Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands is Ubisoft’s most ambitious game till date. Despite its somewhat mixed gameplay mechanics, Wildlands features one of the biggest open worlds this generation which is perhaps a testament to the company’s AnvilEngine. Another standout feature of the game is its dynamic lighting technology which directly impacts the game’s weather system and day/night cycle. The game’s use of screen space lighting during night time and world streaming logic are all pretty impressive. Furthermore, the world is dense with foliage so it’s not your average barren world…Ubisoft have at the very least ensured that it’s brimming with a lot of trees and grass.
Despite the amazing world streaming tech on offer, the game suffers from a number of other shortcomings. First off, the character models look really off at times. The main characters, the NPCs…they look kind of bland. The animation system seems to have undergone little improvement from the original Advanced Warfighter games. Both the PS4 and PS4 Pro versions also suffer from low texture quality work at several places but as we noted in our review, this is perhaps a compromise for loading and streaming the vast open world quickly.
Wildlands presents an interesting case for PS4 Pro owners with a number of benefits. From an image quality point of view, Wildlands runs at 1440p on the PS4 Pro while playing on a 4K TV whereas the PS4 version runs at a native 1080p resolution. The Pro version also renders a supersampled 1080p image buffer on an HDTV so the image quality is better compared to the same setting on the PS4.
The Pro version also manages to perform better than the PS4 version with a more stable 30fps experience. However we did witnessed some major drops on the Pro version but these were extremely rare. The funny thing about these drops is that they occurred during a totally random situation. We were just merely driving a vehicle and took a sharp turn and the game slowed down. But as we said, these instances were quite rare and may not be experienced by every player. The Pro version also benefits from faster loading of world assets which means pop-ins are drastically reduced along with better texture filtering and shadow effects.
In the end Wildlands seems like a game with a lot of potential and it will be interesting to see what Ubisoft does with it in the future but from a technological standpoint, its open world asset streaming solution has us excited and it will be interesting to see how Ubisoft uses it in future games such as the next Assassin’s Creed.