If I had to take a pick of the plethora of ways the human race has predicted it would die, I would pick the overarching storyline of The Division’s tale.
It’s not nuclear warfare. It’s not zombies. It’s not aliens. It’s a man-made virus purposefully engineered in a lab. It’s dark.
To think that someone would purposefully combine the worst parts (or, the most attractive parts if you’re building a super virus) of humanity’s previous viruses and wipe out 90% of the population… It’s just terrifying.
That’s pretty much the entire plot to The Division. You play as a Division agent who is attempting to right the wrongs in the city of Manhattan where the virus has spread, killing hundreds of thousands of people, leaving the carcass of a once great city behind. Those who have remained alive have formed gangs and groups – all with their own specific purpose and righteousness – and have turned on each other in the name of survival.
In the opening scenes of the game, you’re introduced to the bleak city that Manhattan has now become. Arriving at an outpost by helicopter, you’re introduced to the state of affairs the post-apocalyptic game has to offer you. Its RPG elements become clear as vendors yell out to you, declaring their wares and promising to increasing your stats. This is an introduction to you, a highly-trained agent characterised by Damage, Health and Skill points. But it’s also an introduction to the shared world you inhabit, as this first social space not only throws you into the city, but into other human players, too. And that’s one of the main features that drove the hype train before The Division came out. The game blends genres together to give players something fresh. It’s an MMO3PSRPG. Or, if you don’t like acronyms, a Massively Multiplayer Online 3rd Person Shooter Role Playing Game. To break it down even further and possibly into english? It’s a shooting game, over the shoulder, where there are lots of other people you play with in real time, with elements that give you the perception of playing a certain role via the manipulation of statistics like damage, health and skill.
At it’s core, The Division is a shooter. Which means that moment to moment gunplay has to be amazing, and for the most part, the game does a good job of providing you with the regular interactions of a 3rd person shooter you’ve probably come to expect. Aiming and movement are tight, with different gun styles giving different recoil and behaviour characteristics when shooting bad guys in the face from cover to cover. And this game is all about cover. Virtually every gunfight you participate in will involve you moving between a dozen cover points because the (usually) smart AI will attempt to flank you or lob a grenade next to you, forcing you out of your position. Initially, learning the cover system is a little clunky. Sometimes you incorrectly snap to the wrong side of a car or barricade, and there’s no extra interactions or skills associated with making the most out of the system, like being able to dive or slide to cover or grabbing close enemies and meleeing them. It’s just a simple, barebones version.
The objective of the early game is to restore your ‘Base of operations’. This base is more like a run down shack to start with featuring these 3 ‘wings’ that require restoration that align to your abilities. Over the progression of the main storyline, side quests and encounters, you build up supplies for these wings which you can then turn into improvements which lead to rewards and unlock abilities. It gives you a sense of control over what you want to progress first, and a good idea is to figure out what kind of play-style you want to run with and build your wings and skills from there. The skills give you battlefield-changing abilities like throwing up mobile cover, supplying health to your team mates or throwing a turret down. They all have a great part to play in the way you approach a gunfight and it’s particularly satisfying when you synergise with a fire team of 3 others using skills that compliment one another.
Each district provides a main mission which propels you along the storyline, however the storytelling suffers from the same syndrome a lot of MMO’s suffer from. It’s fragmented and not really that engaging. Aside from the overarching situation of a pandemic that you’re in, it’s hard to feel compelled to move from one part of the story to the next aside for the sake of grinding out levels. It’s a shame really, there’s so much good quality story hidden in the intel that you explicitly have to select to watch – it’s just not told well. I’ll let you discover the story for yourself, but it would have been nice to get a back story into the gangs and groups, why they’re there and why they think they’re all so righteous in their own way on a deeper level instead of ‘just because’.
The story suffers from MMO syndrome. It’s fragmented and not really that engaging
When grinding through the main storyline, the set pieces and action parts are usually varied and interesting. Aside from the bullet sponge bosses (and bullet sponge everything in the higher difficulties), the AI is quite intelligent, hiding in and out of cover quickly and fluidly. It’s nice to see that they also increase in intelligence as their difficulty ramps up. The side quests and encounters, however, face another issue a lot of MMO’s face, which is monotony. Often, regardless of district, you’re tasked with the same 6 or so rotating tasks – Rescue the civilian, mark something for support and defend, activate virus scanners, go find pieces of the quest scattered amongst the district, etc. It’s gets boring pretty quickly and when you factor in the significant time it takes to run from one encounter to the next with little to no interaction from other agents and a sparse selection of mobs, it feels like the encounters are rarely worth the low experience, supply or mental engagement they provide.
