Ghost Recon Frontline

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About

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Frontline is a free-to-play, tactical-action, massive PVP shooter grounded in the renowned Ghost Recon universe. Ghost Recon Frontline features an advanced class system and large set of tactical support tools allowing for complete freedom in strategic gameplay, with multiple ways to outsmart enemy teams and win every fight.

Work

Ubisoft Bucharest started conceptioning the idea of Ghost Recon Frontline while the majority of the team still worked on Ghost Recon Breakpoint. It was around October/November when the transition phase started which switched the focus of the entire team gradually towards the pre-production of Ghost Recon Frontline. This is the time, when Ubisoft Bucharest started its journey as a fully functional lead studio to develop a novel and unseen kind of battle-royal like game. As the lead studio, we were in control and had to take responsibility for every action we took. Unfortunately, the journey didn’t end well, but taught us a big deal of leadership and responsibilty!

In this journey, I was a gameplay programmer as a part of the core gameplay team which had a focus on gameplay systems and overlapping areas. The work included to implement entirely new systems or overhaul existing systems to fit them to our needs as we built on the foundation of previous Ghost Recon titles. These areas were, i.e., progression, class, inventory, loot, weapon, vehicle, and news systems, various UIs ranging from the game landing page to inventory pages, matchmaking algorithms, user data tracking, daily quests/challenges, and other things. The game was developed with a client/server architecture and featured an authoritative dedicated game server as the integral part to house all managing systems.

Team

In Ubisoft, almost every game is developed in collaboration with studios around the world, where each studio has different responsibilities and mandates. In Ghost Recon Frontline, the lead development studio was Ubisoft Bucharest and our co-dev studios were all part of the eastern european Ubisoft hub, such as Ubisoft Craiova, Odesa, Kyiv, and Belgrade. As I worked for the lead studio, permanent communication and connection to the other Ubisoft studios was key throughout the development cycle to ensure collaboration and that everything was in synch with our production efforts.

The core team of Ghost Recon Frontline within Ubisoft Bucharest consisted of 150 - 200 people with different kind of sub-teams. Those included various kinds of directors, gameplay programmers, game designers, dev tester, online programmers, generalist programmers, specialist programmers, build specialists, every kind of artist, sound designers, producers, project coordinators and project managers.

Used Software and Technology