If I Made Breakpoint

 

            It’s no secret by this point that I’m not the biggest fan of Breakpoint. It just seems to have gone in a weird direction BUT, if for some reason, in some alternate universe, if I was the/a person Ubisoft came to and said “make a new Ghost Recon with these parameters; The Ghost go to an island, drones take out the helicopter, no one can get off or on the island, the player character is trapped and hunted and must scavenge to survive.” I’d say “this sounds like Fallen Ghosts” and “this doesn’t sound like a Ghost Recon game anymore but, I’ll see what I can do.”

            First I would keep the Wildlands look. I don’t know how long Ubi was working on Breakpoint but it came out 2.5 years after WL so I don’t know if there was overlapping development time or if they started work on BP right after WL but if they just kept the WL look that would have saved a ton of time, I imagine. Again, obviously, I’m not a developer; I don’t know how things work and why they decided to go with a different style but they did. WL just runs so much smoother than BP and everything just FEELS better, I find BP too clunky. Like all the little things, getting into cars, reloading vs performing an action, things like that.

            Second thing to tackle would be the overall gameplay loop. Should it stay like Wildlands or should it be more linear? In my opinion I would make it more singleplayer/linear; my mind keeps going to the Tomb Raider games. The modern Tomb Raider games are typically set in large areas to explore but still a very linear path to progress from each place so I think that would be an ideal way to set up a game like Breakpoint. You could explore the area, find little camps of enemies, find some intel on certain gear or whatever in the area and ultimately find a clue as to what the hell is going on. I also imagine that since your helicopters got taken out when you approached the island then maybe the game doesn’t need to be so large that you HAVE to fly a helicopter from point to point and in fact you SHOULDN’T be able to fly a helicopter because of the aforementioned drone attack. So point one, there are missions you get in BP that have you go from one end of the island to the other. Literally like 20km or so and when it’s your first playthrough and you don’t have the fast travel spots it takes SOOOO fucking long. Like why? Come on, that kills the game. I shouldn’t be wasting my time flying from point to point. And better yet is, a lot of the time you have to report back to the mission giver and sent back out so that’s even more time wasted, even with the fast travel. I’ve done a few videos of me playing WL and BP and without all the traveling the missions take, more or less, thirty minutes to do. All the extra time is just traveling and if something catches your eye from point A to B. Point two; we established at the beginning that there are drones that take out anything in the air or in the water that gets too close or too far so why the fuck can I just fly a helicopter where ever I damn well please? I can see the argument of they are Sentinel or Wolves helicopters or boats but wouldn’t it be more of a personnel thing? Like if they had an IFF (friend or foe) tag on the pilot it would tell the drones not to attack? I mean there are some early missions where I steal pretty big and powerful helicopters like, I could just keep stealing these guys’ shit and I could get outfit the Outcast pretty fucking well. Plot holes abound in any case.

            The other thing that Wildlands and Breakpoint don’t really have is unique scripted events. Sure there are some scripted parts of missions where certain things happen but there’s nothing unique about them, they still play out like the normal game just with new parameters. In Future Soldier, at the end of thefirst mission you have to extract a guy and the only controls you have are aim and shoot, the movement is taken care of for you and there is nothing even close to how hectic that is in WL or BP. It’s one of my favorite parts of the game and there are multiple segments like that. Sure in WL or BP you might be the gunner of a truck or told to destroy some antenna with a helicopter but it’s not any different then the normal game so in a more linear focused game you can make unique, memorable events like that.

            With all that being said, I would keep the beginning of the game the same mostly and just build off of that. So you get shot down, everyone around you is dead, you pick up another soldiers pistol, now go. You have to scavenge for everything now. You kill a guy, take his gun. I imagine groups like Sentinel and the Wolves would more or less all use weapons with the same caliber bullets. It just makes sense; you’d be able to share ammo. It’d be pretty shitty in the middle of a fire fight to run out and ask your buddy for a magazine only to have it not be compatible for your weapon so for the most part you should have plenty of ammo if you keep taking it off of people. And if it was a smaller, more focused kind of thing maybe the ammo the guys are carrying would be less/more realistic. I think, if I remember right, you can have like over 400 bullets for an assault rifle in Breakpoint. That’s like, thirteen thirty round magazines when a typical soldier has about seven. So maybe the soldiers you fight have even less than that so you have to be choosy with what you use and when. So with a linear path, scripted events and purposely placed enemies you could get missions like; you climb a rock face by a waterfall and at the top is a sniper that, after you kill, you could take his rifle and shoot out other snipers in the area or something like that. I like having different options, either take out the snipers or maybe sneak past them in the bushes below, cause distractions for them, that sort of thing.

