Video Game / Ghost Recon Breakpoint

There is no briefing.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a game in Ubisoft's Ghost Recon tactical shooter series, and a follow-up to Ghost Recon Wildlands.

Six years after the events of Wildlands, the Ghosts are dispatched to the fictional Auroa archipelago, the home of Skell Technology, or "Skell Tech", a controversial AI drone and robotics firm whom the Ghosts had crossed paths with before in Bolivia. Skell Tech, along with the entire Auroa archipelago, has mysteriously gone dark soon after a US cargo ship was sunk in the vicinity. Unable to get in contact with company head Jace Skell, the United States government dispatches the Ghosts to make contact and investigate the circumstances of the sinking. Led by Nomad, Weaver, Holt, and Midas, a formidable force of 32 Ghosts set out to Auroa by helicopter...

...And things go wrong pretty much right off the bat.

Before they even make landfall, the Ghosts are knocked out of the sky by a swarm of drones. Nomad escapes, but Midas is missing, Holt is seriously injured, and Weaver is killed—by none other than Cole Walker, a former Ghost and long-time teammate of Nomad and Midas. After meeting up with a group of survivors known as the "Homesteaders," Nomad discovers that the island has been taken over by Sentinel Corporation, a PMC which was originally hired to protect the island, but has apparently pulled a coup over Skell Tech and is currently ruling Auroa with an iron fist. Nomad teams up with the Homesteaders, along with other island locals and surviving Ghosts from the crash, to bring justice to Walker for his betrayal and stop his plans, but it soon becomes clear that Walker and Sentinel are just the tip of the iceberg on Auroa, and that much more dangerous threats may be lurking, waiting for their chance to strike...

The game was released for Gold and Ultimate Edition owners on October 1, 2019, and three days later for the basic edition owners. It was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia.

Trailers:Reveal Trailer, Global Threat Trailer, We are Wolves Trailer, "What is Breakpoint?" Gameplay Breakdown, Live Action Trailer.

IGN also released a video of first 15 minutes of the campaign.

---

Tropes found in Breakpoint:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The Operation Motherland update raised the character level cap from 30 to 99, well past the point where the player will have unlocked every class and ability. To make up for it, it also added "Weapon Mastery" to keep using all the skill points you can still find in the world and for leveling up by improving your ability with all the weapon types - except you stop getting skill points past around level 85 or so.
• Action Girl: In the trailers, we can see Fury (Ghost 1-2), the close combat specialist. If you wish, Nomad can be female too, like in the previous game.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: One side quest reveals that the island's drones have started learning on their own and are even constructing structures without the knowledge of Skell or Sentinel. The ending also indicates that the drones Skell used to stop Walker's sub have started to gain sentience, causing considerable worry for Nomad.
• Airstrip One: "Restricted Area-01", standing out among more ordinary place names like Smugglers' Cove, New Argyll and Sinking Country.
• A.K.A.-47:
  • The FN F2000 rifle is called SC-20K in-game (despite appearing under its real name in the previous game), a name that dates back to the first Splinter Cell.
  • Averted with Walker's massive Hand Cannon revolver, which is not based on any specific real-world firearm, but rather takes design cues from various extra large-caliber revolvers.

• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Several clothing items, patches and camo patterns unlock upon completing specific tasks or reaching character levels.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you die during the Final Boss fight, you only have to redo the fight again, instead of having to clear out the entire enemy base all over again like you do with any of the game's other boss fights.
  • "Operation Motherland" adds a variety of new Bodark enemy types, almost all of which above the basic trooper have an armored helmet that requires more than one bullet to take off. The only ones that don't are Tacticians (who can call in reinforcements endlessly until you take them out) and Seekers (who have optical camo that makes them practically invisible outside of thermal vision).
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • The Sniper class can use armor-piercing ammo that is highly effective against both body armor and drone armor plating.
  • The unique legendary sniper rifle you obtain from Rosebud also ignores enemy armor, at the cost of being unable to be silenced.
