The nine guards there weren’t a match for me and my three comrades. I learned that I had to duck into cover or get shot. That wasn’t the wisest of moves, but I was testing the system.

I went in shooting, ambushing the first guard I could see. I could have thrown my drone into the air and then identified each one of the guards and mapped them out. I arrived at the compound and did minimal recon. And then I received the warning that killing civilians could turn the population against me, and that could have grave consequences later in the game. I accidentally ran over a pedestrian who wouldn’t get out of the way. The DJ was a mouthpiece for the Santa Blanca cartel, and I sensed just how much of this country was against me. While I was driving, I listened to the radio station in the car. I seriously thought that Ubisoft could have made this beginning a little more exciting, but I went along.

So the first thing I had to do was drive my jeep on the narrow mountain roads and head up the mountain. But when I clicked on the marker, I found the target was a few kilometers away on top of another mountain. My first mission was to rescue a man who had some information that I needed. In my preview session, I started out on a mountain. Then I dove into the mountainous Montuyoc region, where Santa Blanca was trying to train an elite army. The customization opportunities were endless, and you could make characters of either sex. I made an Asian character with a mustache, and went into action. If we have a target to extract, previously we’d tell you, “Go get a vehicle, take out the guys at this front gate, blow up this generator, grab the guy, get him back to the vehicle.” We’d go step by step and give you lots of clear objectives.” You have to start somewhereĪt the beginning, I crafted my own soldier. It’s not just about relating a narrative, telling a story, but also from a gameplay point of view. “When we’re building missions in a world like this, where it’s so big and so open, where freedom of choice is core to the player experience, we have to rethink the way we build mission structure traditionally. So you can start that other mission, acquire the firepower such as a helicopter, and then go back to rejoin the other mission in mid-course. In fact, you can start a mission, then decide you need more firepower. Ubisoft designed the game so that you could accomplish the goal of taking down the Santa Blanca drug cartel and El Sueno any way you want, said Dominic Butler, lead game designer, in an interview with GamesBeat at a Ubisoft preview event. If someone wants to log out and go to sleep, the rest of you can keep playing.” If you have some more time, you can go into the public matchmaking and find two other guys to join you. “They can come into your mission right away, seamlessly, and you’ll play co-op for as long as you want to. A friend of your shows up online and asks to join your game,” Abboud said. “Now, imagine that you only have an hour to play, so you begin to play solo. If your friends want to join you can, they can hop right in. “Being able to play a tactical shooter in a big open world where you can move from mission to mission and play the whole story in co-op, or switching back and forth between co-op and single-player, that’s never been done before. “If you look the three basic elements here - a military shooter, a massive open world, and four-player co-op - there’s no other game on the market that has those at the same time,” said Nouredine Abboud, senior producer at Ubisoft in an interview with GamesBeat. In this case, the company’s Ubisoft Paris studio set to work on the vast open world, married with a military shooter and four-player co-op.

Ubisoft has been popping out the open worlds one after another, including Watch Dogs 2, Steep, Far Cry Primal, and Tom Clancy’s The Division. The French game publisher got the memo a five years ago when it appeared that half of the games in the top 10 were open world games.

Ghost recon widelands