The Division Day 5
So I finally took my first steps into the Dark Zone, and it seems my worst fears about the place have taken hold. In the beta, it was a high risk, high reward location where you could never be too sure if you could trust your fellow players as you fought and clawed your way past vicious mobs. Now, only a handful of days after launch, the zone has become wholly predictable and wholly boring.
First thing I noticed were the overall nerfs to items and drop rates in the Dark Zone. I can’t help but wonder if this was to bring the DZ gear closer in line to loot recovered via crafting or story dungeons. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just removes the DZ from the treasure paradise it used to be and turns it into “just another MMO PvP zone.” You can find loot that completely outclasses the core game still, it’s just that much harder, hidden behind special treasure crates only accessible via a key or a high rank, and by being lucky on a rare named mob with a golden health bar. Everything else you get is pretty thin spoils, paired off with the fact you can only carry so many Dark Zone infected items at a time. I once ended a run extracting nine pieces of clothing. If you ask me that’s a lot of hard work for some cosmetics.
I quickly worked out I was just better off uncovering blueprints and crafting my own gear as a far more viable alternative to Dark Zone and story rewards. Now there are blueprints you can get semi-tied to Dark Zone play, but an additional nerf to Dark Zone currency drops again just adds incentive to focus in on PvE content. Did I mention loot is also outclassed incredibly quickly in The Division? Which just further kills the enthusiasm for Dark Zone play.
PvP is also entirely predictable now. It used to be once your trusted ally could turn into a backstabber. However it seems the penalties for becoming a player killing “rogue agent” are just much too high, especially at higher levels and ranks. If you die while rogue you risk losing experience and credit gains. It’s really punitive for anyone who might want to engage in the optional PvP. Puntive, that is, unless you have a dedicated gank squad, as I have run into a few of those. It’s one thing if you get into a factional war or a free for all brawl, it’s another to encounter four players who would rather camp extraction points than do any work for themselves. Of course with the right build and armor you could hold your own, and I’m confident for the battle of attrition I gave one group of player killers their penalties were just as harsh as the one I suffered (I wonder if the 16 credits they got off me was worth it), but it wasn’t very fun. It lacked any sense of tension or sportsmanship, just “Here thar be gankers, so spawn at another checkpoint.”
The penalties for going rogue should be eased back. The rewards granted for the Dark Zone should be much higher. These things might have been unnoticeable during the beta, and while the beta certainly only restricted you to blue level items, it dolled out much better gear overall. Now I did wonder if I was just massively unlucky, and some players have had far better luck than I when it came to Dark Zone gear, but the consensus is in, the nerfs are real and players are discouraged from impromptu PvP.
In summation there’s just no longer anything special about the Dark Zone. It feels utterly like every single PvP zone in any other game. Personally I’m a huge fan of PvP, and most games I invest in I’ll spend a good third of my time brawling with other players, most recently honor duels and invasions in Bloodborne. The Division enticed me with two major draws pre-release, some excellent dungeons, and a killer take on PvP. The former is still mostly intact, but the latter leaves a lot to be desired, and I hope Ubisoft addresses the problems through patches. Otherwise the Dark Zone is utterly and painfully average.
The Division Day 3 and 4 Story and Other Tings
Sorry I missed yesterday’s update. I had a doctor’s appointment. Have you ever had the doctor ultrasound your arm just to punch a needle through your muscle and extract blood? I wouldn’t recommend it.
Speaking of Doctors. My Dr. Sniper Medicine Man build is coming along quite nicely. He’s strong alone, great in a team. With a slant towards defense and technical skills, he’s a hard man to take down, though battles take a little longer than I might like. Now that my medical wing is up to 60% complete he’s got some pretty incredible overheals, AoE heals and a deployable medical bay. Not to mention the sniper rifle I lovingly built, found parts for and customized myself through a mix of (expensive) mod purchases and crafting. I didn’t super love The Division’s crafting system at first, but I’m not mad at a game where I can build my own powerful gear without ever spending a dime.
After the initial shock of Day 2 I’m finding the title a bit more amenable. I just have to accept this is a game where gear upgrades count for everything. Since the goal of most ARPGs is to loot up (even Bloodborne and Dark Souls you’re always after that coveted weapon or fashionable armor), I can’t be too mad at this slant. I wish there were a bit more build depth. As it stands, Engineers and techies are going to be your room clearers, medics are going to have a high rate of survival, and tanks are going to be really fun to play but not all that effective solo. I’ve discovered this last thing the hard way, on my second alt I refer to as “Gunadin.”
