Ghost Recon: Wildlands Open Beta (Ends February 27th)

ZGR

Platinum Member
Oct 26, 2012
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The Open Beta was released Thursday including a new region. I am very happy with the results so far. The increased AI difficulty and numbers is a welcome addition.

The game now runs very well on a single 1070 @ 2160p60 at medium-high settings with ultra textures. This game is very CPU intensive so you need a fast CPU to saturate the GPU. In the closed Beta, I was forced to lower settings far more (same driver). I can now enable long distance shadows, very high detail, and other minor things. The only options I lower now are shadows to medium and Ambient Occlusion to off as well as Vegetation to high. Frametime drops are now a non-issue unlike the closed beta.

It isn't a particularly perfect game, but it feels like a coop version of Just Cause with a bit of Crackdown to it. The realistic difficulty makes it for a fun experience overall. I love how easy it is to quickly jump into a game with friends. I play a lot of ARMA and it takes forever to set it all up for everyone.

The game quickly gets annoying with bad teammates. the 60 second revive can be annoying if a teammate is right there... It is also annoying playing with teammates on the Arcade difficulty. They seem to have infinite health whereas the highest difficulty plays like Rainbow Six. It quickly becomes obvious who is playing on Arcade.

A lot of the weaponry feels redundant as well. For example, "His AK-47" (a special scoped assault rifle), gets 1 shot kills yet holds far more ammo than any other sniper rifle. The Skill Tree is also unimaginative for the most part, the wanted system is too easy to evade, and the teleporting system needs work (especially teleporting to a teammate in a vehicle). The most annoying part is playing with a teammate nearby and they fail a mission. This means everyone nearby is forced to spawn elsewhere and lose their stuff. To get around that, I always have a supply drop mission queued up when playing in matchmaking.

Yet I still pre-ordered. It is a lot of fun with friends. Obtaining a 4* Unidad wanted level is a scary experience now. 4 enemy apaches + a horde of soldiers usually ends in disaster for our squad of 4. Since gaining access to APC's and Rocket Helo's, attacking military strongholds with AA defense is a lot of fun.

This does feel a lot like Coop Just Cause (and Mercenaries 2) without requiring any mods to install for computer illiterate friends. A great casual coop adventure free roam game. This will probably be my casual adventure game until Crackdown 3 comes out for Windows 10 (if ever).
 

Andy T

Senior member
Jul 24, 2008
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To me, the graphics look to be much worse than The Division. Has anybody else observed this?
 

nurturedhate

Golden Member
Aug 27, 2011
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Lol, yea I described it as division+farcry+just cause as well. It's pretty fun on higher difficulties but there seems to be some scaling issues currently with groups of less than 4. On the advanced difficulty solo play is rather easy as you get to control 3 AI plus yourself. With just the two of us playing we are short two AI and in a mission or two you can quickly be overrun.

I really enjoy the gameplay and the coop aspect but it also feels like something I could plow through extremely quickly on solo.
 

Igo69

Senior member
Apr 26, 2015
716
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Looks like a skip for me if I can't play alone and don't have friends who play.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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I'm still on the fence about buying it. I've got 30 hours into the Open Beta. I want to like it, I really do. I'll even say I am mostly enjoying it. However, I'm not sure I'm full price enjoying it and I have strong concerns about it's play time. Division, you can reply previous missions or just keep doing open world roaming. There doesn't appear to be a mission reply in Wildlands and once you clear an area, it basically downgrades into a minor outpost that you can wipe out without breaking a sweat. Stats say beta was 10% completion of the game. That puts me at roughly 70 hours to complete the whole thing at that rate. Probably less because APC's significantly reduce the time to complete missions. I've got 230 hours into Division and still pop in from time to time and re-run missions with friends or hop in the DZ if I'm really bored. If this is a "complete then shelf" game, that's not enough play time for me to spend full price on it nor is the story deep/engaging enough to dismiss it as a story game.

My main issues (based on PC, Advanced difficulty, 50/50 between playing solo and playing with a premade 3 man team):

1) Vehicle physics are horrific. All aspects of it. Seriously, they are terribad. The way they handle, the way they take damage, their effect on people, everything. Especially helo's. Trying to engage in air to ground combat using mounted weapons is an exercise in futility. You either have to fly so low and slow that you get killed off by small arms fire from people on the ground or you kill 100 innocent civilians trying to hit your target. Yeah, you can "get used to it" to the point you're not crashing all the time but that doesn't make them less bad. If you're just using them as taxi's, you're generally better off with ground vehicles as most of them make better time. The planes catch you off guard since they behave the exact opposite of literally every other vehicle (doesn't return to zero) but they are consistent so you get used to it. The lack of a throttle position readout makes precision flying all but impossible and makes for rather ungraceful landings. Ground vehicles actually seem to handle better if you shoot out all your tires first. No joke.

