The two games are very similar. For good and bad.

The first Mercenaries game was extremely good. Dark, gritty, cool setting. One of the games on the original Xbox I most would like to see remade and updated on pc.
There's nothing boring about calling in a bunker buster on a N. Korean stronghold.
Mercs 2....snoozefest, obnoxious, I could barely play it for the few hours I put into it hoping it would pick up somehow.

Splinter Cell DA...it couldn't win. Chaos Theory was too perfect. Adopting the storyline they did was a mistake, but I get why they brought in the daylight bit. The ending started the Ubisoft melodrama crap direction they took Clancy games in for a few years there. Fortunately they've emerged from that stage, or so it seems for now. DA on Xbox was better than 360 or pc, it did away with the annoying minigames in the base. The insipid arming the bombs bit goes down in history as one of the dumbest and most annoying minigames of all time.

GRAW MP was still good on console, but on pc it sucked. Very robust host options for a console game. The first case of WTF?! expensive dlc I remember. Prior to that it was usually free, other than some RSix Black Arrow map packs.

Vegas...horrible campaign, HATED the environments, the F bombs were ridiculous and out of control. Played MP with the 2 free dlc's for about a year. Didn't like the unlocking with rank crap, and the graphics generally sucked, but MP gameplay was good.

I think Blacklist qualifies as a mainly decent Splinter Cell game worthy of the name but it wasn't entirely free of scripted sequences, cinematics and all the usual console-driven gameplay. I enjoyed the heck out of GRO/GRP, too, until they got greedy and turned it into a pay-to-win bonanza. If there is one thing that these Clancy derivatives have in common is that, alongside some genuine concessions to the legacy purists, there's always a certain amount of either greed and/or cinematic pandering that smacks more of publisher input than developer input. To me, Wildlands, at least on the basis of the playthough, epitomises this, too. If you have AI that can follow a certain range of movement/fire orders including, possibly, effective suppression and even a bit of flanking here and there, well that's in the tradition of "classic" GR. The problem is that these people can never resist pandering to the attention-challenged with dopey banter, over-cooked dialogue and cinematic gameplay. Look at the exfil from that village, for example: being able to get out quietly would be impressive but of course there has to be the mother of all gunfights with a turret-mounted MG on a moving vehicle and the rally point is about half a mile away because Heaven forbid the player gets bored with the time and distance involved in a realistic exfil from deep behind enemy lines. I know, I know, we must judge it purely on its own merits, etc., etc., and it's not ArmA but the pandering isn't merely irritating, it is, I would argue, unnecessary. I think it signals a loss of nerve... but that's just my theory.

From a business standpoint it is very necessary and you are correct, money talks and it will always speak louder than the cries from a small percentage of players.

Unfortunately these games are not made for hard core fans of the series anymore. If you want to sell games you sell to the largest demographic and don't place arbitrary limits on your sales just because you want to keep a small percentage of customers happy. These games (Tom Clancy "titled") are no longer part of small developers and Ubi certainly is not the small publisher it was when both R6 and GR came out 10-15 years ago. They now have investors and I am more than certain those investors want profits, especially in the now multi billion dollar video game industry. Devs like Bohemia Interactive and ESims can go for the ultra hardcore realism players because I'm fairly certain that the majority of their money comes from government contracts for the specialty software they create, they are not solely dependent on normal sales like Ubi and EA.

As for the "demo" video being very Jerry Bruckhiemer-esque, I think you hit the nail no the head. It was done intentionally to market to a larger audience (again for sales). Most 10 year olds don't usually have the attention span to watch someone trek through the landscape silently for 5 hours to exfil. Neither do I for that matter even after doing it in the Army for 10 years.

Like it or not that is how it is.

Here is a thought, if we have games that already do the "mil-sim" thing extremely well (Arma), is it really that bad for GRWL to be more casual when we already have a game that does everything most milsim fans want ask for?

I understand competition is a good thing but lets face it Arma is where it is at in that particular area of expertise and it would take an exceptional game/sim to dethrone it (which I do not see happening anytime soon.)

There is the question of editing...will it always be like that video or is that one of the more spectacular ones that they cherry-picked for marketing?

Stealth games like SC, Thief, and Dishonored are best played slowly and quietly, yet marketing videos always show the most explosive sequences or someone deliberately playing it "wrong" just because heavy action looks better than slowly moving in the shadows does.

I would like it if these games had a separate setting that wasn't just some sop to players like "HUD off" but actually switched between Hollywood action film and realistic tactics required.

Anyone remember when F-117 Stealth Fighter 2 came out? The reality of the F-117 was far duller than the excitement that MPS postulated with the F-19 in the first game, so you had a choice of flying the "real" F-117 or the fictional F-19 with A2A radar, afterburners, gun, A2A missiles, and 4 weapons bays.