Everything is much more bearable with friends, however. The Divisions fire team system is pretty good, invites and joins work fairly seamlessly with the press of the thumb-stick in-game and you’re able to fast travel to where your friends are if they’ve run off without you and left you behind. The audio is also quite clear, much clearer than other in-game chats I’ve experienced. It’s also really cool to be able to hear other party chats as you approach other groups in the Dark Zone.
Which leads me to pretty much the best part of The Division’s experience. The Dark Zone.
The Dark Zone is a walled-off PvPvE arena where players take on high level NPC’s of varying difficulty depending on which of the 5 zones you’re in. The Dark Zone is all about high risk vs high reward. When you die, you get punished. You drop credits, loot and lose Dark Zone rank, which upon completion of levels 30 and 50, unlocks access to endgame gear. Unfortunately, as you progress levels, the death penalty scales with you in a disproportionate way. Sometimes you might lose half an entire level of Dark zone rank or even a full one, depending on how high you are at that time. That means you can spend literally hours grinding for the next level, only to lose all of those hours via a single death. On the flip side, if you succeed and not die, mobs drop high level loot and they drop it often. The catch here, however, is that because of the virus, they’re contaminated, which means you have to get them out of the zone and into safety for later decontamination and storage into your stash. It sounds easy enough, but you’re only ever allowed to carry up to 8 pieces of loot at a time in the Dark Zone. Also, in order to get the loot out, you have to call for an extraction of that gear at specific zones, which is where the chaos starts.
When extracting your gear, a timer appears, signalling the time it will take for the helicopter to arrive. As the time starts to tick, NPC’s attempt to rush you and take you out. Also, all the other human players in the zone are alerted of your team wanting to extract something, so often you’ll find other players rush to the same extraction zone to try their chances at one of the 4 slots each extraction allows. Usually, if it’s your fire team of 4, each one of you will have a good chance of extraction and people will leave you alone. Other times, chaos ensues as other fire teams decide to ‘go rogue’ and kill you. Stealing both your loot and your chance of getting your gear out.
This is really where the fun is. As a PvPvE arena, there is always this extreme tension when you see another human player running around. Will they help you? Will they hurt you? Are they strategically positioning themselves to help you take out a high-level named group (the hardest kinds of mobs)? Or are they strategically setting themselves up to take you out while you’re distracted and engaging in the foes in front of you? It’s exciting. You always have to watch your back and you always have to be aware.
The Dark Zone is where most of The Division’s fun is at
The main purpose of the Dark Zone, though, is to gather the best endgame loot. My issue with that is once you’ve got it, there’s no other objectives to be found. What else is there to do? You can’t go Rogue on purpose because it’s just not mathematically worth it. Dark Zone rank for kills don’t increase that much while you’re Rogue, and death losses increase exponentially. Plus you’re pretty much guaranteed a loss of an entire level if you achieve level 5 Rogue status, as the entire server instance will be alerted of you and try to hunt you down, fast.
This is the limit of The Division’s PvP functionality, which means that when you hit the end game, that’s it. You’re done. Apparently an expansion called ‘The Incursion’ is coming out soon, but without an active area of repeatable competition (aside from the boring ‘daily missions’ which are just rehashes of old missions on a higher difficulty), there isn’t much replay-ability in this game.
If I had to rate this game in a numerical format, it would be a 7 out of 10. And that kinda sucks, because much like Destiny, this game has serious potential. But for everything The Division has got going for it, it’s got something equal or worse that detracts from the overall experience. The story is plausible but fairly thin and told poorly. The gunplay and cover system is standard but nothing special. The Dark Zone is interesting, but it’s not a true PvP experience. It’s pretty fun grinding out levels, stories and DZ ranks with your friends, but then again, pretty much every modern game is fun with friends. I don’t see this game really lasting more than a few months. It’ll be forgotten by the time the next AAA game comes out. But for the month or so that you do get to enjoy it (and you probably will at least enjoy it) at least it’ll be better than Watchdogs.
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