2) Bullet physics, namely the on the sniper rifle, leaves a lot to be desired. Far too much drop and far too slow of muzzle velocity. Pistols are far more stable and effective than either of your other starting weapons. Bullet damage is inconsistent on lower powered, suppressed weapons. Mounted weapons also seem to vary widely depending if they are player controlled or AI controlled. AI controlled mini gun, a quick burst and everything's dead. Player controlled? We chased a cartel Lambo and put a solid 60 seconds of sustained minigun fire into it before it finally blew up. I've seen direct hits from the APC fail to kill a stationary person without cover when fired by a person but with the AI targeting, it's like god mode until a helo comes at which point the AI seems to be unaware you can shoot helos with the APC.

3) Team AI is horrific when if you're playing stealthy. I appreciate they are trying to prevent your team from breaking your secrecy. However they completely ignore hostiles and hostiles ignore them back. I've sat there and watched a handful of cartel guys walk arms distance away from my team in broad daylight, both sides ignoring each other until I get downed. Then two of my team half assedly lay down cover fire while the 3rd revives me, ignoring the cartel guy standing on my lifeless body as he does so. That combined with the bullet physics make trying to play full stealth an exercise in frustration. It's fairly solid if you're playing as rambo and going loud everywhere.

4) The general spectrum of bugs/glitches expected from Ubi games. Falling through the ground, things vanishing in front of your eyes, random performance hiccups, getting stuck on non-existent objects. Admittedly for the most part it seems less buggy than the Division beta. But release is in 8 days. The only fairly consistently buggy thing I've seen is reloading bolt action rifles. Repeatedly it ignores reload commands or gets stuck while reloading causing you to need to switch to another weapon then switch back. Especially the MSR. Given the exceedingly slow pace at which you reload and chamber rounds, it's painful.

5) Inconsistent gun/crosshairs height. Sometimes you can shoot over the bed of a pickup, sometimes you can't. Most of the walls are just the right height to prevent you from shooting at something, but hostiles have no trouble shooting at you. Crosshairs will show you clearing a wall/edge but your bullets hit the wall anyways. Or if you're lucky, your 203 round blows up in your face.

6) Unreliable/inconsistent cover. I was expecting to see a lot of Division influence in the game (no jumping, 3rd person camera unless using iron sights, space bar to jump over objects, etc). Unlike Division, you don't snap to walls/cover. So maybe your head is out of sight, maybe it's not. Maybe you can shoot over the cover if you stand up, maybe you can't. That makes the lack of the ability to jump extremely frustrating. You generally seem to be better off just laying flat at a good distance away than trying to make use of cover. Mesh objects seem to be inconsistent in how they affect your bullets. Bullets go through chain link fence without issue, but grates are 50/50 odds of you hitting your target regardless how close you are. AI however, doesn't seem to have any issues.

7) Fast travel resets your weapon load out. Good god that's annoying. Take the time to pick up an actual scoped sniper rifle since you can't unlock scopes in beta? Guess what, you get to hoof it around now because fast traveling will swap out that hard earned sniper rifle for whatever you have slotted standard.

8) Stats are extremely unreliable. This would hardly be worth mentioning, except that when combined with some of the other above issues, makes me wonder if there's a larger damage registration issue. For example stats say I've fired 1,602 shots with the Serbu but only killed 8 targets. Off the top of my head, 8 kills sounds correct because I've only used it once, and that was prone at the top of a staircase, waiting for hostiles to chase me. Those were point blank, one hit kill shots. I have no clue where it's getting 1,602 shots from as I've fired maybe 20 shots? Ditto for the Skorp (which I have listed twice for some reason in my stats). 300 shots, 6 kills? Yeah, no. 6 explosive kills? I've killed 5 people at once with a 203 and/or C4 more than once.
 

nurturedhate

Golden Member
Aug 27, 2011
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The best part was the constant vehicles and npcs just falling from the sky. Anyone else notice this?
 

hondaf17

Senior member
Sep 25, 2005
757
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I put a couple hours into it last night. That's all the time I had. I enjoyed it. Graphics are amazing.

^^ From above poster - agree on two thoughts - 1) lack of cover system and 2) sometimes you can shoot over walls, sometimes not. In 3rd person view tough to tell exactly where you're looking. I like 1st person better.

Thing I didn't like about Division is constant grind to upgrade your gear. Seems like in Wildlands you can find new weapons and attachments, and earn skills, etc, but it's not an endless grind to "level up" your character. Hopefully it should be a more even playing field in COOP.

