Ubisoft has released one final, massive update for 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands ahead of sequel Breakpoint’s launch October. The last content drop for game includes a brand new, battle royale-style PvPvE mode called Mercenaries to the game.
Mercenaries is essentially an eight-player fight to the death divided into three phases: Recon, Helicopter Deployment, and Extraction. The aim is to get rescued before anyone else by gathering enough intel while fighting off both AI controller soldiers and rival players.
Ubisoft wrote in a blog post:
With Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint coming this October, we want to send off Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands with one last major update as a thank-you to the community. We’re excited to experiment with this concept to bring something new and different before we launch the next installment in the franchise.
Phase one of Mercenaries kicks off like most battle royales. You’ll spawn with no weapons or gear, and will need to scramble to find what supplies you can while searching for the location of the extraction point. You can do that by activating three radio transmitters.
As you travel the world on the hunt for the transmitters, you can come across certain special perks, such as the location of a vehicle or the ability to track enemy players for a time. Once a player activates three transmitters, phase two kicks off for everyone.
During phase two, only the player who managed to activate the transmitters will know where the extraction point is going to be. However, once the helicopter touches down there, it’ll be open season as everyone will be made aware of exactly where they need to head.
Phase three is essentially a free-for-all during which players will attempt to actually board the chopper and claim victory. To do this, they need to have filled up their extraction gauge, which can be achieved in phase two by continuing to hunt for transmitters.
If you don’t fancy doing that, the gauge can also be filled in phase three by simply keeping the extraction point free of the other other players for a set amount of time, which means you’re in for a good old fashioned showdown. Just to keep things interesting, there’ll be swarms of AI-controlled soldiers to deal with at the same time.
It’s a pretty interesting new mode, and a nice send off for a game that Ubisoft has done a pretty strong job of supporting since its release in March 2017. Ghost Recon Breakpoint comes to PS4, Xbox One, and PC on October 4, and is shaping up to be a pretty big improvement on Wildlands.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.