Impression: This article is an Impression piece. It does not in any way reflect the final product of a game, but represents the author’s initial contact with a game’s demo or beta.
Hours Played: Between the closed and open betas, about 10.
Things look bleak.
I mean, I guess the apocalypse does tend to make things look significantly darker than sunshine and rainbows.
Enter The Division, an oft rumored legend among the gaming community that appeared at E3 several years ago and then subsequently disappeared for two years with nary a word or a preview. Then suddenly as though Ubisoft channeled Lazarus, the next game in the Tom Clancy line reappeared and…looked surprisingly good. Why do I say ‘surprisingly’?
Well, we’ve seen this before. Does anyone remember the debacle that was Duke Nukem Forever? Or Aliens: Colonial Marines? Those are the game that had potential and then suddenly disappeared into development hell only to suddenly rise from the grave as a zombie with a pretty looking face. Here’s the problem, though. It’s still a zombie. It wants to cull you into a false sense of security and while you have your guard down and your wallet out, it will take your hard earned $60 (I don’t do the Pounds or Euros, does this look like a British or European zombie?), slap you in the face for assuming that it wasn’t a zombie, and then run off to go develop more horrible games. Those gosh darned zombies.
The Division, however, genuinely impressed me. Set in the middle of a horrible virus outbreak in New York City, The Division puts players into the role of their very own Division agent (I know, ‘Division’ is used a lot here) and tasked with getting to the bottom of what happened to the first wave of Division agents and who could have released this virus into the city. Of course, nothing in a video game is ever that easy so you will have many obstacles standing in your way: angry rioters, various different psychopathic gangs one of which loves using flamethrowers, and several missions necessary to restoring your base of operations and upgrading your abilities and skills.
Players could smash through the beta’s content in a couple of hours and while I found the game play enjoyable, the relatively short completion time of the variety of missions leaves me concerned. Before we dig into that, let me discuss the things I greatly enjoyed about The Division.
Games with excellent weather effects make me giddy. When the snow began to fall and visibility dropped to about 5 meters in front of you, when night time approached and the broken lights of a suffering city sparked on, and when the sun hits the fallen snow on the ground, it all makes me swoon. The Division does an excellent job at setting the mood and creating a wonderful atmosphere. I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed just walking around the city and taking it all in.
The overall story of The Division has promise and Ubisoft tells different pieces of that story through interactive sequences called ‘echoes’. These echoes begin a small visual and audio recording of an event that transpired in an area and like any triple-A game, the voice acting and sound design gives players a sense of exactly what happened. One of my most intriguing, yet horrifying echoes presented a couple in a car panicking to escape while a group of psychopathic gangers known as ‘The Cleaners’ began to torch their car…with them in it. You don’t actually see any of the images (the screen is this static hologram made up of different colored dots that outlines people and objects), but the sheer fact that you heard this couple screaming for their lives sent goose bumps up my arms. After that, I swore to find every Cleaner in the city and mercilessly eliminate them.
These bastards deserve a good whooping.
Like any Tom Clancy game, shooting should take the forefront of the medium and The Division pulls this off relatively well. It reminds me a great deal of Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, a game I absolutely adored and found the gunplay within the game above par. Like Future Soldier, you have the ability to customize your weapons with a good variety of modifications (though not as much as you could in Future Soldier’s ‘gunsmith’) and modify how your firearm performs in the field. Rapid fire weapons such as submachine guns, assault rifles, and light machine guns can potentially suppress a target and force them to huddle behind cover so your friends can flank and finish them off. NOT ENOUGH GAMES DO THIS. Future Soldier had a suppression mechanic similar to this and it greatly amplified the usefulness of the LMGs as well as granted XP during multiplayer matches for any player who suppressed another. It encouraged teamwork and I can’t stress enough how much I enjoy having this in The Division.
