Game Pass owners can manage their own university in August

Xbox has updated its list of arrivals for this month's wave of Xbox Game Pass titles. And between campus management and the expansive wildlands, there's a pretty ?good spread of st??uff to do in the first half of August.

Available today on the Game Pass service is Ubisoft's Ghost Recon Wildlands, a co-op open-world Tom Clancy shooter. It seems like Wildlands didn't really win over hearts wh??en it launched, but at the low price of free for Game Pass subs, it could at least be worth ??a shot for co-op night.

This week will also see Zachtronics puzzler Shenzhen I/O arrive on Game Pass, on a bit of a somber note. For folks who dig logic, circuits, and the beautiful art of clean, efficient design, that's one to watch. And Turbo Golf Racing brings rocke??t-powered cars into the world of golf.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=_14i0Zxsfos

Next week will see Two Point Campus launch, and debut day-one on Game Pass. The new campus management sim from the Two Point Hospital team made a solid early impression with us, and looks like a good pick-up for those who lik??e? a little wackiness in their sims.

Or maybe you'd rather just dip into the cold, outer reaches of space with Citizen Sleeper and its new, free DLC episode FLUX. That's available now for Game Pass subscribers as well, and hey, the base game is a real good time too. Here's the full rundown on the? first wave of August games for Xbox Game Pass.

Coming to Xbox Game Pass August 2022

• Ghost Recon Wildlands (Cloud, console, PC) - August 2
• Shenzhen I/O (PC) - August 4
• Turbo Golf Racing (Cloud, PC, Xbox Series X|S) - August 4
• Two Point Campus (Cloud, console, PC) - August 9
• Cooking Simulator (Cloud, console, PC) - August 11
• Expeditions: Rome (PC) - August 11
• Offworld Trading Company (PC) - August 11

Leaving Xbox Game Pass on August 15

• Boyfriend Dungeon (Cloud, console, PC)
• Curse of the Dead Gods (Cloud, console, PC)
• Library of Ruina (Cloud, console, PC)
• Starmancer (Game Preview, PC)
• Train Sim World 2 (Cloud, console, PC)

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Jungle Boogie Man

Predator is a movie worth watching 30 times in two months. It's an all-world physique lineup -- Weathers and Jesse "The Body" Ventura and probably Arnold too. It's important to pack on mass. Much better than, say, Transporter 2.

Ghost Recon Wildlands just packed on mass, so to speak. Ubisoft confirmed what we had already suspected: Predator is coming to terrorize the jungles of Wildlands. Starting tomorrow, players are challenged to k?ill the Predator in a special free hunt e?vent that runs through early January.

Those who manage to fell the Predator will earn exclusive in-game items, such as a Predator mask that features thermal vision. More importantly, they'll earn their continued existence. Predator hunts for honor and for sport; you hunt for survival.

The post Predator’s here to kill all the Ghost Recon Wildlands players appeared first on Destructoid.

Another one!

Starting this Thursday until Sunday (October 12-15), Ghost Recon Wildlands will be going free to play on Ubisoft's Uplay service. The free weekend will be celebrating the game's brand new Team Deathmatch mode known as “Ghost War.” The game's ??price will also be 50% off on all editions, with any progress you make during the trial carrying over to the full game, if you decide to purchase it.

Sadly, the free weekend doesn't seem to extend to Steam, but it will be available for Uplay PC, PlayStation 4 a??nd Xbox One. (A PlayStation Plus or Xbox Live Gold membership is required).

Will you be checking out the free trial? I'm sort of curious to see if my save ??file will still work from the last free weekend a few months back, I was about halfway through the game, maybe now I can wrap it up!

Ghost Recon Wildlands - Free Weekend [Ubisoft]

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Ghosts did it without anyone noticing

According to NPD Group, an analyst firm that tracks the sales stats of games, Ghost Recon Wildlands outsold Zelda: Breath of the Wild in the US for March. While this shouldn't be so surprising (Wildlands launched on three platforms versus Zelda's two), there are a lot of factors that make it seem unbelievable. The first is that Zelda reportedly has the highest attach rate for a console launch game that the NPD has ever tracked (coming in at around 99%). The second is how you couldn't even casually skim through Twitter while taking a dump and not see a Zelda related post last month.

