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. To create excitement before the game launch, our idea: what if we could show that the game world was alive, before the players have arrived?
To do this, we made an immersive website featuring the entire 3D map of the game. On this map, gamers explored different environments, day by night, thanks to 50 surveillance cameras streaming more than 8 hours of exclusive videos captured in-game.
We brought to life the game world before the game launched and provoked the players to want to come and bring justice to a world ruled by a merciless Cartel.
Creative Execution
We knew gamers were itching to see the beautiful world in which the game takes places. But a simple trailer would not do the trick, neither would a classical advertising campaign. Gamers wanted to see the real thing, not an artifice.
We decided to capture everything in the game engine, recreate the original map in WebGL on a website and let gamers explore this living world for themselves, before they can even start playing.
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.