• Artificial Brilliance: The full release and subsequent updates to the game have helped tweak the enemy AI into formidable foes. Enemy units can now determine the direction of where unsilenced gunshots come from and will approach cautiously, using cover and attempting to flush the player out with gunfire if they can determine your general vicinity without actually spotting you. Radio operators will also immediately request backup regardless of whether you have been spotted, if they detect any obvious sign of hostilities such as dead bodies or witnessed kills. Hollywood Silencers are also averted; enemies can still hear the shot if close enough, but, as in with Real Life, the silencer is more effective at concealing the direction of the shot rather than the report itself. The drones also get in on the action; Behemoths, for example, will use their mortars to flush the player out of cover and sometimes only launch half of their mortar salvo, waiting for the player to exit the danger zone before launching the other half to catch them wherever they move to. However, all this was not the case in the pre-release beta of the game, which was more like...
• Artificial Stupidity: Poor AI was one of the major issues observed in the open beta, with enemies generally not noticing the player or their drone unless right on top of them, and being very easy to bait into obvious traps. It was bad enough that some beta players were convinced the beta version of the AI was bugged.
• Attack Drone: Skell Tech's stock in trade. From Predator-like Azrael drones that patrol the skies and scan the archipelago for unwelcome visitors, through quadcopters of various sizes with mounted weaponry, to jeep-sized drones and even automated tanks.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Heavier drones like Aamons and Behemoths have their insides glowing orange. You’ll need some explosives to knock off the armor that covers them first.
• Authority Equals Asskicking:
  • Colonel Walker is the leader of the Wolves and their most dangerous combatant.
  • Downplayed with the game's "boss" enemies (the 4 Elite Wolves and Sgt. Hill), who are about twice as durable as a normal Wolf (three times as durable in the case of Yellowleg and Hill), but can still be taken down with about half a mag of full auto fire or a single headshot.
  • Averted with Ian Blake, who's no tougher than a regular Mook (although with possibly a slightly better assault rifle), and turns into a blubbering wreck the moment you capture him.
  • Sentinel CEO Trey Stone is a former black ops commanding officer and apparently in a similar league as Walker according to a scoreboard at Shark Base. You finally get to face him in the Red Patriot DLC. He holes up in a locked command room and sends a bunch of Wolves after you. He's at least as tough as a standard Heavy with a powerful handgun, despite wearing only a business suit, but can be taken down quickly with a headshot the same as any other Sentinel soldier.
• Badass Boast: Given by Walker in the "We Are Wolves" trailer.
  Walker: But by tooth and claw I took this island, and by tooth! And claw! I will rule it.
• Badass Bystander: Prisoners you free from Sentinel will grab an assault rifle and help you fight back. Particularly notable since, unlike in Wildlands, these folks are not trained rebels, just engineers and farmers, yet are still willing to fight for their freedom.
• Badass Creed: Breakpoint reveals that the Ghosts' motto is "Nos autem de iustitia manes", which is Latin for "We are the Ghosts of Justice".
• Badass Longcoat: The Wolves’ uniform includes a hooded coat worn over the armor.
• Border Patrol: Anything that attempts to enter or leave the archipelago meets its doom in the form of a swarm of highly destructive flying drones released from cannon-like towers placed around the island. Your helicopter encounters them at the beginning of the game, and then a boat full of refugees gets destroyed in a Gory Discretion Shot from far away in one of the missions.
• Bottomless Magazines: In a case of My Rules Are Not Your Rules, enemies in Breakpoint don't need to reload at all and can fire their weapons infinitely, though they do pause between bursts. This was addressed in the Ghost Experience 2.0 update, where enemies now have to reload when the weapon runs dry just like players do, though they still have infinite spare magazines.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Breakpoint is likely the most monetized Ubisoft game to date. In addition to the expected cosmetic items for guns and avatars, the game also sells ingame currency, XP boosters, weapons, attachments, skill points, a battlepass, and a booster for the battlepass for real money.
• The Bus Came Back: Raven's Rock, the main antagonists of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, reappear as the main antagonists of Breakpoint's second DLC campaign, "Red Patriot".
• Call-Back: The events of "Operation Oracle" from Wildlands get mentioned in a conversation between Nomad and Skell.
