After more than 5 years of absence, Ubisoft were relaunching the “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon” franchise, a military tactical shooter. In “Wildlands”, the new installment in the franchise, you control 4 elite soldiers called Ghosts. The objective: take down a Bolivian cartel.

Ghost Recon Wildlands has the largest gaming open world map ever created, equal to over 400km2. To create excitement and immerse gamers in the world, we decided to show what the world of Bolivia looks like before the Ghosts arrive.

A World with no Heroes is an immersive website experience that presents a new type of content : a documentary on a virtual world. Captured entirely with the in-game engine, the players could explore over 8 hours of footage that showed the world of the game before the players arrived. The content was visible through 50 different virtual cameras placed on the game map. Each camera told a story of a world that is brutalized by a merciless cartel before the players arrive.

To document this world, we approached it in a completely new way: like journalists. If the world was to feel real, we had to document it in the most neutral way, just like documentary film makers. The result is something entirely new: a documentary on a virtual world, produced only by capturing in-game footage. During the game’s development, we spent 3 months exploring every area of the map and looking for the most iconic landscapes, explored the lives and rituals of the everyday people and of course witnessed the rampage of a criminal cartel left unchecked.

We then placed all the footage in 50 different cameras on an exact recreation of the actual game map, rendered in WebGL. To bring the map to life, we added subtle design touches such as animals, traffic, trains and planes, which added a layer of depth to the world.