The third is that this is also on back of some rather tepid reception to Wildlands. Destructoid gave it a 2.5 in our official review, so we clearly weren't hot on it. Fan reception hasn't been great and even critical response has been pretty mixed. Somehow the game shifted more than a million copies (although NPD Group bases their rankings on revenue earn?ed rather than copies shipped).

Another thing to note is that digital sales for Zelda weren't counted, which could close the gap between the two titles. I'm not sure many people bought the game digitally (Nintendo fans tend to fear digital copies), but you never know. Regardless, this is shocking. With how popular Zelda was (and rem?ains), I guess we all just assumed the entire world was busy saving Hyrule instead ??of wandering around in Bolivia.

There are other surprising (and welcome) games in the top 10 that should makes fans happy. Seeing NieR: Automata end up on the list is crazy, even if it is god tier. Also, how the hell is Grand Theft Auto V still in the top 10? Doesn't everyone already own that?? game?

1. Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Ubisoft)
2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo)
3. Mass Effect: Andromeda (Electronic Arts)
4. Horizon: Zero Dawn (Sony)
5. MLB 17: The Show (Sony)
6. Grand Theft Auto V (Take-Two)
7. For Honor (Ubisoft)
8. NBA 2K17 (Take-Two)
9. Nier: Automata (Square Enix)
10. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (Activision Blizzard)
11. Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 = 4.0 Remix (Square Enix)
12. Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts)
13. 1-2 Switch (Nintendo) - 19% attach rate to the Switch.
14. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom)
15. Overwatch (Activision Blizzard)
16. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (Ubisoft)
17. Super Bomberman R (Konami)
18. FIFA 17 (Electronic Arts)
19. Lego Worlds (Warner Bros)
20. Madden NFL 17 (Electronic Arts)

March 2017 NPD Results Led By Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Surprising Performance From Nier: Automata [Game Revolution]

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And baby makes 2.5

_{[Spoilers for the ending of Ghost Recon Wildlands, because it's so bad that I have to talk about it.]}

I take back every nice thing I ever wrote about this game.

Yes, Thomas Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (an Ubisoft Game) certainly makes a strong first impression. Isn't that, like, the first rule of running a good con? You get the mark to trust you over the first couple hours, to believe that your open-world will be exciting and diverse. That's when you? pull the rug out, instead forcing your mark to suffer through dozens upon dozens of hours worth of endlessly repetitive missions, a story so bad that it should be illegal, and a series of irr??itating glitches and bugs.

The fact that I've wasted a portion of my life getting to the end credits of this awful, awful game is bad enough -- if I had paid full price for Ghost Recon Wildlands, I would be furious.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands (PC, PS4 [reviewed], Xbox One)
Developer: Ubisoft Paris
Publisher: Ubisoft
Released: March 7, 2017
MSRP: $59.99

I don't even know where to start with this thing. Who is this game even for? It's certainly not for people who want to play co-op with their friends. I gave that mode a shot under practically ideal circumstances; although my microphone was unusable (my fault, the co-op works perfectly on a technical level), I knew everyone else in the party and they had their headsets on. I could only communicate via PSN messages sent from my laptop or Twitter, but that was good enough. I was content to f?o?llow orders on this particular mission.

The operation in question was an instant-fail stealth tailing mission, of which there are many in Ghost Recon Wildlands. It's curious to see a game released in 2017 implement an objective that is irredeemably terrible and not enjoyed by a single human being on the planet Earth, especially after the collective internet took this exact company to task for stuffing these kinds of missions in the Assassins' Creed franchise. Except these missions are worse than usual, because you're often infiltrating a base right before the tailing starts so you have to remain undetected by everyone, made harder since the AI in Wildlands can often spot?? you from across the other side of the map.

We were supposed to find a cartel assistant and follow his car without being noticed. After getting spotted again and again and again (because you've got four operators in co-op instead of one with three AI partners), we decided to send one person in and have the other three hang back at the spawn point. For a good hour, our elected representative made it to the point with no trouble...only to have the assistant get hung up on something and not even bother getting into his car. Eventually, the whole thing fell into place and our man started following the assistant. Somewhere along the line, the assistant stopped his car in the middle of nowhere and didn't move. The AI broke again. When I tried the mission in single player, the car was just gone.

