Gamescom: Ghost Recon Gets Closer to its Roots

The thing I noticed during the Gamescom demo of Ghost Recon Future Soldier was how much it had in common with the Advanced Warfighter series. Unlike the original concept for Future Soldier that was scrapped after E3 2010, the new version brings back teamwork in a big way. Sure, you can run in shooting and try and be Rambo all by your lonesome, but a good bit of reconnaissance goes a long way towards helping your team succeed.

Future Soldier is still a third-person shooter, but more emphasis has been put on analyzing the situation before engaging. When I saw it in 2010 it seemed to be going for a much more lone-wolf feel; still incorporating stealth elements and future technology like light-bending suits, but once the shooting started it felt like you had to be self-sufficient. The new Future Soldier gives you tools such as a powerful UAV to identify targets for your team. This was also in the previous Ghost Recon games, but now the UAV can quickly switch from a flight mode to a driving mode, and even employs cloaking technology.

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Though tactics seem to be played up a lot more in the new version of Future Soldier, squad commands didn't seem to play that big of a role. Unlike the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter games, Future Soldier can be played cooperatively. Thus pointing out targets and using UAVs is still important for planning, but I kind of miss the idea of playing solo and hardly firing a bullet myself. I kind of doubt I'll be able to get my friends to listen to take orders from me.

The one big thing I'm glad the new Future Soldier brought back from the Advanced Warfighter games is the cover system. The original Future Soldier had a cover system that switched from third to first-person when you got behind an object. It was jarring, and felt like it restricted your tactical view of the battlefield. The new Future Soldier keeps it third-person, allowing you to zoom into first person if you want to aim more precisely.

It's obvious that Ubisoft has taken a lot of the feedback concerning the first iteration of Future Soldier seriously, I just hope that they bring back a more complex system of squad commands, too. Cooperative gaming is nice, but the Ghost Recon series has always stood out to me as one of the last places that did tactical squad play right. Expect Future Soldier to release sometime in 2012.

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