• Character Customization: As befitting a tactical MMO, you can customize your look and loadout in multiple ways, both outfits and firearms, and the pre-order beta allows for a lot. In addition to the cosmetic accessories like headsets, glasses, undershirts and backpacks, you can also override the visuals of stat-influencing gear with anything you have found or otherwise unlocked, and customize the colors and patterns of everything. You can paint elements of your firearm separately. Some players certainly have fun with it.
• Cosmetically-Advanced Prequel: Breakpoint retroactively makes the previous games into this. Despite the game taking place shortly after Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, it features a predominantly "real world" technology level with almost none of the futuristic equipment, such as cloaking devices, electromagnetic goggles, or homing bullets, seen in those previous games. Even Skell's advanced combat robots are for the most part essentially just smart cars with armor and guns, compared to the actual mech robot from Future Soldier. Operation Motherland makes this especially prominent with the return of a cloaking device, as without significant upgrades it's noticeably less advanced than that seen an in-universe year prior - though walking upright or shooting simply drains its battery faster rather than deactivating it entirely, by default it has a ridiculously short uptime, cut even shorter under any sort of strain and followed by a significantly longer recharge that only works in daylight.
• Covered in Mud: The “Prone Camo” feature, allowing you to roll in mud or dust and lay motionless, making you functionally invisible.
• Crossover: A limited-time event has the Ghosts fighting Terminators of all things, who have appeared on the island and are using the factories to multiply and start the Machine War with all guns blazing. Of course, there's precedent for this weirdness, considering a limited-time event in Wildlands had the Ghosts fighting Yautja.
  • Deep State sees the return of Sam Fisher, still voiced by Michael Ironside.
  • Operation Amber Sky sees the Ghosts working with Rainbow, with Ash, Finka and Thatcher as squadmates and Lesion as Mission Control.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Averted with the 4 named Elite Wolves (Flycatcher, Silverback, Rosebud, and Yellowleg) as well as Josiah Hill, who all are about twice as durable as a regular Elite Mook (three times as durable in the case of Yellowleg and Hill), but still go down realistically quickly. Played straight in the Final Boss fight, since Cole Walker is protected by 4 defensive drones that vaporize all bullets that come near him; the drones all have to be destroyed before Walker can be harmed; once his shield is gone Walker is still somewhat tougher than an Elite Mook, but goes down reasonably quickly to either a second or two of full-auto fire or a headshot.
• Dark Is Evil: In contrast to Santa Blanca's all-white gang colors, Sentinel and the Wolves dress in very dark-colored uniforms, and every major Sentinel leader wears almost entirely black clothing.
• Demoted to Extra: From the start of the game, Nomad's squadmates from Wildlands are quickly sidelined when they are separated after their helicopter crashes. It later turns out that Weaver is killed, Holt is injured badly enough to be put out of action, and Midas has gone missing, later revealed to have suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of torture and experimentation.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Killing Walker stops his plan to kill thousands of key individuals across the world, at least for the moment, but Nomad and his allies are still stuck on the islands with no method of escape, and Sentinel, Trey Stone, Peter Miles, and their shadowy master are all still active and in control of the islands. Also, the drones are beginning to exhibit unexpected emergent behavior, much to the surprise and concern of both the good guys and the bad guys. As the game was heavily influenced by multi-year online shared-world "event" games like Destiny, Anthem, or Ubisoft's own The Division 2, it seems the story will be continued in future purchasable content, but Breakpoint is even more of a No Ending/Cliffhanger than any of those games' main campaigns.
• Double-Meaning Title: Breakpoint is a maritime term used to refer to the breaking of waves (fitting as the game takes place on a series of tropical islands), as well as a computer science term for when a program needs to halt for manual human input (also fitting as A.I. Is a Crapshoot seems to be involved in the plot). Characters in the game also often refer to the breaking point of a person's psych or morals, and Fallen Hero Big Bad Cole Walker has clearly crossed his breaking point.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • Your entire squad from Ghost Recon Wildlands winds up put out of commission. Weaver dies, Midas is MIA and Holt is wounded severely enough to be stuck in Erewhon.
  • Documents you come across in Red Patriot imply that this happened to Senator Maddox, Peter Miles and Carl Chissum.