My Post Office turned Base is also coming along quite nicely. I appreciate the way the game populates it. Each time I return there’s a different set of NPCs. Sometimes it might be two ladies kicking back, relaxing and gossiping about, well, whatever the hell you gossip about during the apocalypse. The next I have a depressingly long line of people waiting for medical treatment. Occasionally I might find a dog wandering around sniffing bottoms. While I’m still not a fan of base related progression walls, there are a few pretty great base perks to be had both as an auxiliary and for character skills. My favorite base upgrades are anything having to do with giving me free stuff. Fabric drops from medical upgrades, scavenged clothing from security, stat unlocks for weapons from the tech division. It’s like a refined version of World of Warcraft’s strongholds.
NPCs are a bit of a mixed bag. Each zone you enter will give you a different handler. The struggling television actor, the faith healer, the old matron. They add a bit of fun to mission structure, but there’s so little of them you begin to really miss them. Sadly the big story NPCs only come in one flavor: Ornery. The folks you’ll run into across New York City don’t have a whole lot of depth either, just the same handful of lines repeatedly recycled, and you’re going to find you’re killing a whole lot of “Alexes.” Each time I fight a group of Rioters one will angrily shout “He got Alex!”
Reasonably concerned I’ve now done about 5 story missions and I’m 30% through the story. Though I maintain it’s a story with no real depth. There’s a whole lot of patriotism, a whole lot of save the people of New York – And trust me after living here all my life I’m not really sure I’d ever slot that as my highest priority – and a simple Clancy story of “Stop the bad guys, uncover the conspiracy.” In that exact order.
Right now The Division is headed for a pretty solid 4. I’m not sure it’s going to do a lot more to surprise and raise its score, but at the same time I don’t think it’s going to get any worse from what I’ve already played.
The Division Day 2
The Division has issues. Issues that seem minor at first but begin to collect into a series of unpleasant annoyances that ultimately reflect badly on the game. As I get deeper into the title it reeks of The Division devs not learning closely enough from Destiny’s mistakes, not paying enough attention to the audiences they’re attempting to target, and sometimes even leave me with scratching my head with “did they even play test this?”
I’m noticing there’s been a change in character AI and behavior. See, the city is divided between three gangs, the Rioters, the Cleaners and the Rikers. I haven’t had a chance to run into the Rikers, not yet, I can’t discern their theme other than they really dislike cops. Rioters however are all over the place. Their behavior is erratic, they hold their guns well out from their bodies, turned to their side in a “gangster style” they no doubt picked up from watching one too many crime movies. The animation is a nice detail, their behavior leaves a lot to be desired.
By this I mean their patterns and how the AI behind the Rioters operate. They’re prone to abandoning cover and trying to swarm you, even carrying class names such as “Lurker” that serves as a strong indication as to how they will act in battle. What I enjoyed so much about the beta is that the AI, while not wholly predictable, at least played by the same rules you did. They would utilize cover the same, and in dire situations they would do whatever they could for the win. Now their movements feel arbitrary, like they’ll surround you for the hell of it, and like the game is requiring you have a party if you intend to confront more than one of them. It’s a behavior change I’m not in the least bit in favor of. In the words of Ubisoft: If it ain’t broke, fix it.
Another huge problem in the game derives from collision detection. I already mention it briefly in my review, but I didn’t realize just how big of a problem it is. The very first area of the game requires you “check in” and register your agent (whether this has any impact on actual gameplay I’m not sure, I honestly don’t think it does). The problem is if someone else is using the check in terminal, you’re going to have a difficult time getting to it, if three people are at the terminal, you’ll have a near impossible time getting to it. Confronting this bottleneck I simply logged off and logged back on until I got a server with a lower population. It’s a problem so bad players have actually had to create self dictated lines for access to the terminal.
One measly terminal wouldn’t be enough to get me to point out how bad the collision detection problem is. New York City for the most part is instanced for each individual player, which as an aside makes it even weirder Ubisoft would stress you travel in a party so much, you can’t just casually meet and play with other individuals as you would most MMOs and even ARPGs like Destiny. However safe houses for the most part are shared. This means that in these safe houses it will be tough for you to access vendors, restock, sometimes even the act of leaving the safe house can be made difficult by a player that absentmindedly, or intentionally, leaves their toon at a doorway and blocks all access to the outside world.
