I’d just loaded into Ghost Recon Wildlands (a third-person tactical shooter released by Ubisoft in 2017, set in a fictionalized version of Bolivia where a Mexican drug cartel has seized control of the country) for the first time on a proper PC, max settings, the whole thing running at a locked 75 frames per second through a monitor that was finally good enough to justify enabling v-sync, and while I expected to notice the visual difference immediately (I immediately did), the first thing that truly ‘landed’ was the cartel soldier twenty meters away complaining to his colleague about something (I don’t speak Spanish and these dialogues are not translated by the subtitles), and underneath that, in my vehicle, native Bolivian music playing on a radio. Then, a civilian in a village muttering something I didn’t catch. Later, on the radio again, the voice of Pac Katari, the rebel leader whose insurgency your team is secretly supporting, delivering a radio address in English (?). His rhetoric shifts tone depending on how much of the cartel’s infrastructure you’ve dismantled since you last listened, which is a very nice detail.
I’ve been playing this game, on and off, since the open beta in 2017. I played it through 2018 and 2019 in co-op with a friend, and I bought it again on PC in 2023, started a permadeath run (a self-imposed mode where your character dies permanently with no respawn) and lost everything after about ten hours when I tried to jump off a cliff, attempted to deploy a parachute on the way down, and failed to press the spacebar in the right moment. As funny as it is, the cliff wasn’t even part of a mission, it was just there, and I was curious, and then I wasn’t playing anymore. A particular mixture of frustration and embarrassment followed and kept me away from the game for a while, but I came back two weeks ago after upgrading my computer, started over, and within the first twenty minutes understood again why this game has more of my time than most others I’ve played. It wasn’t the resolution or the graphics, they are relevant, of course, but so was the radio, the sicarios, and Pac Katari’s rebellion changing as the story changed. In summary, a world insisting that it was already happening before I arrived, and that would keep happening whether or not I was paying attention.
This is what Wildlands does that its sequel, Ghost Recon Breakpoint (2019), does not. And it turns out this thing is the most important thing a game world can do.
Breakpoint is set on Auroa, a fictional archipelago in the South Pacific controlled by a private corporation called Skell Technology, whose main “military guy” has gone rogue and turned his drone army against the world. The premise is serviceable, the map is enormous, the mechanics such as gunplay, movement, the way your character interacts with terrain and cover, are genuinely improved over Wildlands in almost every measurable way. Animations are more detailed, enemy AI is more sophisticated, there’s an injury system (so now getting shot in the leg actually affects how you move, thus adding a layer of tactical consequence that the previous game lacked. If you were to extract the combat loop from both games and run them side by side, Breakpoint would win by a landslide — on paper, that is.
And yet, Auroa is one of the most unpleasant open worlds I’ve spent time in. Not because it’s difficult, because it is, though unevenly, such as with the only truly threatening enemies being the heavy combat drones, which function like armored tanks and require patience, raw firepower and strategy that the rest of the game doesn’t really prepare you for. It’s also not because the missions are poorly designed, they’re not, it’s boring in a more fundamental way, a kind of ‘boring’ that doesn’t come from a lack of content but from a lack of reason. See, nothing in Auroa had to be where it is: the roads go where they go because someone decided they should go there, not because terrain, economy and decades of use carved paths that made geographic sense. The settlements look like settlements without looking like places where people lived. The biomes (jungle, tundra, some kind of marsh that manages to evoke exactly the same dread as a province in Bolivia, Caimanes) are arranged according to the logic of variety rather than the logic of climate and elevation. Moving through Auroa is often technically challenging in ways the game intends, but it never feels like moving through somewhere real, and that absence of realness turns out to matter enormously.
