PREVIEW – Two of us decided this weekend to try out the beta version of the long-awaited The Division, the latest tactical-survivor MMO-RPG action game from the industry veteran Massive Entertainment. A big scandal of an obvious graphical downgrade already preceded the release of the beta version, but people still weren’t sure what to expect from the gameplay. Until now…

 

Post-apocalypse, New York in ruin, bands of survivors, etc., etc. – we all knew that already. We have also already seen the back of our “guy” strolling the streets of New York, with lots of abandoned cars, the tall buildings in ruin and the tons of comparisons of the E3 pictures against the current version.

What we were waiting for is the actual gameplay. We, Dante, and BadSector, we tried out the game this weekend, and we both have a bit of a different opinion about Ubisoft’s title, which we wanted to share with you.

BadSector: “Meh.”

After making my avatar in the rather simplistic “hero generator”, the first thing I noticed when I entered the near-future virtual environment of this abandoned New York, that while the graphics aren’t groundbreaking, they are pretty decent for a console game.

 

E3 graphics, those are not, young padawan…

Yes, the game is uglier than the E3 version, that’s for sure, but there’s nothing to cry about, it’s still on par, what we should expect from a decent PS4 title.

The details are crisp, and there are rather subtle effects of the water puddle and fog rising here and there. The human models also look pretty good in the cut-scenes.

After getting off a helicopter alongside a wounded Asian woman, we are marching slowly towards the base trough some military staff and different areas where we can buy some weapons or other equipment. It’s reminiscent of Destiny, but it’s honestly pretty boring in design and regarding the weapon selection as well. I have rarely seen such lack of creativity as far as the gun’s design goes, and the same applies to their differentiation. The main characteristic of weapons is the DPS (damage per second) which is fine for a fantasy MMO game, but a simplistic approach or even a bit off for fire weapons.

Same goes for the skills of our character: they lack any kind of real creativity, they are just a rehash of other RPG/MMO games.

The base is too far

The road to the base is also rather boring and showcases the linearity of this MMO world. Cars are everywhere on the streets of this apocalyptic New York, where rather same-looking, hooded people are fearfully walking on the streets. I have no clue, whether Massive Entertainment will add more NPCs to the outside world, but this New York was pretty lifeless and abandoned. OK, I get it: the events of the game are happening after a major virus attack, still so few NPCs in an MMO game make your environment dull.

It’s a relief that the first firefight outside the base is rather well done, where we can grasp the basics of an efficient but pretty basic cover system. The AI isn’t any special either: the enemy hides and fights rather well, but I find still pretty stupid and unrealistic when a guy armed with a baseball runs at you when you are just spewing bullets everywhere with an AK 47.

Since The Division is an MMO tactical shooter, I am not sure either, how much a cover-based MMO game would be fun in the long-term, compared to the frantic battles of Destiny or a Call of Duty title.

After this skirmish, we are given our first and only mission in this beta: we have to save a female medic, who was kidnapped by the opposition. Honestly, the whole Division universe, the cut scenes, and even this mission are so boring and clichéd, that I couldn’t give a damn who she was or why she was kidnapped.

During the cutscenes, dialogues are also flat and uninteresting. When I finally saved the female medic, and she was discussing something with the other, wounded gal, who came with me on the helicopter, I couldn’t help, but notice how Massive managed, to put some of the ugliest woman in one gaming cutscene in recent memory.

“Dark Zone”?! Let’s call it “Dork Zone” instead…

Once we are done with the pretty basic rescuing mission, we can try out The Division “Dark Zone”, which is the PVP multiplayer section. While I am not really a big multiplayer PVP junkie anymore, I did have a lot of fun in Destiny’s first beta capture-the-flag kind of frantic PVP, or the more tactical approach of The Last of Us PVP multiplayer.

What we have here is neither frantic, tactical or any fun for that matter. Most people (the “agents”) are either shooting AI for getting some boring, uncharacteristic loot or each other for getting the same thing. We can all send back those “treasures” via a helicopter which can call at regular intervals.

I tried, again and again, to find some fun in the Dark Zone, but it was missing altogether. Either it was a hunt for some “rogue agent” (some guy, who shot at others, and thus he became a free PVP target) or it was a boring fight against AI enemies, or everybody was just running around like headless chickens, trying to find something to shot at. It was one of the worst PVP multiplayer experiences I had. Ever.

Letdown

Sadly, as much I hoped The Division will shake a bit this year’s pretty flat beginning, it’s nothing else for me than just another “meh.” Linear crawling trough the streets of a clichéd, “post-apocalyptic” world of New York, with a few same-looking hooded citizens is not what I would call an “exciting, open-ended world”, and while the cover system of the tactical gameplay is decent, honestly, it’s not really that thrilling either.

