Ghost Recons: Wildlands & Breakpoint - The Bear and Badger

g.man

...And the water canteen??? Can't find it. Don't understand it at all. Game tells me to drink water to replenish stamina. Cannot find fecking canteen anywhere???

g.man

FFS

FranticPea

Maybe they sold out after all the other sole survivors showed up.

g.man

THOSE BASTARDS!

g.man

Yup. Loving this. Currently Level 27.
Been doing faction missions for gear all night. Storming bases Sam Fisher stylee.
Go in like Leroy Jenkins and you'll get bummed in the gob faster than you can blink.
Take your time tho, have a plan, mark enemies with your drone, sneaky sneaky, lovely jubley.

good stuff

g.man

g.man

Sun Arise...

g.man

For Franny...

FranticPea

Yes!

FranticPea

In all seriousness, fuck emotes etc

But gear levels I love. That's just my rpg love though. Gimme that loot.

g.man

I tried to shoot the woman that sells the emotes but the game wouldn’t let me.

g.man

HERE is a pretty comprehensive breakdown of how all the stats and levelling and RPG gumpf works in Breakpoint. If you don't read this, you may find the levelling somewhat bewildering.
Fortunately, once you have read it, it can be largely ignored.

FranticPea

Gonna jump on this shortly, have a good blast on it.

g.man

Water canteen is a consumable. You pick it up along the way. Game does not tell you this and prompts you to use it and refill it before you actually possess it.

Webbins

I need to try this beta but I'm not sold on any of what's getting reported here. It's sounding like a Division/Destiny/Mad Max mash up nobody wanted.

g.man

There are elements of those, but they’re largely ignorable. I’ve sunk a lot of time into it and I’m really enjoying it. It’s just a bit different to Wildlands. Oddly enough there are echoes of Far Cry 2s atmosphere, isolation and sense of place, mixed with a healthy dose of planning and sudden death a la Operation Flashpoint. Sink some time into it Webbins. You’ll probably be agreeably surprised.

FranticPea

Webbins wrote:

I need to try this beta but I'm not sold on any of what's getting reported here. It's sounding like a Division/Destiny/Mad Max mash up nobody wanted.

Just had a blast with Sparkles. 99% of it is Wildlands tbh. There's just a few added bits and bobs. Really like it.

There's a bewildering amount of skills and perks. But I see this as a good thing. You could have two or three of the same class type in a squad, but each specced up to fulfil different roles.

g.man

I can definitely hear something coming

I should probably hide

Kernowgaz

I’m liking the hiding in the bush technique, always a favourite.

Anyone tried PVP?

g.man

First big glitch was a doozy.

Took on a massive camp full of hi-level goons to find a weapon blueprint...

This took a couple of hours of stealthing about silently murdering them all...

All went a bit weapons free on the final assault, but I was holding my own with the few remaining goons.
Then the game punks out on me. I can move my guy around but can't interact with anything, fire a weapon, or do anything useful. This also of course means I can't pick up this fecking flash drive in front of me...

Tried everything I could think of to no avail, then had to resort to running out into the swamp and getting spotted by killer drones, which I lured back to the camp and let murder me in the hope of a favourable respawn...

Respawned beside the base, but now everything has of course reset in the camp and everyone is alive again. Fuck killing them all again! Shit timing for a glitch.

Can't stress enough though how fecking awesome the couple hours I spent cleaning out that base was though. I initially looked at it from the air and thought fuck that! I'm going to get bummed here. But with a lot of patience and planning, I slowly slaughtered every bastard in the camp! Incredibly tense stuff.

g.man

This is really rather excellent.

Paul the sparky

It's pretty buggy like. I lost the ability to select which item I wanted, so I was stuck with grenades and couldn't heal my injuries.

I gave it a good old session this morning though, really enjoyed it. The plane that flies overhead and tries to spot you is great. Also those drones which drop goodies when shot down. They're a good bit of random threats mixing things up in the wilderness between compounds.

g.man

Aye. It's hilarious if you let that drone/plane actually spot you.

