These are my own thoughts and maybe its just a sign of getting older but I'm really not enthusiastic about the future of Ghost Recon and the series titles to come especially after the releases of Wildlands as well as Breakpoint, especially more so with what the CEO has said about the franchises honestly. It leaves me feeling less excited and more exhausted by them
The CEO claimed that Ghost Recon is a "staple open world" franchise for them moving forward and that alone has me feeling like ugh, why does everything in their library have to be open world or a trend chasing experience?
Wildlands felt too exhausting to enjoy for me. The worlds map is way too large, especially given the long loading times. There are way too many instances of go here to click this button, travel this far to the next, steal this helicopter and travel so far to drop it off. Stealth sections where if your spotted you immediately fail, sending you back to the close checkpoint instead of adapting to the consequences
The game left me feeling tired, there's too many cases of "checklist" activity content to fill out the time between the story, everything feels meaningless without anything changing around you based on your actions. I never once cared about the characters at all
The game does exceed well at tactical gameplay, the weaponsmith, character customization but it loses itself to the chore of an open world.
Growing up on games like Ghost Recon originals, Socom, Advanced Warfighter 1-2, Future Soldier and seeing the franchise just become third person far cry without the hunting for animals aspect made me less enthusiastic about the franchise.
If they had done something similar to Splinter Cell Blacklist where your team has a base/hub of operations where we can upgrade our gear, weapons, gadgets, select combat ops from a tactical menu between main missions, side ops, and bounties dropping us off into sandbox levels that are not massive but linear with hitman style ways to approach it I would have been a lot more excited for future games
But if they continue to push towards more games like Wildlands and Breakpoint, then what's even the point of the series at all anymore? It just becomes yet another open world amongst all the others that come out on a daily basis. Outside of the weapon, character customization and military squad it just feels like your ordinary game similar to MGS 5 a bit.
I can already see the downvoters saying that Open world Recon is the best direction and how it "saved" the franchise but man it just doesn't feel like the IP anymore.