Ghost Recon Breakpoint

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About

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a tactical shooter game set in an open world environment. It is played from a third-person perspective. Players take on the role of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony “Nomad” Perryman, a member of the Delta Company, First Battalion, 5th Special Forces Group, also known as “Ghosts”, a fictional elite special operations unit of the United States Army under the Joint Special Operations Command. The game world, Auroa, is an open world environment that features a variety of landscapes, and these can be used for tactical advantages. For instance, players can slide down rocky terrain and use mud to camouflage themselves. Players have a variety of ways to traverse the open world, controlling various air, land and sea vehicles.

The game launched with four character classes. Each class has its abilities; for example, the panther is a class-oriented towards stealth and can throw smoke bombs. The player can to switch between classes in-game. Players have to gather intelligence to progress through the game and can use a variety of methods to approach missions. Players can utilize a variety of weapons in combat, with the player’s repertoire expanded to include combat drones and rocket launchers to kill enemies. Alternatively, the player can use stealth to silently neutralize opponents. In Breakpoint, players can equip a variety of new weapons and gear such as a blowtorch to cut through fences, sulphur gas grenades to kill enemies, and electromagnetic pulse grenades to disable drones and vehicles. Players can carry corpses away and hide them so that enemies would not become alerted. Fallen enemies will leave loot for players to collect. Fallen teammates can also be carried away to revive them safely.

The game places a large emphasis on survival. Enemies are numerous and the game features a wide range of enemy archetypes. These enemies have access to many of the same weapons, skills and equipment that are available to the player. Players need to collect different resources in the game’s world and use them to craft resources such as bandages. Regular weapon maintenance checks are necessary to keep the weapons functional and the player will need to manage their character’s fatigue, hunger and hydration. Failing to do so may slow the player down, limit their ability to regenerate health, or cause them to make more noise while moving. The game uses a regenerative health system whereby the player character naturally recovers health, but serious injuries will impede the player character’s performance, as they will start limping and can no longer aim their weapon accurately. Players can set up a bivouac shelter to heal themselves. The shelter is also the site where players can manage their weapons and inventory, customize their character and change the character’s classes. The game can be played with three other players cooperatively, or in single-player with squadmates Kim “Fury” Hernandez, Benjamin “Fixit” Jones and David “Vasily” Zhang controlled by artificial intelligence.

Work

After working a couple of months on Watch Dogs: Legion, I was transferred to the Ghost Recon Breakpoint team in the middle of the E3 week in June 2019. The main games features and contents were already sealed and fixed by this date. However, the team needed support to ship the game in the best condition possible and I was chosen to be part of this.

In Ubisoft Bucharest, we worked on the entire PvP system of Ghost Recon Breakpoint and were responsible for the Google Stadia port of the game. My responsibilities within the development team focused mainly on the Google Stadia port with novel platform challenges and the goal to reach full compliance with our build for Google Stadia. Additionally, my work also included fixing bugs and issues in various PvP gameplay mechanics, data-driven features, user interface, input, multiplayer or any kind of client-server feature, as well as any other main game issue or Google Stadia specific issue.

Ghost War PVP

Team

In Ubisoft, most of the games are developed across different studio locations and different continents, where each one of them has different responsibilities and features to implement and maintain. In Ghost Recon Breakpoint, the lead development studio was Ubisoft Paris which was responsible for the core of the game. As I worked for Ubisoft Bucharest, permanent communication and connection to Ubisoft Paris and all the other involved studios was important throughout the development and contributes to deliver memorable gaming experience to our players.

The core team of Ghost Recon Breakpoint within Ubisoft Bucharest consisted of 50 - 100 people within different kind of sub-teams. Those included gameplay programmers, game designers, dev tester, online programmers, general programmers, specialist programmers, build specialists, every kind of artist, sound designers, producers, project coordinators and project managers.

Used Software and Technology