Bolivia, by contrast, is a real country. Ubisoft’s art team spent time there, and what they brought back wasn’t just reference photography but something closer to an internal logic. For instance, the landscape has its own reasons to be, accumulated over centuries of habitation and geography, something that a design team can borrow but can’t fully fabricate. The altiplano sits at altitude and the light behaves accordingly, the jungle provinces in the east feel genuinely separate from the highlands, not just visually but atmospherically, in the quality of threat they produce and the kind of movement they demand. The villages are where villages would be. The roads go where roads would go. Even the salt desert, which I don’t particularly enjoy as a playing environment (because the idea of approaching a cartel position in an open rebel pickup truck across a flat white expanse and remaining undetected removes credibility past the breaking point) are beautiful in a way that only real places are beautiful, with the specific inexplicable beauty of something that wasn’t arranged for you, the player.
My favorite region in Bolivia is Flor de Oro, a province in the southeastern part of the map that most players probably visit last because it’s far from where the game starts and because it’s the heart of Unidad territory. Unidad is the Bolivian military police — corrupt, brutal, complicit with the cartel — and they’re categorically different from the Santa Blanca cartel as an enemy. Cartel soldiers can be handled with enough aggression and the right approach; guerrilla tactics work against them, and the rebel forces that your team is secretly coordinating will respond if you call them into a firefight. Unidad won’t stop coming. Their reinforcements layer on top of each other in waves that don’t diminish, and taking them on directly means accepting an escalating war of attrition that you will eventually lose, specially on higher difficulties. Naturally, this means that every operation in Flor de Oro requires committing fully to stealth, moving through the thick forest feeling genuinely like jungle warfare, never fully relaxing because Unidad patrols are dense and unforgiving. The forest itself becomes tactical, getting from one position to another is about reading the canopy, to prone or crouch all times, staying away from pretty much any road, forgetting about your drone since military bases have drone-jamming devices, that is, essentially making choices about where to be, when and how. It naturally produces a quality of attention that Breakpoint’s more mechanically sophisticated combat doesn’t quite replicate, because the threat there doesn’t have the same social logic; there’s no equivalent to Unidad’s presence, no enemy faction that requires a fundamentally different approach that forces you to move differently through the world.
Another province I like to play in it is Espiritu Santo, a jungle region built around what the game describes as a former Catholic mission, and the history of colonial religious settlement sits in the landscape in ways that are easy to miss if you’re not looking. These details accumulate into something, as they don’t announce themselves, but they’re there, and over enough hours in the game they produce a ‘texture of place’ that I haven’t found in Auroa regardless of how long I’ve played there.
There’s one more thing about Bolivia that I’ve never quite found the right words for. I’ve never been to Bolivia, never flown over it, let alone set foot there. I know it entirely through this game’s interpretation of its rural region, which is mediated, selective and certainly wrong about things I couldn’t identify. And yet I’ve become, after enough hours moving through its provinces, something close to protective of it; proud of its landscapes, mildly irritated when people dismiss the game without acknowledging what the world actually looks like, and feel a genuine enjoyment of things like Pac Katari’s speeches on the radio that has nothing to do with the gameplay and everything to do with having spent enough time somewhere that its ongoing situation starts to feel real. Auroa produces none of this! And I can’t become attached to a place that was invented rather than imagined.
I should be honest about how I play Wildlands because it’s directly relevant to why the world matters so much to me and why Breakpoint’s world fails in the specific way it does.
My character wears PMC gear, i.e., private military contractor equipment, a sort of of nondescript tactical clothing that could belong to any number of non-state actors, and a balaclava. My primary weapon throughout most playthroughs is the FAL, a Belgian battle rifle introduced in 1951 that was adopted by dozens of armies worldwide and became particularly prevalent in South American conflicts. The choice is deliberate: Nomad, the player character, is a bearded American man who speaks English and carries standard American military equipment, which would be an immediate giveaway of CIA involvement in what is officially a covert operation. I’ve always felt that using American weapons openly while operating in a country whose government doesn’t know you’re there is exactly the kind of mistake that gets operations burned, and while I recognize that treating a Ubisoft action game with this level of operational logic is perhaps excessive, it produces a more interesting experience. The FAL is neither American nor Russian, which works for me. The rebel aesthetic also fits: the story tells you that the rebel forces are taking public credit for operations your team is conducting covertly, so wearing gear that could plausibly belong to an armed insurgency rather than a US special operations unit makes narrative sense.
