A smidge of Breakpoint in HDR

Driftwood
Monday, March 30, 2020 | 11:50 PM
1 comment

GSY Video PC PS4 Xbox One

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint had what we could call a rough beginning, to say the least. It was justified obviously, the game they released a few months back was nowhere near the one they had advertised in the first place, and there were so many things wrong with it that it made fans and newcomers disappointed. The recent update which came finally allows players to get rid of all that game-as-service layer if they want to. This also means that it's possible to tweak the experience in order for the game to be more interesting to those in dire need of a co-op stealthy approach. We haven't had the time to try it ourselves but maybe some of you did, but since we can now record HDR content on PC we figured you wouldn't mind getting more in Breakpoint. Enjoy!

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Commented on 2020-03-31 06:29:51

I played Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint throughout all the Free Weekend. I did most of the collectibles and story. The story is very bad, though it has some good moments, but the execution of it stops from any moment to reach a higher level of quality. Most characters are very bland and generic too. And the story has so many plot holes and contradictions that ultimately make it very, very bad.

I played with the original mode, though I tweaked quite a few settings. Unlike most people, I liked the Gear level because it gave an incentive to search for better gear. Without it, you will only be playing for the story and/or the gameplay. Since the story isn't worth it, the gameplay is where it's very enjoyable. However, without progression of any kind, people might as well play another game or just do PvP.

There's also a lot of freakish design choices like automatically putting any gear you equip in a "preset", where every time you need to swap gear - which is all the time since you need to keep that overal gear level at maximum at all times, you need to spend twice as much removing it from the preset and then being able to dismantle or sell it. It's basically some of the most dumb and stupid design decisions all gathered in one game.

There are a "fuckton" of bugs. The last mission I played is called "One Last Thing", which is a main mission required for story progression and is bugged since the game's release back at October 4th last year. There are hundreds of comments and posts about it and a community manager in Ubisoft's official forums sent the development team a bug report with a lot of info from a lot of users in December, but still this "revamped" experience comes out and the bug is still present. Even after all the patches they did there's still a lot of bugs, far more than the usual amount for open-world games.

The game is very bad, because even when you're in the zone and are carefully planning and executing an operation or simply in the thick of battle fighting against an overwhelming force and you're getting by the skin of your teeth, it's exhilarating and very enjoyable. However, those moments are few and far between. I love collecting stuff in Ubisoft's games, so that's why I kept playing it. Plus it was free.

There's a lot of design mistakes and really unoptimized aspects of the game. A lot of times when I clicked to talk with a character, the game started loading a very black screen - 1 minute to 1 minute and a half on a SSD - even for normal conversations where there's no scenes, just talking! Yet when booting the game up, fast travelling or dying and restarting, the loading times were very fast. How in the hell this particular design choice - to go to a black screen - and unoptimization passed any semblance of Q&A and is still present in the game almost 6 months after release is beyond me.

I understand that developers can't always fix things or the cost of fixing some things are too high - time and resources - and are not worth it, but a lot of the design decisions, bugs and complete lack of optimization are very astounding in this game. Almost all quests consist of multiple parts that are like "Fetch quests on steroids" in which you can clearly see that the developers made them for you to waste your time for no good reason.

People love to hate on Ubisoft for whatever reason and mostly it's unfair. They make some truly great games, regardless of whether people like them or not, they should at least recognize the quality put into most of them. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is absolutely not one of those games, this is by far one of the worst games Ubisoft has ever made. It's truly baffling how much bad design, story, execution, unpolish and so many other aspects of this game went ahead through hundreds or thousands of developers all thinking it was fine releasing it.

Many AAA developers are starting to realize that doing things half-assed and uninspired is really back-firing against them. From "BioWare's magig" to "Bethesda's incompetence and lack of Q&A", to "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint's shit design and unpolish", I hope this becomes more and more prominent in the next generation of games. This, Anthem and Fallout 76 are so incredible bad that one has to wonder how in the hell did anyone thought these would be received well or sell well. Anthem's disastrous development is exposed, but nothing from Bethesda or developers at Ubisoft.

In the end, these developers need to evolve and learn from their mistakes, otherwise they might as well just close and let the various individual developers that are talented work in games that will be worth people's money and time.

In reply to

I played with the original mode, though I tweaked quite a few settings. Unlike most people, I liked the Gear level because it gave an incentive to search for better gear. Without it, you will only be playing for the story and/or the gameplay. Since the story isn't worth it, the gameplay is where it's very enjoyable. However, without progression of any kind, people might as well play another game or just do PvP.

There's also a lot of freakish design choices like automatically putting any gear you equip in a "preset", where every time you need to swap gear - which is all the time since you need to keep that overal gear level at maximum at all times, you need to spend twice as much removing it from the preset and then being able to dismantle or sell it. It's basically some of the most dumb and stupid design decisions all gathered in one game.

There are a "fuckton" of bugs. The last mission I played is called "One Last Thing", which is a main mission required for story progression and is bugged since the game's release back at October 4th last year. There are hundreds of comments and posts about it and a community manager in Ubisoft's official forums sent the development team a bug report with a lot of info from a lot of users in December, but still this "revamped" experience comes out and the bug is still present. Even after all the patches they did there's still a lot of bugs, far more than the usual amount for open-world games.

The game is very bad, because even when you're in the zone and are carefully planning and executing an operation or simply in the thick of battle fighting against an overwhelming force and you're getting by the skin of your teeth, it's exhilarating and very enjoyable. However, those moments are few and far between. I love collecting stuff in Ubisoft's games, so that's why I kept playing it. Plus it was free.

There's a lot of design mistakes and really unoptimized aspects of the game. A lot of times when I clicked to talk with a character, the game started loading a very black screen - 1 minute to 1 minute and a half on a SSD - even for normal conversations where there's no scenes, just talking! Yet when booting the game up, fast travelling or dying and restarting, the loading times were very fast. How in the hell this particular design choice - to go to a black screen - and unoptimization passed any semblance of Q&A and is still present in the game almost 6 months after release is beyond me.

I understand that developers can't always fix things or the cost of fixing some things are too high - time and resources - and are not worth it, but a lot of the design decisions, bugs and complete lack of optimization are very astounding in this game. Almost all quests consist of multiple parts that are like "Fetch quests on steroids" in which you can clearly see that the developers made them for you to waste your time for no good reason.

People love to hate on Ubisoft for whatever reason and mostly it's unfair. They make some truly great games, regardless of whether people like them or not, they should at least recognize the quality put into most of them. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is absolutely not one of those games, this is by far one of the worst games Ubisoft has ever made. It's truly baffling how much bad design, story, execution, unpolish and so many other aspects of this game went ahead through hundreds or thousands of developers all thinking it was fine releasing it.

Many AAA developers are starting to realize that doing things half-assed and uninspired is really back-firing against them. From "BioWare's magig" to "Bethesda's incompetence and lack of Q&A", to "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Breakpoint's shit design and unpolish", I hope this becomes more and more prominent in the next generation of games. This, Anthem and Fallout 76 are so incredible bad that one has to wonder how in the hell did anyone thought these would be received well or sell well. Anthem's disastrous development is exposed, but nothing from Bethesda or developers at Ubisoft.

In the end, these developers need to evolve and learn from their mistakes, otherwise they might as well just close and let the various individual developers that are talented work in games that will be worth people's money and time.