5 tips you'll want to know before you start 'Ghost Recon: Wildlands'
It’s time to get airdropped into Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Bolivia isn’t going to welcome you with open arms.
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While you’re getting acclimated to the lush-yet-treacherous provincial landscapes and trying not to get killed by the Santa Blanca cartel or UNIDAD (the local military police), we’ve got a few tricks for staying alive and navigating the terrain effectively.
1. Choose the right ride for the terrain
Image: ubisoft
There are a myriad of transportation options scattered throughout the provinces. Each has its merits and is useful in different scenarios, depending on where you are and what you’re trying to accomplish.
Regular Vehicles (cars, trucks, civilian SUVs): In the valleys and hills of Itacua, your best bet is usually hopping into whatever vehicle is available at the rebel checkpoints. The terrain is forgiving enough that you don’t often need to go offroad to reach main story missions.
Faction-specific Vehicles: Santa Blanca and UNIDAD have vehicles marked for their use. These vehicles are sometimes the only way to gain access to a compound or a particular part of a base. That's not to say the enemy won’t notice you if you’re in one of their vehicles, but it does ensure you can get inside.
Santa Blanca tends to favour SUVs with mounted guns. If you can get your hands on one of those, it’s usually the best option to taking down supply convoys without much fuss.
Dirtbikes: These real-life death traps are the only way to offroad in Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The mountains are perilous to navigate in a rugged SUV and it's almost impossible to do so with a regular car.
Dirtbikes, on the other hand, are perfectly suited to motoring through mountains, swamplands, and salt flats. Bonus points: unless you’re pitched over a cliff and fall to your death, the physics are forgiving enough that you can hit a rock or a tree at high speed without fatal consequences.
Aerial Vehicles: There is nothing more satisfying than getting your squadmate to fly you up to a mission, marking your targets with a drone, and then parachuting in to wipe everyone out.
Helicopters are everywhere in Ghost Recon: Wildlands and there are a number of different flavors — regular ones, combat choppers with mounted guns that the pilot can use, even enormous supply choppers — though those are unwieldy to fly.
Use a helicopter to make a quick getaway or to make a stealthy entrance. Just don’t crash it… because you will probably get blown up before you can escape the blast radius.
2. Upgrade your drone first
Image: ubisoft
At the beginning of the game, it’s tempting to start with upgrades to physical traits, items, weapons, or your squad. But the most important tool in your survival arsenal is your drone.
Base-level drones aren’t very effective. Their range is terrible and the battery only seems to last for about a minute, maybe a minute and a half. And, if you’re flying your drone at night, it doesn’t come with built in night-vision. (Yikes.)
Increase your drone’s battery capacity and range as early as possible so that you’re not forced to be right at the enemy’s base before you can start marking targets. Later in the game, you can increase the drone’s stealth capabilities and even equip it with a noisemaker so that you can use it as a distraction to sneak your squad through, undetected by pesky patrols.
3. Collect absolutely everything
Image: ubisoft
We all have love-hate relationships with in-game collectibles. Ubisoft is the often the worst culprit for creating useless collectibles, but the Wildlands dev team has done something very surprising. Instead of the “collect 100 feathers” nonsense from Assassin’s Creed, collectibles here are, for the most part, entirely necessary.
The leveling system is built on tagging supplies and collecting skill points. Supplies are scattered throughout each region — usually in towns, compounds and outposts — but they can’t be seen from the game’s TACMAP. You need to be in close proximity in order to see them on your mini-map.
The best way to tag — which is to say, collect — supplies? Take down supply convoys.
Instead of the usual 50 to 500 per tag, a supply convoy is usually good for 2,500 to 5,000. Additionally, snagging a supply convoy means you’ll be able to get in good with the rebels that much faster.
Weapons and Accessory Cases, on the other hand, provide better gear for your loadout. While it’s possible to pick up enemy weapons and use them with abandon during a mission, they’re not automatically added to your loadout. If you're killed in action or fast travel, you lose them.
You’ll need to unlock weapons and parts by collecting their cases in order to equip them to your loadout. The accessories aren’t as crucial as the weapons themselves, but it sure is nice to have a better scope on that assault rifle when things get hairy in the field.
4. Explore, don’t wander
Image: Ubisoft
Exploration is the key to success in Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Since almost every collectible is necessary for advancement and there isn't a single path to follow, there’s no way to binge through the story. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t explore with the same ferocious precision that you use to execute tactical maneuvers during a mission.
The best way to avoid going in circles looking for collectibles that might not be there is to gather intel first. You can talk to rebels, citizens and even interrogate Santa Blanca lieutenants in order to gain intelligence about where the collectibles (and side missions) are located in that particular province. While you’re seeking regular intel (marked with a white exclamation point icon), the major intel (yellow exclamation point) helps fill out the story missions across each province.
Once you’ve collected all the intel you can, devise a circuit for exploration. Don’t just criss-cross the map — be methodical about your routes. The Bolivian terrain is onerous and cumbersome to navigate, with far too much to do.
If you don't mark the side missions and collectibles with intel right away, it’s easy to get turned around and lost in the landscape, or even end up in another province by accident. This doesn’t stop you from returning to missed side missions and collectibles later, but it's most efficient to clear a province before moving on.
5. Don’t ignore the side missions
Image: Ubisoft
Unlike many other open world games, you’d be ill-advised to ignore the side missions in Ghost Recon: Wildlands. These optional activities allow you to unlock rebel support and gather a ton of supplies in one place, which makes it easier to level up and complete main story missions.
The rebels are keen on helping you, but it’s their turf… so it’s quid pro quo. You protect their rebel radio and they’ll give you a ton of comms tools so you can upgrade your drone that much faster.
If you want a vehicle drop or the ability to blast Santa Blanca’s collective faces with mortars, you have to go out and get the rebels what they need in order to continue resisting the cartel. Completing these missions has tangible results not just in the rebel skills you gain access to, but in their morale as well.
Happy rebels show up faster to help in a firefight. Failure to complete side missions won’t result in grave consequences, of course, but you’ll be missing out on an array of helpful tools to get you through more difficult provinces later in the game.
