Ubisoft has been calling Ghost Recon: Wildlands the largest open-world action game the publisher has ever released since last year’s E3 presentation, and based on what was shown during its presentation this year, we’re inclined to believe them. Featuring four-person cooperative gameplay and fast-paced vehicle chases, the citizens of Bolivia won’t just think they saw a ghost: they’ll be sure of it.
Bolivia was previously revealed as the setting for the drug cartel-based story of Wildlands, but the extent that the country has been torn apart is much more than what we saw in the attempted Mexican coup of Advanced Warfighter and its sequel. Recognizing the profit potential of the coca leaf crop in the country, a cartel has taken over Bolivia — all of it. The nation now exists as the largest cocaine operation in the world, and it’s up to the Ghosts to restore order by, naturally, shooting people and blowing a lot of stuff up.
Beginning with just two players entering a small Bolivian town together in search of information on “El Pozolero,” a cartel member known as “The Stewmaker” who is actually a real person, the Ghosts quietly take out their targets before departing for a much larger village on a helicopter. A third player joins up with them from far across the enormous map and, with greater visibility, marks enemies from his perch and transmits the data to his teammates.
What begins as a silent, deadly extraction mission then turns into a car (and truck, and motorcycle) chase, which culminates in a massive firefight on the road and El Pozolero’s capture. The whole demonstration was a tad by-the-numbers — there isn’t too much “new” about Wildlands — but the scale and seamless co-op could help reinvigorate a franchise that hasn’t seen a new entry in more than four years.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands hits Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on March 7, 2017.
Remember when transparent gadgets were the coolest things you could own? Sony is bringing that late '90s aesthetic back with its new PS5 Prism Collection. The gorgeous lineup gives your DualSense controller and PS5 console a glossy, see-through makeover in three eye-catching colors.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/2115459064981512662?s=19
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.