Operation Wildlands

Lore & Background

The game takes place in Bolivia in July 2019. The country has become increasingly unstable as a Mexican drug cartel known as the Santa Blanca Cartel gains control of several regions. Led by the brutal and religious cartel boss El Sueño, the cartel turns Bolivia into the world's largest producer of cocaine. The Bolivian government establishes La Unidad, an elite special forces group tasked with fighting the Cartel, but both factions eventually establish a truce after months of brutal fighting, with some of Unidad's personnel secretly working for Santa Blanca. DEA Agent Ricardo "Ricky" Sandoval is sent undercover in Santa Blanca in a joint operation with the CIA, eventually working for El Sueño himself. The United States is compelled to act when a bomb targets the American embassy in La Paz and Sandoval is executed by the cartel after his cover is blown, deploying a Ghost Recon fireteam consisting of team leader and support gunner Nomad, vehicle and assault specialist Midas, hacker and tactical engineer Holt, and their sniper Weaver.

In Their Own Story

Nomad's fireteam is deployed to Bolivia as part of Operation Kingslayer, a joint operation between the CIA, DEA, and JSOC. The Ghosts enter Bolivia with their CIA contact, Karen Bowman, who was also a close friend to Sandoval. They meet Pac Katari, leader of the Kataris 26, the only resistance against Santa Blanca. Katari requests they rescue Amaru, whose ideologies inspired the Kataris 26, from Santa Blanca. The Ghosts dismantle the cartel piece by piece, targeting their four main operations: Influence, Security, Production, and Smuggling. After eliminating one of the four main operations, El Sueño personally contacts the team and lures them to a meeting, but instead calls them via phone to bribe the Ghosts into working for him, though they refuse. The team finds audio tapes of agent Sandoval's reports revealing he was responsible for the embassy bombing and framed Santa Blanca. After dismantling half of the cartel, Katari claims his men have located El Sueño, but the Ghosts instead find the body of Amaru. Katari breaks their alliance, and the Ghosts rescue Bowman and race to El Sueño's mausoleum to capture him before Katari kills him. The Ghosts and Bowman surround El Sueño, who has beheaded Katari. Despite his surrendering, Bowman receives a call revealing El Sueño has made a deal with the Department of Justice for immunity. If remnants of the cartel remain, Bowman executes El Sueño, leading to her dismissal from the CIA. The canon ending occurs when the Ghosts have fully dismantled the cartel; Bowman takes El Sueño into protective custody, and he provides further intelligence on other drug cartels, terrorist groups, and arms smugglers.

Reader's Guide

Operation Wildlands is the main story campaign of *Ghost Recon Wildlands*. Players control members of the Ghosts, a fictional elite special operations unit of the United States Army under the Joint Special Operations Command. The game is a tactical cover based shooter set in an open world environment played from a third-person perspective with an optional first-person view for gun aiming. Each of the 21 areas on the map is controlled by a buchon, who is associated with one of four divisions of the cartel's operations: Influence, Security, Production, and Smuggling. Clearing missions in an area and collecting key intel unlocks missions where players can target a buchon and eliminate him or her by killing or capturing the target. Eliminating enough buchones in an operations division allows players to target that division's underboss, and eliminating that underboss and all of the buchones in an operations division leaves the division head vulnerable. Capturing this division head cripples and destabilizes the division and makes the cartel boss more vulnerable. The game features cooperative multiplayer mode for up to four players, and a competitive multiplayer mode was released as part of a free update on October 10, 2017, featuring an elimination type of game mode in a timed 4v4 match with revives.

Did You Know?

• The game sold over 10 million units by March 2020.
• A sequel, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Breakpoint, was released on October 4, 2019.
• The game is the first entry in the Ghost Recon series to feature an open world environment.
• The game world includes nine different types of terrain, such as mountains, forests, desert, and salt flats, and introduces a dynamic weather system and a day-night cycle.
• The competitive multiplayer mode was released as part of a free update on October 10, 2017.