With its sequel, Breakpoint, just a few months off, Ubisoft have one last gift for Ghost Recon Wildlands players that stuck around, launching free on July 18th. Mercenaries is an eight-player multiplayer mode and a radical departure from the regular game. Part survival challenge, part mini battle royale (with respawns), it reminds me of Survival mode from The Division, but on a much larger scale. Starting with just a knife, players race to clear NPC-held camps, activate transmitters and call in an evac helicopter with just one free seat. Below, a trailer explaining how it all works.

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We hear a lot about level designers in games. Voice actors, concept artists, big directors. Kate Edwards is none of those things. She is a geographer. It seems like an odd job for the games industry, but the more you learn about her work, the more it feels essential. Edwards is hired by studios to cast her geo-eye over the shuffling NPCs of sci-fi space stations, to examine tiny markings in the giant buildings of first-person shooters, and inspect the maps of sprawling fantasy realms. She s there to ask one thing: is this game being ignorant? The answer is often yes .

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Let me level with you: Ghost Recon: Breakpoint was mostly on my E3 schedule out of obligation. It s the next big shooty Ubisoft game with all the military folk, sequel to the previous big shooty Ubisoft game with all the military folk. But now we’re in the future, and it’s got that bloke who plays the Punisher in it.

Point being, I wasn’t expecting much from the Ghost Recon: Wildlands followup. After creeping my way through an hour at E3, though, I’m keen to creep through some more.

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Ubisoft, who make RPGs about a 3000-year-long battle between freedom and order, FPSs about liberating occupied lands, and military shooters so jingoistic they cause governmental complaints, have been arguing for a long time that their games aren t political. Yesterday, they posted an interview with Tommy Francois, vice president of editorial, in an attempt to clarify their position. It did not help.

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A fictional Pacific archipelago, a mega-corporation and an army of killbot-assisted high-tech mercs. Ghost Recon Breakpoint, announced today and out on October 4th, looks largely like we expected from Ubisoft’s leak last night. A sequel to sandbox shooter Ghost Recon Wildlands, trading the ethically sketchy ‘US covert ops fighting the drug war’ setting for a more videogamey near-future scenario. As with its predecessor, it’s a co-op focused game playable solo or with up to three buddies, optional PvP, and even plans for a post-release raid on a villain’s volcano lair. See the debut trailer and a quarter-hour of action below.

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Ubisoft’s attempts to drum up hype for a Ghost Recon announcement tomorrow have been a tad undermined by their own store back-end, revealing the game’s title: Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Pre-order details for a collector’s edition of the game were snapped and posted on Reddit, although have since been removed. If the leak is accurate, then Breakpoint will continue the story started by the latest Ghost Recon Wildlands DLC mission, Operation Oracle, featuring Punisher actor Jon Bernthal as unstable Ghost leader Cole D. Walker. The leak described the game as a “story-driven four-player experience”, which sounds like a Wildlands sequel to me.

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Hey, remember the good old days? Those giddy times I like to think of as last week? When the Charts felt fresh and new, filled with potential, as if any interesting game could take a top spot? Well, forget all that because it’s all gone to shit again.

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We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)

With Steam’s big VR Spring Sale on, obviously the charts are a bit full of… ha ha ha, no of course not. No one wants VR. Same old same old. (more…)

Poor Sam Fisher really deserves a break, but Ubisoft’s grey and grumpy stealth agent is coming back via Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands this week. Confirming the first operation of Year 2 as being Splinter Cell themed, Fisher is going to be teaming up with the Ghosts to stop a rogue CIA agent from selling intel to the Bolivian cartels. Wildlands’ rules of engagement being what they are, I doubt this mission will involve much sassy dialogue with soon-to-be-knocked-out guards.

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