• Elite Mooks:
  • The Wolves. They react much faster than ordinary Sentinel guns for hire and are more accurate. Their body armor also lets them take a couple more bullets than basic Sentinel soldiers, which combined with their very high damage output makes them tough enough that your best option is to take them out with headshots. They're also inevitably very high level, so fighting them with low tier gear is generally ill advised. You can try for yourself right after their introductory cutscene.
    • Glass Cannon: While the Wolves can't take much more damage than basic Sentinel soldiers and can be taken out with a single headshot, their damage output is very high thanks to their superior aim and reflexes (they can chew off half your health in half a second).
  • Operation Motherland, the game's Season 2, adds in the Bodarks as a new faction. Their regular Troopers aren't as tough as the Wolves, but they're supported heavily by 4 different types of Elite Mooks that are a step up from anything Sentinel or the Wolves can field; Tacticians are designated marksmen who can summon infinite reinforcements similar to Unidad from Wildlands, Oppressors are submachine gun wielding rushers equipped with full body armor that needs to be shot off before they can be injured, Dreadnaughts are similarly heavily armored units equipped with rocket launchers, and Seekers are equipped with optical camo similar to those used by the Bodarks in Future Soldier.
• Eviler than Thou: In Operation Motherland it's repeatedly noted that Bodark is far more brutal than Sentinel or the Wolves ever were. Many Sentinel soldiers are Punch Clock Villains who are Just Following Orders under the belief they're conducting a legitimate occupation of a terrorist-infested island, and the Wolves, as brutal as they can be, view themselves as patriots following Walker's ideals. The Bodark, on the other hand, are outright massacring the island's Skell employee population, even those who have been loyal and compliant to the Sentinel occupation; you can find notes from Sentinel and Wolf soldiers complaining that the Bodark's actions are crossing the line, though the Sentinel soldiers are self-aware enough to note that their methods aren't that different from Trey Stone's (who the rank-and-file seem to regard as kind of an asshole).
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Wolves all have very deep voices with heavy reverb, almost like Darth Vader. It seems likely their masks include a vocal modulator for some reason, as named Wolves lack this effect in cutscenes.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • After his appearance as an ally in Ghost Recon Wildlands, Cole Walker returns as the primary antagonist. The live-action trailer even features his Motive Rant.
  • Walker also convinces former-fellow Ghost Josiah Hill to join him after revealing the full extent of his plans to him.
  • The bonus cutscene you get later on if you manage to kill Walker at the very beginning of the game indicates that all four of Walker's Elite Wolf lieutenants are also former Ghosts.
• Faceless Goons: The Wolves, the Big Bad's Elite Mooks heavily featured in the trailers, hide their faces behind ballistic masks of various designs. Said masks don't actually protect against headshots to any appreciable degree, and even fly off with a satisfying ''ka-chunk'' when you cap them in the head.
• Funny Background Event: In the cutscene where Jace Skell introduces Paula Madera to Walker, you can see a basketball-sized Legion swarm smashing through a pane of glass, among other drone-related shenanigans.
• Gatling Good: Gatling very good. Sentinel’s patrol vehicles, both cars and boats, are armed with miniguns, and then there are the heavy troopers with hand-held miniguns as well. The heavies even lampshade this, bragging about their "fancy-schmancy miniguns" in their idle quotes.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • The entire plot of the campaign revolves around Nomad being one of the few surviving Ghosts on Auroa, who is forced to scavenge what they need to survive and eventually becoming a One-Man Army capable of taking on Walker and his mercenary army. However, that image is immediately dispelled upon first arriving at the game's hub area, Erewhon, where you'll most likely find dozens of other Ghosts / players connected online milling about, quite often well beyond the batch of 32 sent in from the USS Wasp. This is, at least, alleviated by the Deep State update introducing a Private mode which makes Erewhon only be populated by NPCs and your own squad, and not enough Ghosts to rival the Wolves.
  • Likewise, you'll find a document indicating that the Wolves are a battalion-sized unit with 200 members, with each Wolf having cost 1 million dollars to train. While that number seems about right for the main campaign, when taken together with the various Wolf Camps scattered around the map, there's way more than that number of Wolves on the island.
• Greater-Scope Villain/The Man Behind the Man: Walker, Sentinel CEO Trey Stone, and corrupt CIA officer Peter Miles are all apparently working under the backing of a mysterious individual whose identity is left unrevealed.