That's obviously a worst-case scenario, but it's not like the game was an absolute blast to play when everything worked just fine. Even when you're playing with other humans, you're still going through these boring-ass missions. Blow up the thing. Kill everybody. Find the guy and then kill him. Find the guy and then extract him. Do this thing, but if you get detected then you fail and have to start from the beginning. It may seem like I'm being reductive, but there really isn't any flavor to anything you're doing. Every mission is practically the same, both in terms of structure and context. Wildlands feels more like an MMO than a co-op shooter -- which is weird because The Division, the other Ubisoft co-op shooter that feels like an MMO, had a far more interesting world and mission structure. I actually wanted to see everything in The Division, but I got sick of Wildlands' repetitive side missions.

Ostensibly, Wildlands allows you to handle cartel targets differently, but I never saw that in person. In order to unlock missions where you take out lieutenants, you have to find pieces of intel, which unlock missions located elsewhere. (read: busywork) Then, once you take out enough lieutenants, you can unlock the underbosses. Once you take out the underboss and the rest of the lieutenants, you unlock the head of the respective branch of the Santa Blanca ?cartel. Since I had to play the opening 10 hours twice due to a PSN cloud save glitch, I handled the preparation missions in a different order, but I got the same results for my targets. Of course, none of that matters, because everything you do in this game is unbelievably mind-numbing.

Actually, that's not entirely fair. Sometimes Wildlands is just actively terrible. There was a pretty crappy mission where you have to kill everyone in a base and not let anyone escape, but if you get spotted (and you will get spotted, apparently the Santa Blanca cartel staffs up with owl/Terminator hybrids) two bad guys will hop in cars and drive away in opposite directions. You will then fail the mission. Occasionally, when you have to extract a friendly NPC, they'll run towards gunfire and get killed, and since Wildlands' checkpointing is atrocious, you'll be kicked back to the very beginning of the mission. There was one time where I had to extract a truck without getting seen, and then drive the truck back within about three minutes -- except after I swapped the truck, I had to spend 40 seconds talking to an NPC, and then I had to drive the new truck back to the original spot very slowly because it's filled with explosives. Terrible and boring! Those are just a few examples of the reason why I've started greying around the temple??s at my young age.

Here's a pro-tip for anyone who already bought the game and is playing the singleplayer: throw up your drone, mark every dude in the camp, and then use your AI partners ??to insta-kill them using the "sync shot." The game doesn't account for this, you can beat whole early-game missions this way! Eventually, you'll have to act?ually do some combat yourself, but the gunplay is bog-standard so anyone who's played a shooter released in the last 15 years will have no trouble at all. I should start putting "tactical shooter" in quotes, because the sync shot is the one tactic that actually works, apart from taking out an assault rifle and showing the cartel why bullets are not so good for your health.

They say travel is good for you, but Wildlands never takes you anywhere interesting -- even the resort and mausoleum areas feel as drab and empty as the rest of the world. The cartel outposts are either tiny hovels with a handful of buildings that take no effort to clear or labyrinthine sprawls with one viable entrance. Everything feels like a cheap movie set, rather than a detailed, lived-in world. Yes, the lighting is great and the vistas look beautiful, but none of t?hat matters if the sandbox is little more than a stretch of land in between objective markers.

Wildlands kinda reminds me of Just Cause 2 in a bad way, stapling that game's cardboard world to a grievously uninteresting "tactical" third-person-shooter. At first, I thought Wildlands would have a lot of potential for mayhem and nonsense. I was terribly wrong, in part because the game is so disappointingly stringent about where you can safely drive a car. The game is selling a vision of an explosion-filled playground, so why am I being punished for improvising? The player is constantly being told by the game's visual direction that it's possible to ride around the desert on a motorcycle...but so help me God, if you hit one pebble, you fly 50 horizontal feet and die instantly. What fun. Call a mortar strike if you want, and thrill at the pithy little explosions that lack any kind of impact??. Whoop??ie.

I was 100% correct about the story being terrible, so at least I'm one for two in my original ass?essment. The game only makes a vague stab at the very end towards addressing jingoistic American except??ionalism, but it's literally a single line of dialogue that seems to exist only in service of a dumb twist. None of the characters are interesting, or memorable, or dynamic, and they exist in a bland, mean-spirited, generic world full of dullards exactly like them.

