Ubisoft has unveiled the next game in the Ghost Recon series, and it’s making a massive departure from the series’ established format. Ghost Recon Frontline is a free-to-play spin on battle royale game format that adds some Ghost Recon-style twists on the established recipe. It also appears to have its sights set on Call of Duty: Warzone’s long-term audience, with a scope that’s set to constantly shift and expand with the arrival of new seasons.
Ghost Recon Frontline is currently set to ship with two game modes. Expedition is what Ubisoft is calling Frontline’s “flagship mode,” and it features 100 players sent to the island of Drakemoor. It’s a landmass of some 16 square kilometres, featuring four distinct biomes and around 20 points of interest. The area has been recently evacuated due to an environmental disaster caused by a mining corporation, which is using the event as the pretext to take total control of the island. It’s up to your team of highly trained contractors to set things right.
To do that, players will compete to gather intel at locations around the island, working as part of a three-member team of soldiers who are generated procedurally from pools of different military backgrounds, national origins, looks, and skillsets. Each one falls under a specific class, and you’ll be able to mix and match operators to suit your playstyle.
Once you’ve gathered three pieces of intel, you can call for extraction by helicopter. This will alert the other remaining teams on the island, setting up inevitable firefights at the LZ. It also means you plan to avoid intel gathering altogether, and instead plan on hunting players calling for extraction to steal it for yourself.
Here’s the trailer:
The reveal trailer provides a good look at the island, which features trainyards, massive satellite dish arrays, and dense island jungles as settings for shootouts between ghost teams. For the ghosts’ part, they’re doing all the stuff you’ll remember from Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint, deploying drone-based gadgets, finding weapon attachments, and jumping into vehicles to cover ground more quickly.
Ubisoft is holding a closed test for Ghost Recon Frontline from October 14-21, and sign-ups for that are open now. You can register for the test by visiting the official Ghost Recon website. Note that this test is only open to players in Europe.
The development team says to expect Ghost Recon Frontline to change over time, with additional classes, game modes, and map areas in future seasons. There’s no release date set yet, however.