Ghosts on tour.
The leaks may have flattened the surprise a wee bit but Ubisoft’s announcement of Ghost Recon: Breakpoint was a pretty nifty one nonetheless. We got to see a chunk of early gameplay and tucked away in this latest lads on tour shooter were a few tidbits of information surrounding what we can expect to see when Breakpoint gets a release.
When can you play Ghost Recon: Breakpoint?
The new Ghost Recon instalment, Breakpoint, will be available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC on October 4. In that time, there will be a beta for players to try out though we don’t have a date just yet. You can register for the beta here if you’re interested.
Is Ghost Recon: Breakpoint a sequel?
This was something that popped up in the Breakpoint leaks earlier this week and the early rumours seem pretty spot on. Breakpoint will follow on directly from the final chunk of DLC for Ghost Recon Wildlands, which was called Oracle.
Operation Oracle introduced players to a couple of names that’ll be popping up in Breakpoint, with the mission’s story bringing us face to face with a fellow Ghost called Cole D. Walker (played by Jon Bernthal from Punisher) and the tech company Skell Tech.
All this fits in to what we’ll see in the upcoming Breakpoint.
So what’s Breakpoint about?
The story for Breakpoint takes a big step away from the war on drugs escapade of Wildlands, swapping out the cartel for rogue tech that’s seen rockets blowing up parts of America and drones assassinating politicians.
Apparently, this new wave of killer machines has come about because a very unhelpful group of soldiers by the name of the Wolves — who are even more unhelpfully headed up by now former Ghost Jon Bernthal — have taken over the machines and are using them to kick up a bit of a fuss. It’ll be up to returning Ghost Nomad and their squad of black ops rascals to save Skell Tech employees and, we think, Skell Tech’s founder. It seems like a safe bet that, along with the rescues, we’ll be systematically fracturing the leadership network of the Wolves in a similar style to that of the cartel network of Wildlands.
Where’s Breakpoint set?
It seems that the short-lived backlash that Wildlands went through for painting Bolivia as a collection of destitute villages ruled by drugs has led Ubisoft to avoid any real-life locations. Instead, Breakpoint takes us to a fictional island called Auroa. Skell Tech took to the island in the hopes of turning it into a technological utopia, things didn’t work out but the island sounds like it has plenty on offer.
Auroa sits in a pretty unique position where it has everything from jungles to snowy mountains, and even a volcano that looks like it should really house some kind of evil lair. Dotted around the island are ultra-modern compounds that house Skell Tech employees who you’ll be saving as part of your mission.
Given that Auroa is a remote island, we’re expecting a smaller play area than the whole of Bolivia, which should hopefully mean a bit more environmental diversity and detail instead of the miles of emptiness that Wildlands provided.
What’s new in Breakpoint?
A lot of what the early gameplay showed suggests that we’ll see a lot of the same foundations in Breakpoint that we did in Wildlands but there are a few extra bits in that same footage that shows off the Ghosts in a new light.
Survival is the buzzword that’s being chucked around early on for Breakpoint and it’s easy to see why. This rogue tech that’s hunting the Ghosts at the behest of the Wolves is supposedly unlike anything these elite soldiers have faced before. It means that along with killer humans, you’ll also be fighting drones, automated turrets, and avoiding surveillance drones that (we think) will deliver your position to enemy soldiers. Basically, everything seems able to track you better and work out your movements in a way that makes them an unprecedented threat.
That’s the business line anyway. As for what we saw in the gameplay, there looks like there’s been a shake-up in the game’s stealth. We see a Ghost camouflage himself using mud in order to hide from two soldiers before sneaking up and stabbing one of them. Elsewhere we also got to see how you’ll craft together healing items like stints, while downed allies can be carried to safe locations to revive them (we even got to see one soldier using a smoke grenade as cover so they could get to their chum which was pretty cool). There was a snapshot of a new bit of infiltration as well, with a Ghost burning through a metal fence for a sneaky entry.
A lot was also made of the effects caused by terrain, though we only saw the mud camouflage and how rocky slopes cause you to skid down because, y’know, gravity. We’re yet to see any other examples of how the environment can help or hinder your mission but we’re expecting to see more examples in the near future.
The team behind Breakpoint have also said that weapon customisation will now have a larger effect on how guns perform, with a larger catalogue of base weapons and options for improving them.
What about Mulitplayer in Breakpoint?
You won’t be surprised to hear that Breakpoint will be playable as either single-player or up to four-play co-op just like Wildlands was. Breakpoint will also have a PvP mode available from launch and the dev team has already begun planning out post-launch events for the game. Breakpoint plans to have a major update every four months.
Ubisoft hasn’t released any specifics on what these events will be other than the first major update which will launch a four-player raid for Breakpoint.
And there you have it, everything we know about the new Ghost Recon: Breakpoint so far. We’ll update this guide as and when we have new details.