I’m noticing the game is heavily gear based. More-so than it is class based, but it has Destiny’s very present problem where your experience with the game will likely be rooted in the class choices you make. While I had a relatively breezy time with the content on my medic, my tank had significantly more difficulty dealing with foes. It’s a trap that I’ve seen a ton of games fall into, even World of Warcraft, where it feels as though the game was heavily playtested with one set of skills and not so much with a second set. As far as gear goes, I was able to find a markman’s rifle on my medic and additionally craft modifications to make it a badass piece of long range hardware. I was eager to try out a shotgun build on my tank, since the sniper rifle went so swimmingly. I had far less luck. The Shotgun isn’t so much a viable alternative weapon as it is an “oh shit” button for when mobs get close. A lot of weapons feel like this, if it’s not a rifle, only stubbornness is keeping it in your inventory, as my willingness to use SMGs on my Medic and shotguns on my tank keeps it in theirs.
Gear is the difference between night and day in this title. After struggling with the opening scores of this game on my medic, I noticed a few simple gear upgrades had him trashing content that was close or slightly higher to him in level. My alt got even worse gear rolls, and she struggled a lot more also with an equal level range. Now honestly I don’t know if this is a huge problem, but players should know going in it’s all about treasure hunting, crafting, selling, buying and modding.
I need more time before I fill in my final thoughts on The Division. The honeymoon is definitely over, but I’m not going to write it off with a score of “average”, not yet. There’s still a world of content out there I haven’t yet explored. These problems however are worrying, were not present in the beta as Ubisoft kept a lot of this content roped off and these changes under wraps, and could prove to get worse or perhaps a bit better as I crawl deeper into the game. For Day 1 thoughts read below:
Day 1
There’s something a little ironic about forgoing New York’s nightlife to stay up late and play a game set in New York, but I was pretty eager to dive into The Division’s post apocalyptic, post Black Friday world. I had been anticipating this game when it was first announced years ago, and I came away from the beta with pretty favorable thoughts. But even with an open beta such as The Division’s it is possible for the gameplay experience to change in that short window between testing and release. How does the title stack up now that we have a full release?
First a brief rundown of what The Division is. Ubisoft originally billed it as an MMO, but changed its tone and began to re-brand it as an ARPG. As former editor Jason defines it, an ARPG is perhaps any game that heavily leans on RPG aspects while have a very interactive, action based interface. The Division fits that description pretty well. The title’s closest parallel is perhaps Destiny, but in a lot of ways The Division adds its own twist to Destiny’s formula and stands as its own game.
The game heavily relies on cover mechanics. I believe it’s impossible to be an action game fan and not have ever run into a cover system, and frankly after over a decade of being assaulted by all sorts of different approaches to cover systems I’ve grown to dislike them quite a lot. Tom Clancy games are a rare exception, the cover mechanics in games such as Rainbow Six and Future Soldier always had a pretty tight and effective design.
The Division continues this trend, albeit with one caveat, the cover system takes just a little bit of getting used to. If you get yourself into good cover you’ll be impervious to damage, and once you get used to the controls you’ll find your character sticks well to cover and can make some pretty fluid transitions from one barricade or wall to the next. The flip side of this is that bullets will rip you apart, fast, if you’re not in cover. Don’t think the AI is going to just let you relax behind a shield and sip a coolatta either. They’ll try and flank you, they have units exclusively for chasing you down and cracking your skull open with a bat, they’ll toss tear gas your way, try to set you on fire and snipe you. Thankfully in The Division these units and attacks are well telegraphed and your radar tracks them, so it avoids the feel other games have of enemies randomly popping up behind you. Getting the high ground counts in this game, it’s easier to shoot down into a kill box, and a quick death if enemies come from above.
Shooting is going to take some getting used to. Guns are heavy and have a hell of a kick. It’s too early to tell whether or not this can be mitigated with weapon mods, as many folks assume, however a solid strategy is to take a deep breath and just squeeze the trigger in short controlled bursts to make sure you nail your targets. Free aim and sight mods also tend to help immensely with keeping control over your gun. Frankly I like it, there’s something that feels pretty solid about the gunplay, even if video game audiences aren’t used to weapons with this much punch and recoil. Something else to bare in mind is that since this game is about DPS and pulling big damage numbers, enemies won’t go down with one or two squeezes of the trigger, that said you can take them on strategically. Grenadiers and flamethrower equipped cleaners are easily blown up, while headshots tend to tear down enemies much faster than bullets to the body.
