With The Division coming out soon, Digmbot and Artemiss join up to offer their opinions on what they’ve experienced so far with the game.
Digmbot
Tom Clancy’s Division is coming out in just a few days, and I’m remembering my own time spent with the beta. There was one extremely frustrating stream, and about 4 hours of off stream play. Perhaps the one thing I could say about The Division is that the shooting mechanics aren’t awful. They aren’t particularly good either, but they aren’t terrible. The game is competent. It aims to put you into an open world New York rife with waist high cover for you to crouch behind while you shoot at enemies and then loot them, and it does so. It aims to include RPG elements, and it does so.
The glaring issue I have with this is that it is not fun. The game controls fine. It isn’t particularly satisfying feeling to slowly dodge roll into cover, or clamber precariously over a car hood, but it does it when I press the button. It just feels chunky and slow. The cover mechanics such as switching between cover or vaulting over are as tried and true as the come. So is blind firing from behind cover. New York is certainly nice to look at, though not on the level they promised us in the original trailer. But all graphical complaints aside, The Division is uninspired. It takes all of the checklist boxes of an open world game, a cover based shooter, and a loot based game and doggedly ticks them off. The setting, which is admittedly intriguing can’t - for me- save gameplay that is utterly dull as dishwater. Even the loot is uninspired. In most loot based games (Diablo and Borderlands come to mind), there is an immediacy to the loot. Shiny new toys! That do crazy things! Destiny pulls this off especially well from a visual standpoint. Guns look awesome in Destiny. And in Borderlands they do insane things like shoot lightning. In The Division the guns...make slightly larger numbers pop up above enemies head’s when you shoot them. They might reduce recoil slightly. They might up your ammo count by 5 rounds in a magazine.This isn’t compelling loot. When I play Borderlands, as soon as I grab a new gun I immediately open my menu to stare at it and see if I should equip it. When I was playing The Division, I usually remembered I had new loot after 20 minutes or so when I opened the inventory for some reason and saw the little tag. It’s just not compelling, which to me is a huge problem in a loot based game.
Let’s move on to the other thing that I find most egregious about Tom Clancy’s: The Division- bullet sponge enemies. Over the years Tom Clancy games have conditioned us to expect realism. Rainbow Six, Splinter Cell and the like have made it clear that these are games grounded in reality. If you shoot someone in the head with an AK-47 in Splinter Cell or Rainbow Six, they will die. In The Division, they will continue walking straight towards you as if nothing happened. Common thugs wearing nothing but hoodies can take 10 to 15 rounds to the face. This is a subjective thing, I get that. But the name Tom Clancy and bullet sponge enemies do not belong in the same game. And even beyond the idea that this is Tom Clancy game, video games in general have conditioned me to the idea that if I shoot a baddie in the head with a real gun, he’s going to go down. If I shoot him with a hyper powered badger gun in Borderlands, ok he might not go down. Because he has shields and is a mutated psycho on the moon of a distant world. But not an AK-47 in a real looking game. Get the idea? It's a dissonance that I can’t reconcile and it ruins a core mechanic of the game for me.
The last thing to touch on is The Dark Zone. This is the PvP area of the game, and is probably the only bit of credit I would give the game in terms of new ideas or originality. Once in the Dark Zone you and other players can team up or duke it out over loot that you can scavenge from NPCs and objectives in the zone. All of this loot is contaminated though and must be airlifted out via helicopter. Once this is done, it will be decontaminated and you can then equip it. This is a cool idea that is utterly ruined by the asinine restriction that you can only place four packs on the helicopter’s line at a time. Of course, it drives emergent stories by having players turn on one another in order to make sure their loot get out at all costs. But the other thing it does is punish you for someone else being an asshole, which is not good game design. Of course killing too many other players will mark you on the zone map and incentivize other players to take you down, something very similar to DayZ’s bandit system. I find the idea of these emergent stories to be probably the most interesting part of The Division, and especially of the Dark Zone.
