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My thoughts on the “Ubisoft way of doing things” are well documented at this point,
with the homogenisation of their design principles across different franchises, as well as their
increasingly egregious in-game monetisation making me consider why we even play games
in this day and age; as the publisher seems hellbent on making their products worse—more
of an outright chore to play—for the sake of drawing a few more bucks out of players’
pockets so said players can be granted the mercy of having to play less of the video
game they paid for.
That said, over the years of doing this YouTube thing and having to get into some critical
mindset about almost everything I play, I can’t deny that there’s something… comforting
about reaching the last quarter of the year and getting a big ol’ Ubisoft sandbox to
switch my brain off and breeze through.
Most of the time you know exactly what you’re getting into as you whittle away at cookie-cutter
objectives in a… fairly pretty open world.
It’s a cosy blanket of mindless action to warm me up as we enter the autumn months.
It was this mindset that prompted me to request a code for Ghost Recon Breakpoint—despite
all the talk of its apparently woeful timesaver DLCs, despite being burned by this same framework
in last year’s Assassin’s Creed, I just wanted to not think about a game too deeply.
What I ended up getting, however, was an experience so strange that I can’t stop thinking about
it; one that I’ve legitimately struggled to find the words to describe.
Let me be clear upfront—this is a shoddy product that I don’t think you should buy,
but one that I’ve ended up having incredibly complicated feelings about that I’m going
to attempt to make sense of here.
And I guess it starts with the fact that even considered within the wealth of bad Ubisoft
ports over the years, Breakpoint is, on so many levels, one of the most broken AAA PC
games I’ve played in recent times.
The game is hardly going to win any awards for its visual fidelity, but more importantly
the technical framework supposed to prop up the experience is flimsy as all hell; with
frequent issues ranging from collision detection, freezing, animation glitches, crashes, to
problems altogether more… odd.
A mission whose cutscene featured characters freaking out about an incoming attack would
see me spending a good minute or so looking for where these enemies actually were, before
a cutscene would play thanking me for my supposed assistance… at which point all the enemies
suddenly started appearing right next to me, as seemingly shocked at my presence as I was
at theirs.
And this wasn’t the only case of that happening—enemies would fail to load into a level so often that
it became one of the key characteristics of my playthrough.
I’d sneak into a base to find it totally empty, only for the map to alert me that I
was suddenly surrounded moments later.
Within co-op, the one thing the game desperately wants you to participate in, I would sometimes
see my partner taking damage from and shooting at seemingly nothing as we advanced through
a base that might as well have been worlds apart.
It’s not just that the game is a technical disaster, however; that stuff was often hilarious
to see play out.
The problem is that, while Ubisoft games have always had that weird, alien feeling about
them where you can see interesting, unique ideas just below the surface stamped out for
the sake of broad appeal, I don’t think any of their games have had quite the identity
crisis of Breakpoint.
For example, there are systems in place here that want you to feel more involved in your
soldier’s wellbeing as they traverse a hostile environment, but seconds later you’ll be
calling upon and casually jumping out of your seemingly limitless supply of helicopters—leaving
the game landing somewhere in the middle of Arma and Just Cause, and it’s as whiplash-inducing
as that combination sounds.
It speaks to perhaps my main issue that Breakpoint seems to lack any kind of soul, or rather
any hint of a unifying vision behind its barrage of unrelated systems.
I hate the idea that developers at any level are somehow thought of as lazy—almost any
game requires an incredible amount of work—but I couldn’t shake that this game feels like
very little care went into it; that people would thoughtlessly pile vague ideas on top
of a shooter framework—survival, loot, a kind of pseudo-detective element and the like—but
with zero commitment to fleshing out any one of them, leaving us with a functional mechanical
core and a bunch of extraneous bits sort of dangling off it.
In short, it was consistently baffling to me how much stuff is in this game and how
little any of it actually matters.
But the curious thing about all this, the thing I’m still struggling to fully make
sense of (and bear with me because this might sound nuts), is the idea that the ways in
which this game is broken are precisely what keep it from getting in the way of itself.
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Thank you to Surfshark for sponsoring the video and now back to explaining why the ways
in which Breakpoint is broken are what keep it from getting in the way of itself I guess.
See, many have lamented the game’s loot system, for example, decrying it as pointless
to have a gear score attached to equipment when a headshot will take almost all enemies
down in one hit.
But the thing is, I’ve never been a loot game fan, and in a day and age where game
after game has gone the quasi-RPG route in hiding every enemy behind an arbitrary numeric
health bar, turning even minion-level foes into bullet sponges, it was surprisingly refreshing
to have a game simply reward good accuracy, even if that never seemed like Breakpoint’s
intent.
It means that the loot system (arguably the basis of the game’s progression and economy)
is ill-thought out to the point of being legitimately busted (I mean the thought of buying any of
the much-discussed microtransactions never crossed my mind thanks to how many skill points
were doled out and how miniscule their effects ended up being), and my gameplay experience
was decidedly better for it—removing the abstraction of numbers and letting me focus
on the moment-to-moment action.
In fact, part of the reason the game’s technical state is so disheartening is that the tactical
core of it all, when it works is quite often exciting.
