Long gone are the days when Ghost Recon games brought to mind a collection of realistic shooters. Most would point to the release of Future Soldier to mark the days when the slow, methodical military sim gameplay Ghost Recon was known for would be rehashed into the run-and-gun action shooters that retain the modern player bases.
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint has a rather disgusting issue that plagues the experience for new players, and that is an advert-heavy, malicious UI that’s built with the aim to sell, sell, sell.
Naturally, you’d imagine Ubisoft as a company that’s large enough to warrant such a venture. It isn’t outrageous to assume that the publisher has at least five employees making six figures for the sole purpose of figuring out how to get 30% of the newbies in their games to spend forty dollars on a yearly pass early.
Despite this olive branch, which extends more and more as time goes on into a world of no standard at all, something needs to be said about the method in which Ubisoft delivers their “ads” for their game.
If you play Ghost Recon: Breakpoint without experiencing a single popup for the game’s DLC (which is impossible), you are treated to some of the most unnecessary, disgustingly obtuse UI you could ever fear coming across in a AAA game.
The inventory management, the crafting system, the skill trees, and the map, among other aspects of the game, are all accessed, obviously, through a user interface (UI). Breakpoint’s interface is slow to load, clunky to interact with, and in some cases simply dated.
Instead of binding specific tools to keys, as you would in a game like CS2, you throw your tools onto a rolly hotbar Oblivion-style. This hotbar is represented within the UI almost as a mod instead of something that came base with the game, it is that out of place.
When it comes to the map, I see nothing but malice in the fact that pressing “M”, by default, brings up the map but doesn’t close it. Pressing M a second time actually brings up this little DLC ad for Operation Motherland.
Ubisoft knows players are trained to double-tap UI keybinds to quickly get a look at them, such as the map, and so they introduced this ad as something you can choose to look at in-game with the press of the map button while in the map. This is intentionally annoying on Ubisoft’s part and demonstrates the Publisher’s inability to meet their advertising standards in a peaceful way with their product’s environment.
The confusing thing here is that Operation Motherland is completely free, so there’s no reason to design this ad in any way that mars the experience for the average player who isn’t interested in it. More content equals more players equals more money, but in Breakpoint it feels like Ubisoft is trying to make the game a self-contained system of play-to-ad experiences. Or, in other words, they are monetizing their games with ads for their own games. Insanity, truly.
Keep in mind that this ad for Operation Motherland pops up at the beginning of the game, too. The defense here would be that Ubisoft is letting veterans of the game who are starting new characters when they are able to start playing the DLC, but in reality, the early popup is just there to advertise the fact that it exists at all.
The unfortunate thing here isn’t that this ad-focused and UI bog design is there in the first place, but that underneath it all, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is actually a pretty fun game with a lot of things going for it. It’s a shame that this fun, which you should be able to get for the AAA price tag, is held back by intrusive adverts and a UI that bogs the entirety of the player’s vision down. The problem is so bad that Ubisoft allows the player base to get rid of the UI altogether in the settings just so they don’t have to look at it.
TLDR; Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is a fun game with a lot of strengths in its corner. These strengths of weighed down by, among other things, the fact that the game cares more about advertising DLC and Ubisoft monetization options than it does about keeping the experience immersive and intuitive (even when playing on immersive mode). The experience essentially boils down to Ubisoft holding an immersive experience just out of reach of the player unless they can move beyond the incessant UI design.