Spoiler:

g.man

"Really? This is what I have to work with? The Poundland Avengers?"

Paul the sparky

Captain Scotland

Things I hate from the beta:
You can't invert the camera in the chopper or drone
The bug that means you can't select your useable items
The tank drone things. They scream bullet sponge to me.

Things I love:
The movement. Felt a bit clunky at first but it forces you to think about your positioning more and hopping about like Master Chief wouldn't feel right.
The improvements to enemy AI. They come and investigate stuff like burnt out vehicles etc. and patrol, fight and flank in a satisfying manner.
The plane drone giving you a fly by and stopping you in your tracks. It's nice to feel vulnerable now and again in between the god like power you have over the regular grunts.

Things I'm on the fence about: that gear level gating. They could really fuck that up in the late game. If it starts to become a grind I'll not last long.

g.man

Read this HERE about gear levelling if you haven't already.

As for inverting the camera for drones and choppers. This had me stumped for a minute, but yes, you can do it. Stupidly you have to go into the button mapping section and just swap the stick movement directions for that function. That has exactly the same effect, but yes, stupidly it's not in the main options.

Those level 60 drone tanks are cunts tho. I put three rockets from a noob tube and ten rpgs from the under barrel grenade launcher on my AR into one of them and did zero damage. All I did was massively piss the thing off, which lead to much running away as fast as my legs would carry me. Bastard was still launching missiles at me from half a mile away!

g.man

Also, somewhere along the way I seem to have finally either unlocked or picked up the binoculars.

regmcfly

Really intrigued here by reports from the experts. It has proven v controversial with pundits too - seems to be swinging in a different way from the first. Keen to see where consensus ends up.

g.man

It's an interesting one H.
They've changed a lot of stuff, while still retaining the core gameplay from Wildlands. The trouble is that none of the stuff they've changed or added really benefits the player, and the addition of things like dead enemies dropping loot is fundamentally at odds with the core gameplay.

So much of this franchise is about marking targets and taking them out with long range sniper shots. If the guy you've just sniped five hundred metres away then drops loot, then that massively changes how you're going to have to play the game.

That being said, so much of the RPG looty grindy nonsense seems so half baked and ignorable that the game ends up being neither one thing or the other. It's quite an odd miss-mash, and the official forums are full of people rightly annoyed by all this needless tinkering with the formula.

I think perhaps the most interesting quote that gives you insight into just how insanely misguided devs can be was in (maybe) that blog post I posted earlier.
The devs flat out stated that...we had a tonne of research from Wildlands that showed that a large percentage of players would just find one gun that they liked and stick with that for the rest of the game...so we're actively trying to change that this time to encourage players to use more different weapons.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK???
Your research shows that there is a clear way that a large percentage of your players like to play the game, so you are going to go out of your way to change that and actively discourage it??? This is just fucking wrong-headed madness.
By all means change things up and refine systems. Use your research to find out what players didn't like and what annoyed them, and what they thought could be improved, and then work on that FFS. Don't ignore these things and instead concentrate your time changing the things that your players actually like.

Gah!

FranticPea

I know Wildlands PvP was a bit of an afterthought, and people had mixed thoughts on it, but I really enjoyed it and thought it had some neat ideas.

Anyway, looks like it may be a bit more fleshed out in Breakpoint from what I'm reading.

It's still the same 4v4 mode that we saw in Wildlands, but with a litany of improvements that are set to make it way more satisfying, including a completely remodeled class system, shared progression across solo, co-op and PvP modes, and a whole set of PvP-specific maps.

That, and the promise of two gametypes (Elmination and Sabotage) promises to make Ghost Recon Breakpoint an engaging multiplayer experience.

I'll give it a whirl, could be fun.

g.man

I still think that when it finally launched as an expansion to Wildlands it was an absolute breath of fresh air as far as multiplayer experiences go this current gen. Then they absolutely fucked it by endlessly tinkering with it, and endlessly adding more and more classes and equipment to it. I'm a firm believer in less is more and keep it simple, so they lost me pretty quickly.
Still, I'll be interested to see where they go with it this time around, because the core potential is massive.

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