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Ghost Recon at E3 2001

The Specs

This is Red Storm's follow-up to the Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear series, which focused on small anti-terrorism squads. But Ghost Recon is about military actions, most of which take place outdoors and with hardware like tanks prowling around. You lead three teams of up to eight men, but unlike the Rainbow Six games, there's no pre-planning phase. Instead, you give orders on the fly using an overhead map to assign waypoints to your different teams. Between missions, you allocate combat points among your soldiers to increase their skills. Red Storm is building Ghost Recon from a completely new engine geared to longer-range outdoor encounters.

The Speculation

Tom's Comments: I'm not convinced a first person shooter modeling modern warfare can be done realistically. There's a reason games like Rogue Spear and SWAT3 are about limited police actions. The role of infantry, particularly in the kind of terrain that can be modeled on today's home PCs, is often dependent on heavy hardware like armor and air support. Titles like Operation Flashpoint and Ghost Recon look promising, but will they feel much different from Rouge Spear/SWAT3/Delta Force? What kind of liberties with realism will have to be taken to make them playable? Having said that, I have no doubt Red Storm will provide a compelling game; there's still no other first person shooter that captures the lethality of modern firepower and the cat-and-mouse of hi-tech like Rainbow Six/Rogue Spear. Ghost Recon's new on-the-fly command interface will also ensure that the single player game is more about actually playing than planning.

Mark's Comments: When we stopped by Ubi Soft I was too busy looking for Red Storm's Kevin Perry to take a long look at this game. From the few minutes I watched, it looked a lot like a tactical shooter in a wartime setting. Yeah, I know, that's not exactly helpful, but so much of these games comes down to feel — FPS fans are a persnickety bunch — that's it's hard to get a sense for these games from just observing them. And I never did find Perry at the Ubi Soft booth, though I did run into him later at theglobe.com's cocktail hour. I guess he was doing some recon for free drinks.

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May 22, 2001