But the Pentagon is clearly thinking about small surveillance UAVs like those that appear in the game. Sasser says the drones in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are much smaller and lighter than those used today, even smaller than the RQ-16 T-Hawk or RQ-11B Raven drones. So, DeGay says, it's realistic to think they could use one for a mission. And while not every company commander would have a drone at his or her disposal (there'd be too many in the airspace if they did), the team in the game is a Special Forces unit.
However, he says, the Army does use "packable" bots, many of which are made by iRobot, that drive on the ground. Army's current drones can do, and that the Army usually keeps UAVs high above the battlefield in a circling pattern to conserve energy. And the game's drone can sprout four wheels and land on the ground-the idea, Oriola says, is that this saves battery power because it takes less energy to drive than to fly.ĭeGay says this air-to-ground conversion is a little beyond what the U.S.
In the game, the UAV is used for surveillance and reconnaissance. A squad member releases a personal UAV into the air that you can control almost exactly like you would a four-rotor Parrot AR.Drone (in reality, users control the AR.Drone with an iPhone app). In the Zambia level, the Ghosts track down a terror group that detonated a dirty bomb. But this is Future Soldier, so it includes a lot of military tech that we can imagine, but not yet build. Many of the technologies shown in the game, including the thermal vision, modular gun components and battlefield situational awareness, are in development or even already in use on the modern battleground. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier is a good showcase of how the military would work, and DeGay says, overall, the game looks realistic. Finally, we bounced all the military-tech ideas in the game off a real military expert, Jean-Louis “Dutch” DeGay, Strategic Outreach, Natick Soldier RDEC, who tells us how the game stands up against what the military is really planning. Then we spoke with Thad Sasser, a lead developer for multiplayer at Red Storm Entertainment Roman Campos Oriola, a campaign mode lead developer at Ubisoft Paris and Travis Getz, an authenticity coordinator at Red Storm. To find out, we got an exclusive look at a new gameplay level that takes place in Zambia in Southern Africa. But are the weapons, defense systems and other military gadgets in the game something soldiers will eventually use in a real battlefield-or just creative ideas for the armchair commander? Army Natick Soldier RDEC (Research, Development and Engineering Center) program.
The name and the technology of the newest installment in the Tom Clancy Ghost Recon series is inspired by the real Future Soldier Initiative, part of the U.S. Filled with more than a dozen new military tech advancements, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will put you in the shoes of a Special Forces soldier in a near-future scenario, minus the blisters in your boots. Next spring Ubisoft will release one of the most realistic first-person shooter video games ever.