I flew the real 117 a few times, flew the waypoints, bombed the targets, flew home, never seen or threatened, and got bored. Went back to the more easily seen but also more capable F-19 immediately. These games should offer us that choice as well.




The Jedi Master

The choice is in the players hands.

After spending time with the game I can attest to the "play it your way" design the devs were going for. If you and your team, either 3 other players or AI, want to go in guns blazing you can. or if you want to recon the area and attack under the cover of night ninja style you can do that too. Some mission objectives do require you to "go loud" like when you have to blow up a SAM site. Even still there is a lot left up to the players on how to go about accomplishing this task. Steal a truck, plow through the gates, go Rambo, kill everything that moves, fire rocket into Sam OR sneak in, plant C4, sneak out, detonate from afar, go home and have a cold one. Again its all up to how you want to play the game.

Yes you can turn the HUD elements off and you can set the difficulty to what equate to 1-shot kills (Ghost difficulty).

Help me out here. Are y'all saying it plays like FarCry 4? Splinter Cell:Blacklist?
Super Mario?

How was the MP COOP play?

The videos I've seen were very promising looking.
One group, played cautious, methodical and assaulted quietly never causing alarm. The other group...it was ugly, many deaths...but it was kinda funny. I think the 2nd group was trying to break the game, but it handled it reasonably well.

It's another slightly different variant of what Ubisoft has found to be a winner of a game concept. Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, SC Blacklist (to a degree)...just slightly different approaches to scenarios that are pretty open to how you want to handle them. AC, FC and now GR do so in an open environment that gamers want these days. It's hardly a COD approach, it isn't a reflex shooter but takes some thought. (or so I take it from watching)

Agreed that this was their aim, RK, but I think they bungled it horribly. Every aspect of tactical gameplay, including cover mechanics, tac-AI and mission balance, has been bungled by these devs, to the point at which The Division looks like a masterpiece and Metal Gear Solid V perfection itself. Perhaps coop plays better but in SP the bad combat, messy, unreliable stealth and all the tedious driving and grinding for skill/equipment upgrades puts it firmly in the "life's too short" category for me. I have no objection to this format (open world, persistent, RPG aspects, blah, blah) but Wildlands is an awful mess. I played the Closed Beta in SP for four hours, after which I realised I would never touch it again.

That's unfortunate. Will have to keep an ear to the ground to see if they take any of it to heart before releasing. Kind of late for major changes.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

I know me and the fellas who played it in Coop had a blast and will be picking it up. We had no problem going full Ninja mode on the Ghost setting and pulling those missions off were very fun. The grind/level up is a a "video game" convention that is found in most games these days (for better or worse depending on your outlook) I personally don't mind it even if it makes no sense in the context of the games story. Why? Because I know its a video game. MGSV had a grind to it for equipment and base building as well. Its there to keep the players vested in the game to work towards a goal.

On a technical note the game played beautifully on my PC at max settings. I did not get any crashes but there were some semi-long load times when first starting up the game. After you get into the world I did not get any load times but then again this was only 1 out of 21 areas so I cannot say if there will be loading when switching areas. The playable area in the Beta was absolutely HUGE and if the other 20 area are on the same scale then the playable area for the entire game is going to be massive. On the Xbox One the game ran and looked great too. Obviously it looked much better on the PC than its console brethren.

The AI is AI so expect them to do dumb things. As I have stated before the game is much better when playing with like minded friends. There could have been a little more "hand holding" at the start to explain certain things to players (ie controls, icons etc) but in reality it wasn't that hard to figure out.

This is a game where you will want to grab a few beers, loosen the screws, and relax with friends.

Actually I kinda liked what I saw in Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Of course it isn't the good old original Ghost Recon - How I would love to see this game "resurrected"! But as others already said there's no hope for this. At least coming from a major "AAA" studio/developer like Ubisoft. Maybe someday some smaller developer (yet to be "born") could end up doing something like the original Ghost Recon? In the meanwhile there's always ArmA.

With this being said, again I liked what I saw in Ghost Recon Wildlands. I specially liked that this game will have a SINGLE PLAYER mode in mind or resuming that single player won't be an "afterthought" like in many other games nowadays such as the latest Rainbow 6 (Siege, if I'm not mistaken). On top of that it seems that you can play the single player game in Co-Op (instead of having AI teams mates you'll have Human team mates) which IMO is always a "blast".

Finally and as "the cherry on top of the cake" you can adjust the difficulty of the game so that you can be killed with a single shot/hit like happened in the original Ghost Recon game.
And there's also the open world "a la Far Cry 3 and 4" where you can man vehicles such as helicopters, "technicals", etc...
To me, it looks like a "winning recipe", lets hope that the implementation looks as good as the "recipe".

There's definitely nothing wrong with the concept. It's all about the execution.
The open beta this coming weekend should be a good opportunity to judge.



The Jedi Master