The Santa Blanca drug cartel has turned Bolivia into a dangerous narcostate

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands is a realistic look into the world where a small group of highly trained American special forces are dropped into the Bolivian jungle to fight the war on drugs.

Although the game opens with your four-man squad arriving in Bolivia by helicopter, there’s no danger of them finding themselves being hunted for sport by an alien with thermal imaging vision and a penchant for skull collecting.

Instead, the team have been sent into Bolivia to take down a Mexican drug cartel which has effectively taken over Bolivia and is in the final stages of turning it into a narcostate.

Speaking at a recent media event in London, Ghost Recon: Wildlands senior producer Nouredine Abboud said the game was “the very first military shooter set in a massive, realistic and dangerous open world than can be played entirely in four-player co-op”.

Ubisoft have put an extraordinary amount of work into the game’s world and one of the aspects of the game the developers were keen to highlight was the realism of the title, from the way your squad can work together and synchronise targets to take out several threats at once, to the diversity of the biomes and the accurate recreation of several Bolivian locations including the Uyuni train cemetery, the impressive salt flats, and Bolivia’s infamous Road of Death.

“The game is Ubisoft’s largest open world,” technical art director Benoit Martinez said.

“There are 11 ecosystems, seven million trees, 800km of roads and more than 120 villages and landmarks.”

A team of special forces must fight the cartelSource:Supplied

Accompanying the game, which is out on March 7 on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, is a documentary movie entitled Wildlands. Narrated by Australian author Rusty Young, it interviews several people involved with the real-life drug trade and efforts to combat it, including a drug trafficker, DEA agents and even one of Pablo Escobar’s hitmen.

Lead game designer Dominic Butler said the design philosophy for the T om Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands was all about giving players freedom of choice.

“What does this mean? It means you’re here with a very clear objective — to take down Santa Blanca Cartel — but how you do that is up to you,” he said.

“We’re going to give you the tools, were going to give the equipment, we’re going to give you vehicles, weapons and lots of options and the way you achieve those goals is completely up to you.”

With more than a billion character customisation combinations, hundreds of firearms and more than 60 vehicles in the game, Mr Butler said everything was there for players to play the game the way they wanted.

“We want to make while we’re telling an interesting, compelling story set against the backdrop of the war on drugs, there’s still the idea there’s no wrong answers,” he said.

“If you’re a player who likes to just mess around, set off alarms and see what happens and how the world can react, you can do that — (but) you’re going to have to deal with those consequences.

“If you’re the kind of player who really likes to scout out the environment, recon, understand the layout as it changes throughout the world, understand the different types of challenges you’re going to see — we’re going to support you too, we’re going to give you lots of options.

“And you’re going to be able to do this entirely by yourself, the AI is going to support you, or you can do it with your friends.”

Clothing and accessories from real-world manufacturers have been included in the game, along with all the firearms and tacti-cool accessories you’d expect to find in a modern military shooter.

There is a strong central story to Ghost Recon: Wildlands, but it is unique in that it is nonlinear; players are free to make their way to any part of the game’s map and undertake the missions there, instead of following a progression system as in most games where regions unlock.

While it has not been explicitly acknowledged by the developers, I thought the game clearly drew a lot of influence from other successful Ubisoft franchises, most particularly Far Cry and The Division, with a dash of Square Enix’s Just Cause games thrown in for good measure.

This is an excellent combination and as a fan of open world games, I was very impressed with what I saw while playing a prerelease version of Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

While the game didn’t seem to introduce many revolutionary elements to its base gameplay, I thought it refined existing elements very well indeed to create something I will definitely be checking out as soon as the full version is available.

Given it is still in beta testing it would be unfair to attempt an early review based on the two regions I was able to explore, but on the whole I thought the game looked extremely promising and looks to be a most welcome addition to open-world genre when it launches.

Royce Wilson travelled to London as a guest of Ubisoft