With 'Ghost Recon Frontline,' Ubisoft tries to cash in on the battle royale fad (again)

Remember Hyper Scape? No? Well, apparently neither does Ubisoft. The publisher is working on a new battle royale that will take players to the Tom Clancy universe. On Tuesday, the company announced Ghost Recon Frontline. Like many of its contemporaries, the free-to-play title will pit you and two other teammates against more than one hundred other players.

If the Call of Duty: Warzone comparisons weren't inevitable already, Frontline moves the series away from its traditional third-person perspective to a first-person one. However, where Ubisoft's Bucharest studio hopes to differentiate the game is with a tweak to the battle royale formula. In Frontline's signature Expedition mode, you and your team will need to find three pieces of intel scattered across an island map. The twist is that you later need to extract that information by calling in an airlift. Other teams can ambush you during this crucial moment and steal the data you fought so hard to obtain. The playspace also won't get smaller as a match progresses.

The franchise’s most recent outing, 2019’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, was, to put it mildly, a disastrous release for Ubisoft. Thanks to its unfinished state, the game performed so poorly in its first week of availability that the company delayed all of its biggest 2020 releases. It then went on to spend months patching Breakpoint, but the game never quite recovered from the reputation it earned at launch. Ubisoft said it plans to continue to support Breakpoint while working on Frontline.

Ubisoft didn't share a release date for Ghost Recon Frontline, but it said it would hold a closed PC test starting on October 14th that people in select countries across Europe can sign up to take part in by visiting the game's website.