• Hand Cannon: Walker's apparent favorite. In the Live Action Trailer, he's wielding a Desert Eagle similar to the one he used in Wildlands, while in-game his weapon of choice is a huge revolver with a blocky match barrel. In the final battle, Walker ditches the assault rifle he was using in the cutscene, and fights exclusively with his massive revolver instead.
• Heavily Armored Mook:
  • Sentinel Heavies are considerably more dangerous than their Santa Blanca equivalents from Wildlands, being significantly more heavily armored and also wielding miniguns rather than simple light machine guns. They're more than 4 times as durable as regular Sentinel soldiers and can soak a little over a full mag of full auto fire from your starting assault rifle. Higher tier gear makes them somewhat more manageable. They also have helmets that need to be shot off before you can headshot them.
  • Later in the game you encounter even more heavily armored Heavies (usually in the later main story missions), who similar to the Los Extranjeros Heavies from Fallen Ghosts are so heavily armored that they're completely Immune to Bullets except for headshots, and you need to shoot them in the head a few times to knock off their helmet before they can be headshot.
  • Bodark Oppressors and Dreadnaughts in Operation Motherland wear heavy armor that needs to be shot off before they can be damaged. Unlike the heavy suits worn by the Heavies, the Bodark version doesn't restrict their speed or movement at all. They can withstand roughly the same amount of gunfire as a Heavy, though similar to a Heavy you can shoot off their helmet then headshot them.
• Hellish Copter:
  • At the end of "The Great Escape" mission, Ilsa Herzog tries to come after you with an Apache attack helicopter and a squad of Sentinel goons. You blow her out of the sky.
  • The side mission "Redeeming Remedy" has Maya Coleman make a similar attempt to retrieve an antivirus from you via helicopter, which naturally also ends with you shooting her down.
  • During your duel against Yellowleg, she's backed up by the circling attack helicopter that was sent to extract her, along with a couple of patrol helicopters that get drawn into the very loud firefight.
• Incredibly Durable Enemies: Compared to previous games in the series, including Wildlands, due to the Genre Shift introduction of character tier levels. Even regular Sentinel goons can withstand several torso shots from your starting assault rifle, and generally have that amount of durability if you take on leveled enemies with equivalently leveled basic gear (though with some gear optimization you can be capping them with just a few bullets each). All human enemies (except for Heavies) still die from a single headshot from any weapon, however.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Jace Skell letting Sentinel onto the island. Sure, a terrorist attack happened right before, leading Skell to think he needed security, but when nobody was looking, Sentinel hid massive amounts of troops and materiel in the old US military infrastructure on the islands, in order to prepare for The Coup.
• It's Up to You: Due to the game's Genre Shift from the open-world sandbox of Wildlands to a shared-world MMO Looter Shooter, AI squad mates were not in the game at release, and players as such had to accomplish missions either entirely on their own or with a squad of other online players. AI squadmates were added in an update in July 2020, though it's possible to disable them and continue with only player-controlled Ghosts.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • It's actually possible to kill Cole Walker at the very beginning of the game during the Hopeless Boss Fight against the Wolves after the execution of Weaver. The game actually counts it as a legit kill, too, and you'll get the achievement, mission completion, and loot drops that you normally get after the Final Boss fight. Also, even though the game continues on normally, the story does acknowledge that Walker is dead; in the cutscene in which you normally first confront him face-to-face after rescuing Jace Skell, Sergeant Hill will take his place instead as the leader of the Wolves. Also, if Walker is dead, the final battle with have no cutscene and Walker will be absent (though you'll still have to deal with a squad of Wolves).
  • In addition, it's entirely possible to unlock and beat the game's final mission to kill Walker as early as an hour into the game before you complete any of the other story missions. This also triggers the alternative cutscene during the Jace Skell rescue sequence.
• Meet the New Boss: It's heavily implied in Deep State and confirmed in Red Patriot that the Wonderland conspiracy is essentially an American version of Raven's Rock, a cabal of highly placed politicians, businessmen, and military figures who want to overthrow the current government and assume power. They even have their own special forces group in the form of the Wolves, similar to the Bodark.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: While a couple of female captains are seen in cutscenes, in gameplay all the Sentinel goons you mow through are all exclusively male.
