A formal complaint has been filed against France by the government of Bolivia who finds the depiction of the country within Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands to be inaccurate to the point of potentially prompting legal action.
The French embassy has yet to respond to or comment on the complaint, but already this conversation highlights one of the potential, albeit rare, issues game developers can face when their fictitious game world overlap with reality.
According to Reuters, Bolivia has delivered a letter to the French embassy asking that the government intervene with the game’s portrayal of the country. Which could be a mite difficult, since the game is set to release next week.
Ghost Recon Wildlands stages its story of drug cartel-fueled conflict in the country of Bolivia, a portrayal that the country’s Interior Minister Carlos Romero says is grounds for a lawsuit. Speaking to Reuters, Romero said that they have the standing to take legal action, but would first prefer to resolve the issue through diplomatic negotiation.
Ubisoft, however, maintains that the game is a fictional portrayal of the country that “imagines a different reality than the one that exists in Bolivia today,” then adding that it hopes "that the in-game world comes close to representing the country's beautiful topography.”