            So now I’m seeing this game in a weird blend of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Assassin’s Creed 3 and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Like the “prone camo” or covering yourself up in mud looked like SotTR when it was first shown off anyway but I think they could explore that more. I never quite understood the stealth in SotTR, like I was able to take out a guy or two quietly but more often then not I couldn’t take out the whole group. Maybe that was by design or maybe it wasn’t but from what they originally showed for Breakpoint, that’s the direction I assumed they were going. I have fond memories of tracking and taking out convoys of red coats in Assassin’s Creed 3. I remember climbing the trees and taking out the last guy with a rope dart until there were only a few left and maybe drop assassinate them or make a skirmish out of it but it was fun to essentially hunt these people and not be seen taking out the whole group, I’d like some of that in BP. Something BP needs is quick melee kills. There’s no reason you should be wrestling on the ground with a guy when you had a perfectly good opportunity to put a bullet in his head or slit his throat. It’s too flashy, too Hollywood and just unrealistic. Just kill the guy and move on. Another thing the game could add in is the camouflage system that Snake Eater had. I don’t think any other game has really utilized camo for anything other than looks. Like, I’d like it if the player could use pieces of the new environment they find themselves in and make a sort of ghillie suit out of it. Not a full on ghillie suit but something that will help them blend in and remain undetected. Optional of course, if someone doesn’t want to do that or just likes making they’re life harder than by all means, do without it. It would just be great if the enemies have no idea where you’re going to come from and, maybe if the game is smart enough, the AI could kind of learn what you’ve been doing. So if in one area you were hiding in the mud and drowning people that came too close; in the next area you’re in you hear on their very loud raidos that they found some of their men drowned in the mud so this group starts checking the mud puddles more, leaving you an opportunity to hide in the trees and take them out when they’ve got their backs turned. Misdirection.

            I’d like the game to be able to support two player coop. I think Splinter Cell Conviction was more about Kestrel and Archer than it was about Sam. I really like the coop story missions and would like to see something like that again so you could have one person whistle, make a guard turn around and the other player could sneak past him then when he’s almost detected the whistler, the other one whistles, he looses interest in the first whistle, turns around and that’s when they other player strikes. Another thing Breakpoint kind of sets up only for it to be disappointing is the main villains. It makes the generals, or whatever they are, come across as some sort of badasses but they’re no different then normal enemies. Flycatcher is like, really good with drones but when you fight him he’s just in a Wolf base, you get a keycode (I’m guessing? I just shot through the door he was hiding behind, killed him and the doors open), doors open and you have a fire fight in a hallway/office area. Rosebud is supposed to be some badass sniper but is just in a base like normal. I snuck in the back of the base, got a vantage point and started taking out snipers. I apparently took her out too. Never would have known she was different than any other NPC. Then there’s Silverback. I’m not real sure what he’s special for but same idea; I got in his base, alarm triggered, had one guy after another come through the same doorway and he was among them. The only one that was different was Walker; he had some drones around him that you had to shoot first before you could shoot him, big deal. So again I look at Metal Gear because they have very interesting boss fights. Like chase Flycatcher out of a base or something, have him hide and launch drones to attack you. Take out the drones then try to find where they’re coming from. Maybe do like The Division 2 and if you shoot a drone that someone just launched, it damages them and do that a few times. Rosebud could call you out to a big open field and you could have a sniper fight like Sniper Wolf. And if you do your camo up like I talked about in the other paragraph it could give you an edge. And if you’re really patient and slow, you could crawl you’re way to her and stab her in the back. Silverback, eh, I don’t even know what he was supposed to be known for but you get it, make these people seem better than your average soldier. Make them special and the fight stand out.

            Like I said, this doesn’t sound like a Ghost Recon game anymore but you could argue that Breakpoint isn’t either. With the overarching story and concept of being hunted down, this is how I would’ve done it. Overall it’s probably closer to MGS3 but I never played the game so I don’t know. From what I’ve seen and heard it’s a good’n but. Is it on PC?.. No, it’s not. Well, I mean it CAN be but. Anyways. Off topic again, what do you think? Maybe this isn’t Ghost Recon anymore but they can’t really make Snake Eater 2. It’s like all these indie games I’ve been hearing about; Safeguard, Zero Six,
Spectre, the big companies aren’t going to make games that we actually are asking for so someone else is gonna do it themselves.

                    @AztecSauce