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?

Space is awesome. Spaceships are awesome. And blowing things up in spaceships is…well…awesome. With that bit of wisdom out of the way, it seems that Frontier Developments has decided to make Elite: Dangerous just a bit more accessible with the launch of Elite Dangerous: Arena. They’ve taken the Close Quarters Combat (CQC) mode of the full game and made it available as a stand alone for just $7.49. CQC pits teams of 4 against each other in fast moving space battles. Players can choose from one of 4 ships, level up and customize their craft in three different modes. Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag are all available for those budding Luke Skywalkers out there.

Having sunk a fair amount of time into Elite:Dangerous, I have some experience with CQC. Having it as a standalone mode is an interesting decision, and should hopefully expose more people to Elite without the intimidating massive galaxy of the full game. However, it should be noted that as of the time of this writing, I have spent upwards of 30 minutes in queue waiting for a Capture the Flag match. This is nothing new, and as I primarily enjoy objective based game modes, has reaffirmed my opinion that CQC has nothing to offer to my playstyle. If you enjoy TDM though, give it a try.

The Elder Scrolls Online is due to receive another DLC pack soon with the addition of Thieves Guild, which will feature the organisation in question.

Thieves Guild will come in two parts – the expansion itself as well as a patch for the base game which will add scrolling combat text and a new 64-bit client for PC and Mac users that can support it, among a bunch of other things to update the game.

Coming with the expansion will be a new area – Hew’s Bane – and you’ll find the Guild at Abah’s Landing which is the HQ and where you can start off as a recruit for the thieves and other criminals of the streets. It’ll also bring a whole bunch of other stuff, such as new costumers, motifs, items sets specific to the guild and “hours” of new quests and story. One new 12-player trial in particular will be Maw of Lorkjhaj, but other than the name there’s been no details given on it or much else.

Release date and pricing has also not yet been revealed, although we’ve been told to “be on the lookout for more articles starting next week” which suggests that they’ll be coming out to the public soon.

The CEO of Gazillion Entertainment, the company behind the Marvel Heroes game, has announced that he is due to leave the company to work on his own projects after seven years.

David Brevik was formerly the president of Blizzard North for 11 years previously and said that he missed the game developing side of his job.

“As CEO, I spent most of my time running the company” Brevik said in the post he made on the Marvel Heroes’ forums to announce his leaving. “After doing this for several years, I really want to get back to developing games and programming. I got into this industry to make games and I miss the day-to-day creation process.”

He said that the decision to leave had been tough to make as he loved Marvel Heroes and while he’ll still be playing the game and streaming it he’s “going back to doing the things I love most: programming and making games.”

On the subject of Marvel Heroes’ future and the big 2016 update next month Brevik is confident that the Gazillion team have it handled suitably. “We have an incredibly talented staff here, and I know the game is in great hands, I believe in the future of the game and I know a lot of amazing things that are being worked on.”

Recently Blizzard have brought down the banhammer on a number of World of Warcraft accounts who were found to have been using third-party bot programs to play parts of the game for them.

The Community Manager Lore was the one who revealed the bans on the forums saying “We’ve recently taken action against a large number of World of Warcraft accounts that were found to be using third-party programs that automate gameplay, known as ‘bots.’ As a part of this action, we have removed various currencies and inventory from these accounts including, but not limited to, gold, PvP currencies, and gear. The penalty for those identified as repeat offenders has also been increased.”

The accounts in question haven’t been permanently banned though, instead given six months time out in suspension. The reasons why Lore says is that research has revealed that it’s the better way to cut down on botting players.

Those with banned accounts apparently often go to buy a new account and most often continue where they left off, while those with suspended accounts are more likely to just wait out the suspension period and then when they do get their accounts back they may give up the botting out of fear of being caught again and permanently kicked next time. In other words the shock of being caught and almost losing what they worked on often acts as a better deterrent than actually permanently losing it all.

Interesting stuff.