Your skills and abilities range the gamut from a healing gun to a deployable shield with some defensive turrets sprinkled in. They all seem quite fun and really let you change your play style to match whatever you’d like or to compliment the style of your friends. Even better, once you’ve unlocked an ability, you have the option to further upgrade and customize it and you can seamlessly switch between any unlocked abilities with a few button presses. You are not beholden to one particular tree of skills. Though the beta didn’t have a large number of choices for your abilities (and completely ignored the interesting ‘perks’ section of the game), the taste I received left me wanting more.
Finally, let’s discuss the Dark Zones, The Division’s PvP zones that allow players to acquire some spectacular loot while facing very difficult enemies and potentially other players. When you enter into a Dark Zone you are labeled as ‘non-hostile’. In order to extract any loot you’ve acquired, you have to head to a designated extraction zone, fire off a flare (which warns everyone that an extraction helicopter is on the way), and wait 1:30 for the helicopter to arrive. The tension this creates has an intensity I haven’t felt in a game for some time. The worst part? Someone could kill you and take your loot! Here’s how it works: should you choose to shoot and kill another player (thus forcing them to drop any loot they’ve collected), you are tagged as ‘hostile’ and any player can shoot at you freely. It’s a massive risk, but one that could potentially pay off. Hunting hostile players became a favorite activity of my friends and me, for we enjoyed punishing the jerks who hunted down innocent people just trying to upgrade their gear. This creates a fascinating dynamic.
Yet it also presents a possible issue. During the open beta, I explored the Dark Zone as I had done in the closed beta. Though you shouldn’t go alone, I had meandered through the more terrifying parts of the DZ alone before and felt confident in my ability to take down NPCs. All went well until I saw a rogue agent running from two non-hostile agents in the subway. I joined in on the hunt and helped them take him or her down, receiving some lovely XP and some Dark Zone cash (used to purchase things from Dark Zone vendors). The three of us exchanged nervous glances, but then noticed another rogue agent farther in the subway. Charging at him, we quickly backtracked when we noticed that six other rogue agents followed him or her. They created a roving gang of rogues who quickly dispatched the three of us and took any loot we had. It sucked and none of us could do anything. They terrorized the southern half of the Dark Zone until I left. It was the first time I didn’t have fun playing The Division.
The Division also has a series of in-game items you can collect in order to gain more information about the story. While you can access these items in-game (unlike Destiny), I fear that Ubisoft might resort to a reliance on the echoes and collectibles to tell the story. Even then, the story itself has promise but does still reek of the usual Tom Clancy flavor. Not that I’m opposed to the usual Tom Clancy (rest in peace) storytelling! I simply fear that The Division will become predictable. Also like Destiny, this game presents itself as an ‘MMO, but not really an MMO’ and while I logged over 600 hours in Destiny, I became innately aware of just how little content it had. The Division follows the same vein as Bungie’s prolific shooter and I only hope it promises more content than Destiny did. Otherwise, players will quickly burnout and turn to another source of entertainment.
Some news sites complained about how enemies became bullet-sponges capable of absorbing an entire clip’s worth of ammunition without even missing a step. Though Tom Clancy games generally prefer to make both the player and the enemy easy to kill (bullets tend to do that), The Division doesn’t suffer from changing the formula. It is a third person shooter/RPG after all! Sometimes, however, it does seem a little absurd that a large man wearing what looks like a knockoff costume of the Pyro from Team Fortress 2 can take 8 clips and multiple grenades before he dies. I don’t think that incorporating RPG elements into a game necessarily means that opponents, especially bosses, should use fewer tactics. Yes, you could focus on his fuel tanks to whittle his health down faster, but I prefer an intelligent and tactical fight. Hopefully not all of the boss enemies are like this.
The Division releases for the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC on March 8th. I hope to see you all in the Dark Zone! Let’s hunt some hostile agents together!
Victorus aut Mortis!
-Valiant
[…] ashes, The Division’s two betas showed incredible promise. Yet as I mentioned in my article “The Division – Two Weeks Until Apocalypse”, I had my worries concerning this game’s potential lack of content. 600 hours into […]
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