Ghost 'Difficulty' (or lack thereof)
Personally I found the game a complete cake walk on ghost difficulty, maybe I just play too many shooters but iv seen a lot of people complaining about this so I suspect im not alone. I had no issue with clearing the whole beta solo and not once did I feel challenged. Playing online was even worse, by the time someone had bothered to set up a drone and try to scout you could easily clear out a base and get off with the objective before alerting anyone. So here is a list of core issues that need to be addressed to fix the difficulty. Not suggesting these changes for all difficulties, just for Ghost, its far too easy and should be a real step up forcing people to work together or for a solo player to be a perfect operator.
- Sound detection; or again a lack thereof, the AI is woefully stupid at detecting sounds. You can quite literally clear bases without even using a suppressor since the AI wont pick up gun shots over a certain distance. If you fire with an unsuppressed gun the whole country should go up in arms over it, and just having a suppressor on shouldn't be magic immunity from making any sound at all, AI should still be able to hear you if they are close enough. This would hopefully force players to melee more often rather than just run and gun through a camp but still be stealthing the area.
- Sight detection; again, AI is really stupid. Takes a solid 3 seconds for the AI to figure out that armored and armed soldier is a threat. It should be instant on the highest difficulty. I noticed the AI takes a second to 'call in' a threat even once detected so the player still has time to kill them even if seen, so there is no reason why the AI should provide the player with so much extra detection time to murder them. Also the snipers were really blind as well, as were any AI using binoculars. The line of sight on AI was also awful, just being a little bit off center often was enough to avoid detection.
- Minimap detection shouldn't exist on ghost difficulty, at all. Its bad enough that the AI are always marked by their general location and even worse than you can gain wallhacks with drone/binoculars to see where they are at all times. Now I know you can turn this off in the options but I think this is a bit of a copout since a lot of people are going to be playing online with randoms, and its unbalanced that if you limit yourself by playing on ghost and turning off markers that others are not as well. I think the vast majority of people didn't even know you could even turn off the markers as well and very likely would have enjoyed the game a lot more had it been turned off by default on Ghost.
- Armor not blocking bullets. I noticed the armored Unidad guards would get 1 shot when they hadn't detected you but could tank bullets when they had. Total inconsistency and also undermines their strength, you should be forced to either hit a weak point like their face, use a high caliber weapon or melee Unidad guards to take them down. The Unidad bases in the beta (and on the outside map for those of us who glitched out) were a total joke when you could run around and murder everyone with a single suppressed pistol shot to the chest.
- Friendly AI. Two things; give us an option to turn them off, and stop them teleporting and saving us on ghost difficulty. After some testing I found you could run into the middle of a base, die, and your AI regardless of distance to you would just teleport to you, kill everyone, and revive you. This completely undermines any sense of challenge or difficulty when you get a free pass as well as the AI doing all the work for you. To be honest you shouldn't even get this free revive on Ghost, if you go down you die.
- Reinforcements need to be more brutal. If players want to go loud then they want as many enemies to attack and blow up, if a group wants to go silent and messes up they should be greatly punished for it. I found while playing alone you couldn't always just sit back and snipe a whole base from a distance because a helicopter would often be called since the base AI was too far away to deal with you, and if you were in the base and detected then cars would come, but this doesnt seem to work when playing online. It seems every time cars would reinforce and no helicopter would come, meaning you could just have 3 people sniping everything with immunity and 1 person doing the ground work the whole time. If you get detected the AI should deploy assets to kill each member separately, which means calling in helicopters if there are any sniper players, and car reinforcements for anyone in the base. This should also be influenced by what players are in as well, so if a player is in a helicopter the AI should call in something that can deal with it rather than them just sitting back dropping rockets on the whole base.
- Unidad patrols were a joke. Out of all these complaints I suspect this one might be fixed on the harder maps, it seems like helicopters spawn on those maps a lot more often from what we've seen from glitching into the rest of the map. But my issue is the fact Unidad are extremely poor at tracking the player down, escaping their 'wanted' level is a complete joke and can easily be accomplished by just running fast in a random direction or hiding in a building. If Unidad are coming for you on Ghost it should be a nightmare to deal with, not a mild annoyance like it is now.
- Im adding another point here that I forgot about adding first time; There is a big issue with balancing in the side missions (although this applies to some of the main missions a well).
What is the purpose of four AI defending a side mission objective? Even if you are one of the worst players around, is this situation ever going to pose any type of issue to you? For example three of the side missions were stealing a plane/helicopter from a location and taking it to a different location, each one was protected by 4 to 8 men. The only time I have ever seen anyone fail these missions has been because someone blew up the vehicle with a silly grenade throw, and this really isn't surprising.
All these missions are the same principle, you have 1 pilot who if they get to the vehicle can fly away making you lose the mission, and a couple of guys protecting him. But this isn't challenging in the slightest and there are quite a few reasons for this. Firstly even a bad player can take down a group of AI in rapid succession. Personally iv cleared out all three of these side missions by just sprinting to the location and gunning everyone down while being hidden the whole time. Having only 4 to 8 guys on an objective is really pointless when half are guaranteed to die before detection even takes place.
Secondly the AI always spawns in the same spots. I know where the pilot is before I even reach the objective. It surely cannot be that hard to have the pilot on a patrol or spawn in random locations. Considering killing him ensures you will not fail unless you blow up the helicopter yourself it should be a major difficulty getting to him in the first place as he basically is the main objective. Once hes dead you can simply sit back and take your time killing enemies.
Thirdly these dont scale at all based on the number of players. If I can solo everything by myself, how easy is this game when you have four slightly competent players?
Hopefully on the harder areas these quests get a lot more mechanics involved, like the moment you get into the helicopter the AI calls in reinforcements to shoot you down. But I have a nagging suspicion that all we will see as a more difficult version of these missions in higher level areas is just more enemies and maybe the odd mortar or SAM site.
One other thing is how detection works, it applies to the whole team which is just stupid. If one person is hiding in the boot of a car and a different member of the team gets discovered the whole team shouldn't magically be known to the enemy. Obviously fixing this would make the game easier but its just another issue I found which was just unrealistic and annoying.
Fun game though, would pick it up if the game gets a revamped difficulty that is actually challenging
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