I’m sure there are plenty of elements of The Division that will be discovered after launch that I didn’t get to experience yet. The problem is that what I did experience was bland enough, dull enough, cookie cutter enough and just plain not fun enough that I don’t care to experience those other moments. For me, The Division is a generic military third person shooter with some RPG elements shoehorned in that doesn’t really do anything new. I’ll pass. Maybe one day they’ll put Destiny on PC. At least it has Star Wars style speeder bikes..
ArtemissBow (aka Ranger)
Admit it, everyone saw the recent open beta for The Division, and at least considered downloading it. I was the one refreshing the page awaiting the open access. When I first saw the announcement trailers and teasers for the game, I nearly jumped out of my skin with excitement. Having interactable objects in the world you don’t just glitch around, even some of the mobile aspects had be interested. I’m sure I was one of many who were mostly disappointed after seeing a much more recent E3 example of the game and gameplay, sporting a not-so-beautiful looking New York landscape and strange shooter mechanics.
My experience with the beta refreshed my view significantly. I was able to quickly forgive any graphical broken promises when I was immersed in the semi-apocalyptic Manhattan landscape. There was nothing glaringly terrible about the game graphically, and despite the fact the game presented was in beta, I encountered very few glitches. Granted, usually games that are released on console as a ‘beta’ are mostly finished so it was pretty unlikely that I would have seen too many.
The gameplay is solid, as long as you like 3rd person, cover based shooters. I do think that the game was rather standard as far as the in-game play, but I was thrilled with how the RPG elements were incorporated. It was a little disappointing to see, while my character was low level, enemies eat half a clip of damage from my assault rifle. That feeling was short-lived though, as progression was fast and I started to feel up to pace after only an hour or so of play. I am excited to see what they do with the game as far as the story is concerned, as the setup that we were exposed to, my inner science nerd is drooling. The story we were exposed to did also hint at some base building and crafting elements. These are things I was not expecting, but was happy to see! I had friends that hated the fact games like Fallout 4 had base building, and I have to believe that if you are one of those people, you might not like this aspect of The Division as well.
Another major element definitely worth mentioning is the Dark Zone. I will need to address the Dark Zone separately as the meta develops after the game releases, but aside from the dissertation I could write of speculation regarding the mechanics, I’ll use a single word: potential. The Dark Zone is absolutely brimming over with potential. Let me preface this by saying, I am generally NOT a PvP player. I have several hours into games like Destiny, DayZ, Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2; but it is a rare occurrence that I venture/engage in the PvP zones of these games. I am just the type of player that enjoys PvE elements more. I have never been so happy to be wrong. I love that the zone is persistent, you do not end the PvP experience until you decide to walk back out of the door. Gamers that are sick of games like Destiny where the load screens between matches is a huge time sink for your gaming hours will love this. All you do is walk in the door, and it’s all PvP all the time.
That being said, there is little to NO motivation for aggressive players to camp the doors. When you have sweet DZ loot, you get the fashionable, gigantic yellow butt-pack that indicates you have gear that might be worth stealing. People who just walked in the door have no butt-pack and so aggressive players have no motivation just to kill you, as they won’t get anything from it other than being tagged as ‘Rogue’ which is not necessarily favorable as the whole server can then see your exact position on the map. Speaking of being announced to the server, I even liked the extraction setup for the DZ loot. It’s exciting and thrilling to try and get your precious loot out when the extraction location and time is announced to the whole server. Extraction is where you will be finding the aggressive players, so it’s treacherous. Extraction is why I really want to wait for a full impression until the meta develops, as I saw something incredible while I was playing the beta. There were high ranked/level/DPS players….actually protecting the extraction zones from aggressive players so that normal scrubs like me could get my sweet loot out of the DZ.
Long story short, The Division is an absolute yes from me. I don’t know if it will be able to replace the more flashy titles like Destiny, but it’s going to be a real contender. I will absolutely be playing this one on release.
So there you have it. What do you think about The Division so far?