The FAL in Wildlands is loud. Genuinely, viscerally loud, making the moment of breaking stealth feel consequential, to the degree of adding weight to the decision to fire. The same weapon in Breakpoint is quieter, smoother, less present. It’s a small detail and I wouldn’t expect anyone to care about it who hasn’t spent significant time with both, but this gap between them summarizes something larger: Wildlands makes its world feel heavy in ways that Breakpoint doesn’t, and that heaviness comes from dozens of small decisions that accumulate into a quality of presence. Since I’m now playing both games ‘at once’, this becomes even more evident. The vehicles in Wildlands look catastrophically damaged from what would be minor contact in real life, since any scratch produces a visual response out of proportion to the impact, but driving them still feels, Ubisoft-wise, right. Driving in Auroa is technically better, as the vehicle physics are more sophisticated, the damage modeling more accurate, but somehow less satisfying, and the roads too are less interesting, the distance between one place and another feeling longer even when the map tells you it isn’t (for a moment we’ll assume distances in videogames aren’t misleading).
I particularly don’t spawn vehicles in neither Wildlands nor Breakpoint. In the first game, you can press TAB to request a vehicle drop-off, and in the latter you can spawn a vehicle by setting up a bivouac. The way I do it is: find a cartel or Unidad pickup truck somewhere near the mission area, drive it as close as operational sense allows, park it somewhere inconspicuous, complete the mission on foot, leave in a different vehicle. This adds time and planning to every operation, but I do it regardless, voluntarily, which tells you something about how the game manages to make its world feel worth engaging with on its own terms. In Breakpoint, choosing not to spawn a vehicle feels like a self-imposed punishment rather than a natural behavior, because Auroa doesn’t give you a reason to care about how you move through it — the world doesn’t reward that kind of attention. Bolivia does, or at least it makes that kind of attention feel like a reasonable response to a place that seems to exist independently of whether you’re in it.
Breakpoint made a particular error early in its life that it partially corrected later: it attached weapon effectiveness to character level, so that a FAL carried by a level-one character did less damage than the same weapon carried by a level-thirty character. This is a design convention imported from role-playing games, where gear tiers and character statistics are central to the progression loop, which creates a specific absurdity in a game that presents itself as a grounded military operation. A FAL is a FAL. There’s no way around it! The round it fires does not become more lethal because the person firing it has completed enough missions to unlock the next level, but Ubisoft eventually allowed players to disable this system, and the game is meaningfully better without it, however, the fact that it existed at all suggests something about how Breakpoint was conceived: as a game that needed to import engagement mechanics from elsewhere because it wasn’t confident the world itself would be enough to keep people playing. Wildlands, despite its failures, and there are many, such as the enemy AI becoming progressively less effective as your character’s statistics improve, the ‘heavy’ enemies absorbing bullets (bullet-sponge, but not quite), totally detached from the military logic the game otherwise tries to maintain, but the game never asked the world to compete with a character progression system for your attention. The world itself was the point.
I’ve finished Wildlands at least twice. Given how long the game is, how many provinces there are and how much optional content exists in each one, finishing it twice represents an unusual investment, specially given that it’s considered to be a ‘7/10 game’, but I always get dragged back to it due to that first quality I mentioned in the first paragraph: Bolivia is ongoing, real and worth the attention. I keep every audio log, listen to every piece of ambient dialogue, read every document the game reveals about the cartel’s structure, the rebels, the relationship between Santa Blanca and Unidad, and the ordinary Bolivian civilians caught between them. The lore is better than it has any right to be for a game of this type, and it seems to be widely accepted that it earns the attention it asks for.
Whether I’ll finish my current playthrough, without permadeath (after the incident) and at whatever pace the game allows, I don’t know. But Bolivia is still there, and so am I.
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