I'll probably buy it after their first big patch and see if I can get it for $40 or so.
 

Ranulf

Platinum Member
Jul 18, 2001
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Yeah, my friends and I noticed a bunch of pop in and some numbers issues since it was just 3 of us instead of 4. Several times we've had the all clear only to get new hostiles literally spawn right on top of us. Saw weird graphical bugs with with crashed choppers a lot, the best bing a spinning tail rotor piece flying around like it was in a hurricane. I really really missed the cover system of Division while playing it. I really wish it had a better weapon switching system though as you need to swap a lot more than even in Division.

Also, the flight model just plain sucks, especially with choppers. I think I prefer flying choppers with a keyboard than a controller.
 
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XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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Did I forget to mention you can "shoot down" choppers by repeatedly flying your unarmed recon drone into their blades? That's hilarious.
 

pontifex

Lifer
Dec 5, 2000
43,806
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Game looks and sounds cool but some of the reviews of the open beta are terrible. i wish i could have played the open beta. didn't even know about it until it was too late.

I'm afraid it's going to be far cry 2, 3, 4 etc reskinned as ghost recon. Those game were fun the 1st 2 or 3 times you did the same thing, but doing the same thing 57035892953214324255 times is incredibly boring.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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I broke down and preordered it because I know I'll have a regular group to play with. But, I've got a sneaking suspicion I'll end up regretting that in the long run. With a solid team I forsee us blowing through the story and then having nothing to do.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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I've got a little over 12 hours in so far. Some improvements over Open Beta but not much (as expected). AI and bullet physics are by far still the biggest annoyances for me.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=878668204

It's hard to tell from just a screenshot but that's showing when you're playing stealth and are undetected the game is hardcoded to not see your AI teammates. That's my AI teammate physically running into a hostile face to face (repeatedly) and neither one sees the other. Bullet velocity is still far too low and bullet drop too high. Vehicle physics are still horrendous but that's less of a overall negative impact compared to the above. That and text chat issues. Namely when in a vehicle. The text box open and accepts input but it's also still reading the regular keypresses. So your map opens and what not. Seeing some latency/sync issues when playing with a group, but that COULD just be on my side.

As in open beta, I can't say I'm not having fun with it. That said, unless you have friends you want to play with NOW, I'd hold off.

Edit: Oh, also forgot, the game defaults to open mics and gives you no indication that you're transmitting. So, I was still there playing with speakers and my headset was just sitting on the desk. I started coughing and my teammate says "No coughing". I did a double take, then realized my mic must be open.
 
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thejunglegod

Golden Member
Feb 12, 2012
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Does this have a proper single player campaign or is it like a bare bones story as in The Division?
 

Ranulf

Platinum Member
Jul 18, 2001
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Yeah, it has more of story than the Division but it is ultimately, go kill the bad guys in each zone.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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I don't know that I'd say it really has more of a story than Division, it's presented in a slightly different way.

Played another 4 hours after work with my brother. Found 2 spots to fall through the map, glitched through a wall, had enemies spawn on me 3 times, got spotted by enemies with no line of sight twice, and got shot through solid objects half a dozen times. Plus the normal host of bullet physics annoyances. Then the servers dropped us, so I figured that was my cue to call it a night.
 

N2gaming

Senior member
Nov 5, 2006
371
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Hello Group, I have a couple of questions about the game play. In the 1st mission you have to "Extract Amaru" to Itacua Echo, I have got him (a few times actually) and I cannot seem to find the location called Itacua Echo, where the heck is it? I actually have tried this mission a few times and cannot find the place to take him to. Also how do you increase the speed while flying the helicopter? while inside the cockpit the pop-up menu says to click the 'Shift+Ctrl' to increase speed but that does nothing for me, what am I doing wrong, LOL
Thanks
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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It should set a waypoint on your map on the extract point. The helo's suck because the flight controls change once you reach a certain speed. A video would explain it far better but basically, get up to altitude, then hold pitch forward and accelerate. Keep doing that until your altitude starts to drop, then release the pitch forward.

That said, "fast" isn't in the games vocabulary. Straight line speed isn't much faster than ground vehicles. Terrain/traffic is the only thing that gives helo's an advantage.
 

hondaf17

Senior member
Sep 25, 2005
757
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Any updates to this game? Have there been any patches since release? They fixing the bugs and glitches mentioned above? I'll plan on picking this up once they iron a few things out and the price drops some.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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Wednesday's patch was supposed to fix several of the bugs and glitches. It did not. The general consensus among the group I play with is it's worse.

To be fair the two feature enhancements (turning radios off globally and choosing vehicle type for the Rebel drop) work and are much appreciated.