I only saw the "bad ending" and not the "true ending," because the latter requires players to complete literally every story mission in Ghost Recon (I refuse to play one more insta-fail stealth mission, so I'll take my lumps rather than spend 40 more hours grinding), but the player character has almost no agency in the finale no matter which ending you get. Even worse, practically everything you did over the past 30 hours was for nothing, as the "good ending" lets the big bad El Sueño make a deal with the Feds and gets off scot-free. In a bleaker game, that could be an effective bit of commentary on the drug war. In Ghost Recon Wildlands, it's a sequel hook that doubles as a slap in the face consideri??ng all the busywork you had to s?uffer through.

It's obvious the game thinks it's operating on the same level as The Wire or similar great drug stories, but it's not even close. At best, the gleeful utterances the Ghosts make during the extermination of every cartel member they see is drastically at odds with the "devils avocado" conversations your squadmates have duri?ng the incredibly long drives you'll have to undertake in between missions.

One moment, your partners will be talking about how the cartel offering a college education isn't that far off from the American military. The next, they'll be threatening cartel members with a prison cell where Neo-Nazis will use them "as pincushions for their dicks" or joking about how they want to steal some coke for themselves. Antiheroes are fine, I have nothing against that particular archetype -- the problem here is the writing. Your actions just don't fit half of the in-game chatter, and when everything does fit, the good guys look like sociopaths.

??Insta-fail stealth tailing missions, ludo??narrative dissonance, a huge open world with nothing interesting to do, it's like we're back in 2009 baby!

I don't know if you noticed, but I do not like this game very much. I derived some enjoyment from the beta, where my friends and I poked at a busted-ass open world shooter for $0. That stands in stark contrast to the full release, where I can say -- in all honesty -- I have not had any fun since writing my original review in progress. To see a major $60 Ubisoft release be this unconscionably terrible, especially after The Division and Watch Dogs 2's respective course-corre?ctions, is downright sad.

Wildlands is a bad fucking game -- it completely fails at everything it aspires to be. It's a bad co-op game, it's a bad shooter, it's a bad open-world game, and the writing is terrible. At best, the game is boring. At worst, it's frustrating. I suppose the visuals are worthy of some praise, but you can just look at screenshots for free. I cannot recommend Ghost Recon Wildlands to anyone, unless you're directly related?? to someone on the development team. If that is the case, by all means, support your family! Everyone else: stay away.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

The post Review: Ghost Recon Wildlands appeared first on Destructoid.

Or do; I'm an article headline, not a cop

YouTube's BUGZ-MAN-FR found a button in Ghost Recon: Wildlands. "Don't press me," it read. He pressed it.

The post Don’t press this button in Ghost Recon: Wildlands appeared first on Destructoid.

Country objects to being portrayed as a violent narco-state

Last week, the Bolivian government has lodged a formal complaint with the French embassy over the portrayal of the country in the recently released Ghost Recon: Wildlands. In Wildlands, a then-minor Mexican drug cartel has taken full control of Bolivia and in just two years (the game is set in 2019) turned it into a full narco-state, supporting its $2 billion per week cocaine export bu?siness. As a result, the United States' seediest organizations -- CIA, DEA and JSOC -- deploy special ops to the country to destroy the cartel.

According to Reuters, "Interior Minister Carlos Romero said Bolivia had delivered a letter to the French ambassador and asked th?at the French government intervene," though it's unknown how Romero wants the French government to intervene with th?e just-launched game. Romero also said, "We have the standing to [take legal action], but at first we prefer to go the route of diplomatic negotiation."

Countries straining relations over video games. Life imitates the internet on a frighteningly macro scale.

For its part, Ubisoft came back with an anodyne statement exculpating itself, noting "the game takes place in a modern universe inspired by reality, but the characters, locations and stories are all fantasies created solely for entertainment purposes," before pivoting to patronizing compliments and, "hope that the in-game world comes close to representing the country's beautiful topography." Even if that topography is littered with fictional savages we have every right to murder wit?h spooks.

Bolivia, to its mind, has done a lot to work against the kind of future Wildlands predicts in two years. While it has decriminalized the coca leaf, which has ancestral and medicinal uses in the country as well as status as a cash crop, it has also capped production. Bolivian President Evo Morales, speaking out against a recent U.S. State Department report which accuses Venezuela, Bolivia and Burma of having "failed?? demonstrably" to combat drug trafficking, tweeted over the weekend, "Colonial Bolivia under imperial domination: 37,000 hectares of coca. The Plurinational State: 20,000 hectares. Where is the demonstrable failure?" Morales, who has been president since 2006, is referring to a 2009 constitut?ional change that renamed the country to the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Bolivia complains to France about its portrayal ??in video game [Reuters]

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Blood on the sand

Impressions out of the Ghost Recon Wildlands closed beta haven't been all that encouraging, but I did see some people say they were thankful for having tried it anyway. The early hands-on time told them what they needed to know about the open-world shooter, which is that there's something to its co-op sandbox, but ultimately, it falls short of reaching its potential. Maybe it'll get there one ?day.

