[Update]: Ubisoft reached out to GameRevolution to clarify that the beta referenced below will be a Closed Beta and will have an NDA that prevents sharing content, but that an Open Beta would happen later in the summer with no NDA attached to it.
“All players who are interested in trying or sharing information about Ghost War will be able to do so before the free update launches later this year,” Alex Money, PR Manager at Ubisoft wrote to GameRevolution.
[Original Story]: Announced earlier today by Ubisoft, the Ghost Recon Wildlands PvP Beta will soon be underway, so players can test out the new mode in advance of a Fall release window. According to several player reports, the Wildlands PvP Beta will be starting sooner than we all expected, on the 25th of July and going through the 31st.
But, if these reports are to be believed, you won’t see or read anything about it. According to players who have received an email invitation to the Beta, they can start to pre-load the game mode on July 21st with a start day of July 25th, but the NDA includes strict prohibitions on streaming, writing, recording or even talking about the Wildlands PvP Beta in a public forum.
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Other video games have had similar NDAs, but under wildly different circumstances. For example, Battlefield 1 set up a similar NDA pre-release, but that was for the Closed Alpha. Furthermore, EA soon after lifted the NDA for Battlefield 1‘s Closed Alpha, allowing a wave of impressions and videos to be released. Then, in the game’s closed beta, there were no such restrictions.
Several Reddit threads of people who received invites have since been deleted, including the one in the screenshot above. It’s possible that even publicizing that you’ve received a Beta invitation is some sort of violation if you plan to accept it.
Of course, players have a few reasons to be interested in the content of the Beta of a PvP mode. For instance, Ghost Recon Wildlands operates on a peer-to-peer basis. For competitive games such as For Honor, this created a huge problem because connection issues could tilt a battle in one person’s favor (not to mention the immense possibility for abuse of the system). That said, this was never really an issue with Ghost Recon Wildlands, since it is a co-op game that pits players against the AI.
But, with this new PvP mode, called Ghost War, the game is a 4v4 competitive multiplayer experience. That means its Peer-to-Peer status could drastically affect the balance and stability of each match. Players already report desync issues just with the regular co-op experiences. Furthermore, I don’t think anyone is quite over the disaster that was Narco Road, even though Fallen Ghosts was much better. These things make players skeptical about future updates and interested to know if they transcend those issues.
That said, other issues that players have encountered will not be in play for the Wildlands PvP Beta, Ghost War. The game mode adds four distinct classes each with unique perks, something the base game and its expansions did not have, so they won’t be requiring you to play a pre-built character like Narco Road and Fallen Ghosts. That requirement turned many people off to the expansions before they even tried playing them.