• Mirroring Factions: One of the major themes of the main plot seems to be the fine line between a black ops soldier and a glorified death squad member. The game also shows that the Ghosts had previously worked cooperatively with both Afrikaner torture experts and a full blown U.S. military secret death squad, and many of the Wolves are former Ghosts who are perfectly fine with committing mass murder of civilians if the rules of engagement say it's OK.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Almost all of the drones (with exceptions like the Cherubim, Azrael and Behemoth) are named after the demons from Ars Goetia. And the Border Patrol system? That one's named Legion.
• No Ending: Sure, the game ends with Walker dead and his plot thwarted. However, the ending does nothing to resolve the fact Sentinel and Walker's backers are still in control of the island, Nomad and the surviving Skell personnel are still trapped on the island with no sign of rescue, and Skell drones are exhibiting emergent behaviors nobody has programmed into them.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted; it seems there are at least 3 different people named Blake in the island; Sentinel's head of security Ian Blake, a random Sentinel officer who's the target of an assassination side quest, and a Wolf stationed at Shark Base.
• Only a Flesh Wound:
  • You can shoot interrogatable enemy soldiers in the legs to disable them without killing them, so you can interrogate them for information later. They will never bleed out on their own, so you can take your time clearing out the rest of the area before getting them up and interrogating them.
  • Averted with Ian Blake, who gets shot in the shoulder by Silverback and ends up bleeding to death in less than a minute as a result.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: The Ghost Recon franchise can get crazy, but for the most part it's meant to be a "modern-day Tier-One shooter" experience. Then a limited-time experience was added in which Terminators appear on the island and start to raise hell.
  • In a meta example, one common fan complaint was that the entire game's plot and setting were this for Ghost Recon on the whole. While the proliferation of weaponized drones is certainly a current and very prevalent concern, the inclusion of things like sentient AI, Brain Uploading and giant killer robots was seen by many as being too far a step outside the series' military simulation roots into pure science fiction.
• Permanently Missable Content: If you fail a non-plot side mission, it's permanently gone. And because the game doesn't have a manual save system, you're stuck with the outcome and can't undo it by loading.
• Pre-Final Boss: The Big Bad of each major story campaign typically has a Behemoth robot protecting them. In Operation Motherland, this has happened often enough that Nomad remarks how unoriginal it's starting to become.
• Private Military Contractors: Sentinel, originally hired by Skell Tech to provide security, now working for Walker.
• The Purge: Walker's plan is essentially to use the Skell Tech drones to assassinate a computer algorithm-generated list of prominent individuals across the entire planet in order to cause a massive political upheaval. Walker and his followers seem to genuinely think this will immanentize the eschaton, but his shadowy backers seem much more interested in being the ones in charge when the dust settles.
• Retirony: Quite a few Sentinel contractors will mention how they have "three weeks left, then [they're] outta here" during their idle chatter. Downplayed in that only a few missions actively require you to kill any nearby enemies.
• Rogue Agent:
  • Col. Walker is a disillusioned former Ghost who went rogue.
  Walker: But we've become a nation under god-forsaken fools! Highly divisible! Liberated by lies, justified by complacency!
  • The Wolves are comprised of former U.S. Special Forces soldiers, including former Ghosts, who have gone rogue alongside Walker. Some joined Sentinel for typical amoral reasons (i.e. hard cash), while others were swayed by Walker's vision of a global revolution.
  • The Bodark operatives you run into in Red Patriot are the survivors of a renegade Russian special forces unit last seen aiding in an attempt to overthrow the Russian government.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Erewhon, the rebel base.
• Serial Killer: One early sidequest has you helping out a Homesteader who's known for preferring to live out by himself instead of sheltering with everyone at Erewhon. However, when you explore his shack you'll discover a torture cellar with a vivisected Sentinel officer as well as several dead civilians piled in a corner.
• Shout-Out:
  • The achievement for killing two enemies with a single rocket is "Simple Geometry."
  • The achievement for discovering 50 bivouacs is "It's Free Real Estate".
  • A character named Silverback opposes a (former) protagonist named Nomad.
