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Ubisoft has revealed plans to “refresh” its free-to-play third-person shooter Ghost Recon Online with new content or updates “at least once a month”, across a period of multiple years.
Speaking to VideoGamer.com last week, the game’s producer Theo Sanders said that “a game like Ghost Recon Online can only succeed if it continues to evolve.
“As soon as your product becomes stale, people will leave. So we have a long-term plan. We have our dev team in place for the long haul, and the [Arctic Pack] is only the first of many that we’re going to be releasing.
“We’re actually hoping to refresh the game at least once a month to some extent.”
Not every update will be “as big as a new map or a new game mode”, Sanders confirmed, but the team will have “something new for players every month, and that’s a multi-year commitment that we’re getting ourselves into.”
Ghost Recon Online went into open beta last month, and the popularity of the game appears to have taken Ubisoft by surprise.
“The reaction and the general start of the game has been better than we expected,” Sanders said. “Ubisoft has a long history of making really fun AAA blockbuster games, but we’re a bit newer as a company in delivering a service. So as a dev team, we spent a lot of our focus on the service side of the game.”
Part of that popularity, he believes, is down to the relationship Ubisoft has built with its community.
“In a game like this, you could have the greatest game in the world but if you’re not able to be reactive to players, if they don’t feel that they’re listened to and that their voices are heard, they won’t stay very long,” Sanders added.
“We’re really happy with the relationship we’ve built with our community, how they’ve been reacting to the game and how they’ve been helping evolve it into its next stages, which is today culminating in our first update to the game.”
Ubisoft is also looking into the prospect of developing Ghost Recon Online into an eSport.
“One of the key features we’re working on today that’s not in the current expansion but hopefully will be in the next one is a built-in clan feature,” Sanders continued. “We’re also working on things like having custom matches and the ability for one team to play another, which is really the foundational layer of having eSports in your game.
“We didn’t set out from day one necessarily to build an eSport product, but a lot of players who have played the game are saying that this could be a really cool eSport product. So it’s one of the directions we are taking the game.”
The first update for Ghost Recon Online, the Arctic Pack, launches today. The update includes a brand new map and Arctic camouflaging for weapons and armour.
You can sign up for the beta for free over on the game’s official website.
In the same interview, Sanders also revealed that the Wii U version of Ghost Recon Online had been put “on hold”.
