even though it seems like a pretty boring, rote open world game, as well as being tonally confused.

@nukleon: I agree that it's super weird pacing and tone wise, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was an intentional goof by a video producer, especially considering some of the other imagery like the literal "special sauce".

I lick a lime after I snort my mounds.

This is essentially 'The Division 2'.

Ubisoft keep making such stupid childish games. It's so lame.

And here we all are, still wishing for a new Mercenaries that blends the original game with Just Cause, Shadow of Mordor and maybe a few other bits here and there.

Man at 11:42 they are trying to the Hitman style mission briefing, the actress even fades in and out of the Hitman ladies intonation, but it sounds so weird as the Wildlands one is American...trying to talk like a RP Brit.

@heatdrive88:

Totally.The tone is all over the place. The seriousness of the briefing videos, or the ridiculous and offensively bad squad chatter.

Ubisoft should be ashamed. Why pick Bolivia? Where's the rich culture you are talking about? The narcos in the game are Mexican, your radio host speaks like a Mexican caricature, and your idea of Bolivian music is narco corridos. They could have made a fictional Latin American country but that would go against their pretense of serious realism.

I keep viewing this as simply a missed opportunity to make good on Mercenaries 2, but then I remember this is supposed to be a tactical Clancy game and it kinda fails to appeal on both ends. If the core combat is uninteresting, Clancin' it up just provides more options and not necessarily more fun. For that reason I can kinda understand why Jeff is just AI sync-killing everyone. Still, it'd obviously be best played co-op but, as always, it's hard to get excited for a 'decent' game.

And as others have said the tone is seemingly serious and cartoonish in places. That radio DJ for instance is just awful and out of place. Contrast with something like Tropico where the setting is outwardly light-hearted. And that mission intro definitely reminded me of last week's podcast: "Is it supposed to be stupid?"

Ghost Recon: Blandlands

Is this game supposed to be propaganda from 30 years ago?

Sounds to me like Jeff complains because he is cheesing it with the OP AI sync shot and then complaining the game is bad because it is too easy and boring. But he doesn't want to stop cheesing.

So it's Mercenaries but with co-op or three AI partners. Alright, that's not bad. Not super great, but not bad

Cocaine is so passé these days anyway. We're all doing heroin now.

I feel like it's telling that she sound great in Hitman, but the cutscene here was just terrible. The writing is poor, and the VA direction seems questionable at best.

That woman that talks in the boss-videos sounds (around @ 11:00 in this video) VERY much like the same that does the Hitman briefings.

Yeah, I cringed when they went as far as emphasizing they meant the fruit. Not to mention the weird "hey I can swear" tone of that video...

Typically, specifically in films, recipies for bombs and drugs, etc. in media. are deliberately obfuscated or ingredients are left out, because the creators don't want to be giving people information that might be involved in a crime or personal harm. Breaking Bad is an example of this, where the actual step by step process of making Meth is deliberately missing information.

It's much more likely that Ubisoft just made some substitutions in the description, than that they didn't do their background research of the cocain industry. Hence why they specifically highlight that lime is a fruit and not a chemical compound. They know, that you know, that lime fruit is not the basis of coca refinement.

The game played cooperatively is a lot of fun. Ubisoft has also improved the game quite a bit since launch and has added some fun content such as the Predator mission.

However, the main-game's story is fairly trite. So, single player isn't as good as it should be. I still have yet to try the multi-player mode but it also looks interesting. So, if you have a few friends who enjoy co-op and sandbox games you can't go wrong with Ghost Recon.

Would love a GBeast series where @vinny and crew play through Wildlands in co-op. I think it could be really fun watching them get into some shenanigans.