Ubisoft has officially revealed Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a follow-up to Ghost Recon Wildlands and seeming to continue on from the latter’s latest story expansion — Operation Oracle.
On an isolated pacific island called Auroa, Jace Skells of Skell Technology claim to be creating swarms of drones for our own surveillance and safety, but it soon transpires that the drones are being used to take out political figures and wage war. The Recon team are sent in to see what is going on; but plan goes awry, and the player, call-sign Nomad, is left to try and survive. Unlike most Ghost Recon titles, you are no longer the hunter — you are the hunted, appropriately by a group called the Wolves.
After an explanatory trailer, viewers were treated to gameplay footage — though it was marked as Alpha, so we have to take what we see with a pinch of salt. We see Nomad limping desperately through a sweaty jungle as he is hunted by the Wolves. After patching himself up, Nomad has to sneak past hostile drones while attempting to meet up with his allies. Nomad covers himself in mud to evade detection, before taking out a group of enemies and finally meeting up with his team. The next section shows off multiplayer, with viewpoints flipping between Nomad, a sniper and two recon agents in a high tech sand buggy as they infiltrate a compound. We see Nomad making use of a blowtorch to quietly break through the perimeter and use his own drone to survey the area.
The team stalk through a fancy set of Skell residences — complete with ridiculously detailed and reactive grass as the bad guys are gradually taken out. The team deploy explosives to draw out the opposition; we see some tight gunplay and tense close-quarters combat. Nomad tries to make sense of some bizarre technology in the room being guarded. Unfortunately a team member takes a shot from a powerful vehicle-mounted weapon; luckily, his team-mate throws up a shield and drags him to safety before reviving him. The team reach their target — someone we assume to be a senior researcher for Skell — and makes a run for it as the Wolves arrive. Then we see a big montage of action from the rest of the game, including some dazzling sights and a whole lot of gruesome up-close dirty fighting. You can see that gameplay below:
Players will have to deal with natural camouflage and serious injuries that can affect gameplay. Apparently there will be four classes to choose from “at launch”, suggesting more to come later on. Based on player feedback, Ubisoft have focused on enemy AI; opponents are more likely to work as a group to hunt you down. Players will have more customisation options with a finer level of detail.
PvP will be part of the game at launch, and you will keep your same customisable character across the whole experience, whether you are in solo, co-op or competitive mode.
Every four months after launch there will be a new episode of content, including a first for the Ghost Recon series - a Raid. We saw a small teaser of this during the stream, but we’ll likely have to wait until E3 to see more.
Finally, Ubisoft dropped the official announcement trailer, which you can see below, which ends with the big reveal — the main enemy is Cole Walker, a major character in Operation Oracle played by The Punisher himself Jon Bernthal.
You can already pre-order the game from Amazon UK, and we expect other retails to show their wares shortly. You can register for the game’s beta on the official site. You could fork out for the Wolves limited edition, including a Year One pass and three days of early play along with the usual physical trinkets. Check it out below:
Ghost Recon Breakpoint is out on October 4th on Xbox One.
