Ubisoft released a new location briefing for the upcoming, open-world military sim, Ghost Recon: Wildlands. The blog covers the various environmental settings located within the cartel-laden region of Bolivia.

They detailed on the Ubisoft blog that their fictional take on Bolivia features 11 different biomes, ranging from deserts and salt flats, to dense jungles and rocky mountains. There are even snow peaks to scale.

Lead artist from Ubisoft Paris studios, Benoit Martinez, explained that they had a team spanning the four corners of Bolivia and beyond, and that’s how they “defined” the world of Ghost Recon: Wildlands, saying…

“The biggest challenge was to define our world.” […] “We went to Bolivia for a couple of weeks, and dispatched the team between the north, south, east, and west regions of the country. We were everywhere, from the Altiplano to the death road, jungle, islands, and everything in between.”

They took time to flesh out specific locations, NPC behavior for the townsfolk, as well as behavior for the wildlife and animals that players may encounter. They describe in the blog post that the design of each of Ghost Recon: Wildland’s areas are about as large as the play-space for the entirety of most other games. I don’t know exactly how true that is until I get my hands on the game and see for myself how it plays, but freedom is one of the key selling points for this new military sim.

Martinez did explain that the detail they were able to capture for the various environmental topography and settlements was all done thanks to a wide array of specialized tools that they’re using in-house. He states…

“We have hundreds of specific tools that let us do everything from populating rocks, building villages, scattering objects to pushing the electric lines […]

 

“The purpose of [our tools] is to offer better design quality, because the tools themselves are not going to define the quality,” […] “But because of our tools, we can iterate even more. If we did it the traditional way, with less tools and more work, we would maybe create a forest once, and then treat it twice because it would take too much time [to do it more than that]”

He mentions that they’re capable of defining the terrain and changing things on the fly and adding as much detail as possible thanks to those iterative design tools.

You can look for Ghost Recon: Wildlands to launch on the PS4, Xbox One and PC starting March 7th, 2017.