If yo??u're curious to see what if anything Ubisoft has changed going into the open beta, you can start downloading the game client now. It's available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, and Uplay, and the open beta is scheduled to run from Thursday, February 23 to Monday, February 27.

Pre-loading has become fairly common, but it's not always a guarantee, so this is nic????????????????????????????e to see.

Ghost Recon [Twitter]

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Screw honor, I just want a 1080

If you're looking to upgrade some of your PC hardware, now might be a great time to jump on one of Nvidia's newer graphics cards. Included with the purchase of a GTX 1070 or 1080 (or a system/notebook containing those cards), you can redeem a Uplay code for Ghost Recon Wildlands or For Honor (not both). Neither game is actually out yet, so all purchases will be grant?ed a pre-order code for th??e select title.

You'll also need to go through Nvidia's horrible GeForce Experience software, but you could always uninstall that after receiving your game. The deal will be running from today (January 31) until March 28, which should give you plenty of time to decide on whether or not you want to make use of this??. It will also give you time to wait for reviews on either game, which is always a plus.

Prepare for Battle [Nvidia]

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Here's the trailer that refreshed my memory

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, revealed last year at Ubisoft's E3 conference, has become a distant memory for me. I completely forgot it existed until the publisher emailed us about a new trailer, at which point the key words all came rushing back to my brain -- "Bolivia," "open world," "drug cartels," -- oh yeah, that Ghost Recon.

I actually don't mind the "go find tons of stuff on the map!" Ubisoft formula in small doses (Far Cry and Assassin's Creed basically), but putting it into the Ghost series just seems...questionable. Maybe it'll be good! We could really use more well-crafted tactical shooters these days that don't try to emulate Call of Duty.

We'll probably see Wildlands in two weeks (!) at E3 2016, at which p?oint?? I will remember it once again.

If you're really into spending money on special editi??o??ns and whatnot, here are the official details for those (yes multiple, this is Ubisoft we're talking about!):

Standard Edition available for $59.99 – Take down the cartel, become a ghost and explore Bolivia.  A few years from now, Bolivia has become the largest cocaine producer in the world.  As a Ghost, you must stop the cartel by any means necess??ary.  Create and fully customize your Ghost, weapons, and gear.  Lead your team and take down the cartel, either solo or with up to three friends.

Delu??xe Edition available for $69.98 -Includes the Stand??ard Edition and the digital Deluxe Pack which includes: the Huntsman rifle and motorbike, three emblems, three weapon camo, three character customization items and a XP booster.

Gold Edition available for $99.99 – In??cludes the Deluxe pack and Seasons Pass content, giving players access to t?wo major expansions as well as exclusive digital content featuring equipment packs, an exclusive vehicle and epic weapons.

Collector’s Edition Standard availab??le for $119.99, Deluxe available for $129.99 and Gold available for $159.99 – Includes the edition of your choice with a Santa Muerte figurine and collectible posters designed by Ken Taylor.

Fans who pre-order the game will also receive a bonus mission, “The Peruvian Connection.”  Players will embark on a perilous mission among the high mountains of Bolivia to break the alliance b??etween Santa Blanca and the Peruvian Cartels.

The post I forgot Ghost Recon Wildlands existed appeared first on Destructoid.

Eww, bloody cocaine

Ubisoft showed an intriguing new open-world game about taking down a Bolivian drug cartel during its E3 2015 press conference and, oh, it's just a new Ghost Recon. That's our Ubisoft!

Ghost Recon Wildlands is a third-person shooter with outposts and spotting not unlike Far Cry, which is fine by me. This time, you can br?ing along three friends for co-op. During th??e presentation, a few different options -- long range, ambush, stealth -- were shown for the same base. One attempt took place in broad daylight while another offered cover during a rainy night.

This mostly just makes me want to play some more Phantom Pain.

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