Despite the fact The Division had to ditch its promises of an advanced graphics engine, the game still looks pretty sleek and runs fairly well. I might run into the occasional frame drop when I encountered several other players, but this was a rare occurrence. I thought the New York City represented in The Division was vibrant and beautiful, which is shocking for a game set during an apocalypse, from an industry that loves painting New York in permanent grey and brown tones. You might encounter locales in The Division such as the area we nicknamed the “Christmas Forest” and The Dark Zone’s take on K-Town. Everything in the game felt true to the real thing, which is a credit to Ubisoft’s artists.
This title isn’t devoid of problems however. I found the launch issues to be fairly minimal, in the first hour there were a ton of server drops, but those seemed to straighten out fairly quick. In the very first location of the game it’s possible to get trapped in a “bottleneck.” The game requires that you arbitrarily register your agent with some ID database, and so many players can swarm this checkpoint it becomes impossible to check in. While I got my first character through the Brooklyn starting zone with little hassle, it was impossible to progress my second character because of this glitch. A lot of the game’s glitches right now appear to be related to interacting with objects, a glitch that carries over from the beta. It’s annoying to slam into a hard wall just because you can’t interact with an exit point or can’t replenish your ammo. Also PC gamers beware, while I’m playing this on the PS4, there’s a known bug in PC where you can’t redeem your player rewards.
Enemy behavior also appears to be slightly bugged. Sometimes enemies would completely abandon their cover just to make a suicide run for me, which seemed to be unrelated to how much damage they had suffered. The good news is these bugs appear to be easily worked out in a few patches, and they’re not game breaking, but the impact on gameplay is measurable.
My last complaint perhaps has to do with the multiplayer aspect. The Division strongly encourages you to grab a party in the opening throes of the game. Now, it’s a multiplayer game so I suppose that’s fair, but ARPGs tend to give you plenty of single player options as you progress, and so did The Division… At least in the beta. I was able to get through the introductory “Police Precinct Dungeon” with a touch of difficulty, but I’m not used to multiplayer walls coming up in games so early, definitely not in the tutorial levels. I’d much prefer it if the game remains a single player experience with “multiplayer optional” as most games, even MMORPGs behave already, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it.
The story is aggressively Tom Clancy just in case you forgot whose name is slammed on top of this title. There’s a strong degree of patriotism, and a ridiculous plot of terrorism and the assassination of American values. Quite literally, as the world went to hell after some evil hand rubbing scientist spread a virus on dollar bills to be exchanged on that Thanksgiving fallout named Black Friday. The story is silly, but luckily it’s not a major focus of the game, and in fact the moments will probably come from the cast of characters you meet (such as an ornery old PMC technician and my new neurotic doctor crush) and the “little stories” you pick up from around New York city. Recorded phone conversations and “echos”, reconstructed crime scene style missions, of events that occurred before the city plunged into hell. It’s pretty appropriate as New York, the city of 9 million people, is a collection of tinier stories making up the better whole.
Classes and class depth are going to require a bit more exploration. A lot of the class mechanics were locked during the beta, and in the actual game they’re behind a few progress walls. Ubisoft seems to love this recent “progress wall” approach where they lock the skills of your character behind NPCs collected and bases built. It’s something they pulled in Far Cry Primal that I absolutely hated. It is far less egregious in The Division and feels a bit more “natural”, but it’s also scaled back from Primal. You can better plan what abilities you’re going to grab by giving yourself benchmarks. I’m a medic, and so I have a lot of incentive to build up the medical wing first. I established Pediatrics early just for the sake of carrying stronger health packs, with Counseling next up on my “to upgrade” list for defensive healing buffs.
Class building is a bit of a balancing game between three stats. DPS, Armor and technical ability (I suppose magic?). You can choose to carefully balance your stats, or focus on one primary stat at the detriment to the others. Lucio and I both went for medic builds in the beta, but while he focused heavily in DPS, I went ahead and dumped my points into tech. While he was certainly killing enemies faster, I had the strong heals. I’ve also begun working on a tank build, more armor, strong pistols and weapons such as the shotgun grant my tank an entirely different feel from my field scouting, heal bomb tossing, submachine gun toting doctor. To be honest it’s not the deepest min/maxing I’ve ever experienced, but it does add a nice little layer to your gear and mod selection.
I still haven’t gotten a chance to dive into the game’s crafting, really build up my base for additional skills, go dungeon diving or explore the launch iteration of the Dark Zone, all of which I’ll update this review with as I get deeper into the game.
