Woop woop, Ghost Recon Wildlands Beta

It's always nice getting to play a game before it comes out. The "beta" starts tomorrow and runs until Sunday, so at least I'll get to play it beforehand and decide if I'm still interested from there. I've been a huge fan of Tom Clancy games for as long as I can remember because with a few exceptions, they have stayed true to what they wanted to be, which were slower paced tactical shooters. Wildlands looks interesting, but I don't know how I feel about the games that have come out in the past few years with the Tom Clancy name on them (mainly The Division, Rainbow Six Siege, and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier).

Not saying that I hated any of those 3 games, but none of them felt like their past itterations on any way. Rainbow Six felt like a slightly slower paced counter strike with an exponentially less toxic community, Future Soldier felt like some really bizarre cross between CoD and Gears of War, and the division was just weird. I know the Division is a new franchise for them, but it still makes me question the direction the Tom Clancy games are headed because it played a little too much like Destiny for my liking.

I don't mean that in the sense that they are the same game, far from it, just the way the loot, missions, progression, and open world bits were handled was similar. I enjoyed the Division more than Destiny, but that wasn't much to beat when it comes to my opinion on Destiny. My main fear is that Wildlands will be like the Division and that is not a road I want to see Ghost Recon go down. I miss when they were games with decently sized maps that required strategy and team work to get through. The Division does require teamwork, but not for the right reasons. You need more people because your damage output is too low to compensate for the enemies being thrown at you.

There isn't any synergy between any of the different abilities either, they all feel designed to make sure that a group can go in with whatever they want and get the same result as if they carefully planned their ability selections. There is little to no teamwork required in the Division beyond "Shit, I'm down, can you revive me?"

I typically try to avoid watching trailers and falling into any sort of hype for games, but I can't help but be excited for this game because of how much I loved the past games as a kid and continued to like them as I grew up. Ubisoft used to be one of my favorite companies when it came to gaming, but they have been trying their hardest over the past few years to make everyone hate them and its kind of depressing if I'm being honest. Oh well, there's always time for a company to pull its head out of its ass and remember how they managed to get to be one of the big names in the first place.

Well, I've rambled for way too long on this, so I'll leave you with a picture of a kitten with a remote if you stuck around this long.