Going Behind Enemy Lines In Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3’s Open World

The first two Sniper: Ghost Warrior games don’t exactly have a legacy to uphold, I think it’s fair to say. They were alright, but they had plenty of problems, but sniping games have a certain niche appeal to them. It would be easy for CI Games to happily keep pushing out more games in the same vein, but Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 is much more ambitious than that.

Really it feels as though this is more of a wholesale reboot than a sequel to the previous games. So many parts of the game have been expanded upon and fleshed out, but the biggest difference by far is that this is now a fully open world as opposed to a very linear series of levels. That one point alone necessitates a chain reaction of other changes through the rest of the game.

Tomasz Pruski, Senior Level Designer said, “We did get a lot of feedback from the first two games. Most of it was focussed around, “Hey! I’m a sniper and I want to find my own sniping spots, my own ways in and out. So to do that, we had to go open world to satisfy those needs and give people the complete sniper experience. Snipers are trained in so many different areas, not just long distance shooting; they have to know how to infiltrate, scout, do recon, and we want to let players do that.”

For one thing, you have to be able to approach an enemy base or objective from practically any angle, and that means the world design has to be much more flexible than before. You can’t be led through a level by your nose, guided every step of the way, so while the game can still pop up objective markers and suggested vantage points, it’s up to you how you get there.

Similarly, you don’t necessarily need to snipe either. Sniper Ghost Warrior didn’t really seem to mean all that much in the first two games, but CI Games have really taken the subtitle to heart, building up the gameplay in other areas to let you be perfectly stealthy and ‘ghost’ your way through the world, or embody the ‘warrior’ and go loud. Obviously, you want to be stealthy, but you have this as a fallback.

“Making one mistake and having it end a mission was not something that we wanted to do,” Tomasz said. “Some missions do have elements that require stealth, but globally in the game, we wanted to have the option to recover from mistakes, because reloading every time you miss will be frustrating. So we added this option for the ‘Warrior’. Not only because of that, but also because it creates a more complete package.”

That new found flexibility has meant that you need to have many more tools at your disposal. The enemy soldiers on patrol aren’t nicely doled up in a set order, but have more natural feeling patrols, and so you need to make use of a little flying drone to get a good vantage point and spot and mark enemies. One nice, player conscious decision is that, if you die mid-mission, you get sent back to a checkpoint, but any highlighted enemies remain highlighted, meaning you don’t need to repeat some of the busy work you’ve already done.

Tomasz explained, “There is a lot more tech. The drone is your best recon tool, and it replaces the binoculars. A lot of times you can’t see everybody from a certain angle, and we want to make sure you know where the enemies are, so with the drone, not knowing where they are is no longer an excuse for poor performance. We want the players to have as much information from recon as possible before choosing how they proceed with a mission.

“The drone is the tech that can allow you to do that, and you can modify it. So hacking security cameras with the drone is a modification, while the regular vanilla drone does not have this option. You can have it detect minefields, have camoflague, better battery life, so the players are going to be encouraged to invest in their drone.”

Of course, the AI also has to get smarter and behave differently to a linear game. “So they do have fields of vision and they have peripheral vision too,” Tomasz revealed. “so depending on if you’re in the corner of their eye or not, they’re going to notice you faster. It’s actually based on light levels, so if you’re trying to infiltrate them at night, you’re going to be stealthy when in shadow, but if you get into the light of a lamp, you’ll be a lot more visible so it’s important to not come out and shoot those lights!

“The biggest challenge, I guess, was how to balance them for long-range combat. In previous games the solution was if they found the sniper, they’d just start shooting at him from long distance and they had to be fairly accurate to pose a challenge, but that was completely unrealistic! Here they’re going to send out a search party, but also they’re going to start shelling your approximate location with mortars and call in reinforcements, if available.”

The open-world nature also lends itself well to letting you pick and choose different missions, dubbed ‘War Crimes’, as you see fit. In one instance, there were reports of civilians being rounded up and disappearing, with a name of a person responsible that’s worth performing your own disappearing act on. Immediately upon getting to the ruined church, it’s clear that it’s the site of some atrocities, with civilians currently digging their own graves, which had me quickly spring into action.

Elsewhere, you can sabotage the separatists who are trying to gain control over the local rail network. This mission I stayed as stealthy as possible, sneaking around the outside and killing relatively few of the enemies as I sabotaged two oil tanks and then retreated to a distance to blow them up. Finally, I attempted a mission to commandeer a set of heavily guarded satellite dishes, again doing my best to make my way through stealthily.

I have to say, there’s a certain Far Cry feeling to the game – no bad thing to be compared to! – albeit in a much less sensationalised and more grounded fashion. There’s just something about having this open world, hopping into a truck to get to where you need to and then tackling the enemy outposts one mission at a time. There is perhaps a slight risk that it might lose its own identity, with a fairly generic war-torn Georgian setting, but at the same time, there aren’t too many shooters that currently feature the modern day/near future.

Either way, it’s great to see a company like CI really striving to take a game series to new heights. It’s intent on rewriting the indifferent legacy of old, expanding the gameplay, creating a large open world to play in, and looking rather pretty in the process. With a good few months of further polish and refinement to give the game, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 could well be one to watch next year.