Wildlands PvP Patch Fixes Overpowered Thermal Tactics, Other Issues Remain

Since launch on October 10, players of Ghost Recon: Wildlands’ free PvP mode, Ghost War, have been struggling with issues of invisibility and over-powered thermal vision. Ubisoft addressed some of these complaints in a recent patch, but some frustrating issues remain.

Thermal camping in a bush is now a thing of the past, thankfully. The October 23 update for Ghost: Recon Wildlands reduced the overpowered Thermal Goggles perk in Ghost War PvP to merely a drone ability for Support classes. Support players are now only able to view the map in thermal vision while operating their drones, which have limited time and a cooldown. This brings greater balance and fairness to PvP, especially on night maps where players of any class type were activating thermal vision for the entire duration of the match.

Ghost War has also been a snail’s pace of grinding just to reach level 35 and unlock the ability to purchase the final three subclasses. Ubisoft addressed the slow levelling with this week’s update, and players can now expect better progression as they level up from 1 to 50.

While it’s great that these issues were addressed quickly, there are still big problems lurking in PvP. Some games start up smooth, but many matches still take a lifetime to load only to be plagued with glitches.

On several occasions I’ve experienced a weird glitch akin to an out-of-body experience. For some reason, I’ve spawned into a round in first-person instead of third. I’ll be running around the map with nothing but crosshairs, completely invisible to enemies and unable to kill anyone. Here’s gameplay where I spawned in first-person and spotted my body on another part of the map. I was unable to interact with anything in the match, and my body mirrored my movements from a distance.

Another problem with the long load times is early spawning. I’ve had squadmates spawn into the match early while the rest of us are still stuck on the prompt that allows us to choose our classes. When the match starts, the earlier spawners have already had enough time to push up to the middle of the map and set their ambush. Or we find enemies are already waiting for us at mid-map with their mines placed or drones out to mark our locations. It’s unfair either way.

Ubisoft has already announced a new class, game mode and more maps in an upcoming November content update, so hopefully these issues will be addressed before then. I really enjoy Ghost War when everything is running smoothly, but the lengthy load times and glitched spawning suck some of the fun out of playing.