  • Another Metal Gear reference is thrown in Deep State, and again it's at the ending: Sam notes that Nomad might have the eyes of other Echelons as a 'snake eater'.
  • Deep State also introduces the Mk. 23 SOCOM pistol to the game, which looks just like the SOCOM in Metal Gear Solid - it even has the blocky Laser Sight permanently attached and its own unique model for the suppressor to match the one it uses in other games, including Metal Gear Solid.
  • In the Japanese dub of the game, Ito refers to Nomad as "Narazumono", which roughly translates to "outlaw" or "ruffian." Besides being on the same track as the English "Brute Squad," the moniker is a reference to the Japanese 1964 film of the same name, where a contract killer goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge after being tricked into killing an innocent, which is interestingly similar to how the Ito twins' accidental killing of innocents in a Skell-tech bombing essentially cleared the way for Sentinel to take over the island and kick off the plot.
  • A sadistic blonde female Torture Technician is named Ilsa, though this one's South African instead of German.
  • The Homesteader's hideout, Erewhon, is named after Erewhon: or; Over the Range, a satirical novel by Samuel Butler that was one of the first to postulate on machine intelligence, self-replicating machines and may be the Trope Maker for A.I. Is a Crapshoot in modern writing.
  • One of the Episode 1 Sidequests is called For Honor.
  • One of the weapons added with the The Terminator crossover event is the "Resistance ASR" - aka the Valmet M82, the same prop used as Kyle Reese's primary weapon before going back in time in the first film.
• Self-Deprecation: The Deep State trailer pokes fun at the more absurd aspects of Breakpoint, from the Terminator event (Vic says he's never heard of them) to the RPG-like gear system and even the central theme of drone warfare, which Sam questions as to why anyone would fight the things.

• The Singularity: Skell's "Project Deus" is an attempt to develop a super-intelligent A.I. that will allow humanity to transcend its current state of existence. Many of Nomad's allies are understandably creeped out by Skell's transhumanist ambitions, the Outcasts formed in direct opposition to the project, and Walker wants to use the technology to upend the global political balance.
• Sticks to the Back: The weapons used by the player stick to the back when not in use in a way that seems aggressively at odds with the gravity at times. One gameplay video shows two rifles slightly longer than the player's torso essentially hovering on either side of the player backpack, with nothing seeming to attach them to anything, and the player able to retrieve one into their hands and place the other back in a second. Doubly so if you wear no backpack, in which case your two rifles to just kind of float on your back not really attached to anything.
• Superboss: The Behemoths, Skell Tech's biggest and most powerful combat robots, are the toughest and highest level enemies in the game, and are never encountered over the course of the regular game except for one just immediately prior to the Final Boss.
• Tempting Fate: Guards are hilariously Genre Blind, spouting lines like "Nothing ever happens around here". And then you happen to them.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The game does a pretty good job making enemy response to sneaking players feel reasonable, such as taking cover from where gunshots appear to be coming from and trying to move in that direction without staying in the open, but when drones are around during minor alert, especially ground vehicles, they sometimes seem to know where to gravitate even if they shouldn't have any clear idea where the ghosts are at the moment, such as finding a ghost who hasn't fired a shot or one who used remote explosives.
• Threat Backfire: The reveal trailer has Nomad growl out an entire litany of threats, cut to a shot of Walker with his voiceover providing a very short and stoic response.
  Walker: I'm a Ghost too. I would expect nothing less.
• Tropical Island Adventure: The game is set on a series of tropical islands in the South Pacific.
• Villain Opening Scene: Walker makes quite an entrance: he flanks the last survivor of a helicopter crash during a firefight and orders the Wolves to hold fire only to give a Preemptive Apology before shooting Weaver point-blank.
• Wolfpack Boss: Aside from the Final Boss, the game's "boss" enemies are only slightly tougher than a regular enemy, but are backed up by a significant amount of Elite Mooks and various other enemy support.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Averted. Once any of the Elite Wolves appear on your intel board, if you already know their hideout location (either from a walkthrough or having played through the game before) you can just go straight to them and kill them without having to follow the normal mission steps to find all the clues to their location. You can also bypass the main quest line and skip straight to the Final Boss after the game's introductory mission, though because of his base's high tier level clearing it with a starting character is quite difficult.

---