For all that the enemy’s threat lies more with your relative fragility and their ability
to bombard you rather than outsmart you, I’m not kidding when I say that, combined with
the game’s wide open arenas, each of my encounters ended up dynamically moving along
a kind of narrative spectrum, from Rambo to Commando—toying with my prey from afar,
then being forced to move around the uneven terrain in order to change my vantage point
until I realise that there’s nowhere else to go and things get a bit explosion-y.
Despite the garish reminders that this game is apparently optimised for co-op, I had way
more fun taking on the challenge of essentially playing all the classes myself; suddenly the
mindless action I’d signed up for became a lot more tense and involved.
All of this came with occasional moments of emergent gameplay where a clockwork system
such as a train would interrupt an otherwise breathless gunfight, creating a standoff as
the enemies advancing on me were forced to stop, allowing me a crucial moment to focus.
Moments like this provide an ebb and flow—hell, almost a kind of a unique micronarrative within
many combat encounters—that makes simply inhabiting the role of the lone wolf anxiously
navigating a hostile environment far more compelling than the absolute waste of a plot
driving it all.
And I mean it when I say the environment is hostile.
I actually found the world design here kind of fascinating, because unlike the colourful
recreation of San Francisco found in Watch Dogs 2 or the jungle gym Odyssey managed to
create out of ancient Greek history, Breakpoint is neither pretty to look at nor fun to navigate.
It’s not like you’re exploring the ruins of a once-great technical civilisation gone
awry, that thing we’ve seen in games a million times before; no, the cyber utopia shown in
the game’s intro gives way to something less coherent than that.
This is a barren expanse broken up with the occasional glut of angular, some might call
it ugly, architecture.
It ends up feeling less like a world in which nature has taken back its rightful place,
as much as technology never really getting a chance to start; where what residential
infrastructure you do come across is often full of NPCs going about their daily lives,
yet still feels hollow, distant and empty.
Sometimes it’s literally a facade.
It’s bleak, uncanny; almost reminiscent of a Fallout title at times.
My grimey nu-metal dude would barrel into town only to be greeted with shock from the
denizens of these weirdly pristine housing blocks and I’d think, are you seeing what’s
going on just over there?
How are you all basically fine?
Why are you not freaking out about this?
Further, the island this infrastructure sits upon doesn’t feel equipped to hold it, leaving
me questioning not only the purpose of these areas, but how you’d even get there under
normal circumstances.
See, most games try to get you from point A to B as efficiently as possible, whereas
here I’d sometimes spend more time figuring out how to climb a mountain than I would dealing
with the fairly innocuous objective at the top of it.
I’d trip up while trying to carefully descend into an enemy base and end up tumbling down
like a cartoon doofus.
This world is so weirdly laid out, so slapdash that it doesn’t feel like it was meant to
be traversed by a video game character; like the devs just randomly generated Jungle Landscape
#5 and said “sure, that’ll do”.
And you know what?
In a more carefully thought out game with a more focused vision, that might not necessarily
be the worst thing.
See, all of this, combined with the fact I largely played on my own, contributed to an
atmosphere where no matter where I went, I couldn’t make sense of the workings of this
world; I never really felt safe.
I could see it in my character’s run animation as he drearily made the pilgrimage across
yet more land to yet another outpost to perform the exact same function he always did—he
was as exhausted as I was becoming; as broken by the game as the game itself was broken.
And as much as the survival system this animation was tied to proves to be almost meaningless,
it did get me thinking.
The game is clearly a janky mess but the feelings that that invoked—desolation, loneliness,
powerlessness, etc.—are these emotions really that undesirable in a game about being a soldier,
trapped in a hostile world filled with people trying to kill you?
This is a game that would sometimes have me aiming at a rock in the distance waiting for
it to move—the game’s building blocks were so unstable, its visuals so muddy and
prone to glitches, that I found myself growing to distrust the very fundamentals of its world
to the point that it told me a lot about my character’s state of mind and where have
I seen that in war games before?
Let me be clear here because it might sound like I’m making excuses for a bad game—nothing
positive here feels like the result of carefully thought out design.
In fact, it’s the opposite.
I get the feeling that if everything had gone right, if Breakpoint had been the game the
developers intended it to be, it would try to convey the hardships of being a soldier
by making you stop to drink some water every so often.
Because that system has so little impact, you experience what it’s like to survive
in an unfriendly environment simply by trying to navigate said user-unfriendly environment.
All of this is to say that if everything had gone to plan, Breakpoint would have been exactly
the kind of game I expected when I requested that code weeks ago—empty calorie action
to turn my mind off to while lamenting how microtransactions were holding the game back,
I suppose.
Instead, I’m now thinking of the ways games could purposefully subvert the accepted technical
norms of the medium in order to more effectively capture the grim realities of being a soldier
on the battlefield.
That doesn’t make Breakpoint worthy of your purchase, not by a long shot, but at the very
least, it did make me feel like all that time I put into this shambolic video game, was
at least not totally wasted.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Ghost Recon Breakpoint.
Thank you again to Surfshark for sponsoring the video and for the aforementioned offer
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Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Sivaas, Artjom Vitsjuk, Mlemonides the Unwise, Hibiya
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And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I will see you next time.