Still, the worst thing in The Division is the PVP multiplayer, which made me longing to play more Destiny and The Last of Us multiplayer instead. I am pretty sure, that wasn’t the goal of Massive Entertainment.

-BadSector-

 

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Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Massive Entertainment

Genre: MMO, TPS

Release date: 2 March 2016

Dante: “Promising.”

Massive Entertainment’s latest game The Division deals with a post-apocalyptic New York, where everyone is fighting for survival, while secret government agents are also trying to piece society together…. by shooting a lot of bullets.

The Division is one of the most controversial games of 2016, and it is not even out yet! The game has been in development for nearly five years, with Ubisoft acting as publisher. For five years people have been waiting for this game to get their hands on it and for a few days, lucky ones were able to do so in a closed beta session. Does the Beta bring hope or despair for us? Find out here!

The Survivalist a.k.a. the good stuff

Ubisoft has had a bad reputation when it comes to graphics of their new games. Downgrades and glitches are the usual characteristics of the published games, but here I barely encountered any game breaking bugs. The graphics were great even when considering there was a downgrade for the consoles, and the sound design is excellent. While New York is a desolate hellhole I still could not stop marveling at the graphics, and ambiance of the game. Sure it is not a Scifi world full of beautiful vistas of alien landscapes, but New York looks great and eerie as trash and empty wrecked cars are piled up on the street. There’s also dynamic day/night – plus a weather system that will surely remind some people of the recent blizzard in New York a couple of days ago. While it looks nothing like the E3 trailer, The Division is competent regarding its looks, especially for a beta.

Gameplay wise things are a little bit different here. Seeing early alpha footage and some youtube footage of the game, many people worried that the enemies would be too bullet spongy and would have to load ten magazines into an enemy. Well, the good news is that most of the enemies are pretty easy to take care of, and the maximum you’ll need is three or four magazines for an elite and maybe five for a boss type. The bad news is that there is no visual difference between the elite units and the generic enemies, which is a shame since even Destiny had this problem where most of the units looked the same. Also speaking of enemies, I could not decide whether the AI was smart or dumb in this game. As it seems the difficulty setting determined the AI’s behavior in certain sections of the title. While most of the enemies try to flank us, take cover, and use specials in hard mode in the story, in normal mode, the enemy was cannon fodder for our guns. Although there is an enemy type with a baseball bat that kept running towards us regardless of difficulty or location. Still the AI can be pretty competent in most situations, but sadly a cakewalk for groups of four.

Currently, the story of The Division is pretty vague (not as vague as Destiny’s though .. haha!), where a virus has struck New York, and the government has authorized the use of a special force to take back the city. The beta starts in medias res with a helicopter dropping us off at Camp Hudson, and from there we go and reclaim our Base of Operations which is in a Libary. From there we can only do one story mission and a few side missions plus the Dark Zone sections. The primary mission was okay, it was nothing extraordinary, but I do hope that there will be more special missions. In fact, some of the side missions in the beta were more fun and engaging. One mission had me running around an apartment trying to start three computers to analyze the virus and then upload the data to „The Cloud”. It was a frantic rush all the while hoping no enemy would be on the next floor. Still there are more than ten main missions in the full game so let’s hope we get some creative ones from Massive Entertainment.

Weapons in the game are plenty, with the usual MMO style rarity categories in place (white, green, blue, purple, and orange (for rarest)), but the unique twist is that these weapons can be upgraded with parts, and every weapon has their talent. The good thing about this is that even though most of the weapons are based on their real-world counterparts, you can make them look distinct enough so that they won’t look the same for every player. The additional parts also balance out the weapons in particular ways. Some provide better accuracy, stability, or a better scope to zoom in better. It is great to see such depth provided for the visuals, and mechanics, even if it is just a „Modernish” third person shooter. We also have character skills, and talents that can be upgraded, and utilized, but the Beta blocked 90% of them. All I can say about them is that there will be a lot of different playstyles available for characters if the users wish to mess around with it.

The matchmaking for missions and PVP content (AKA The Dark Zone), was seamless, and indeed, a next-gen feature that barely had any loading screens (either hidden ones or a loading screen when fast travel was initiated). It was easy joining a friend or a group in a game and was surprised how good it was after playing a year of Destiny where even getting a group of six took tens of minutes and days of scheduling. The Dark Zone is a Player Versus Player section of The Division where you can group up with three other people to kill high-level mobs and other players (or your friends) if you wish. It is a very tense atmosphere when playing in The Dark Zone, and there’s always a question of whether the other player is a troll or a legitimate team player. I had many situations where the other player would help me in killing mobs, defending me while I was putting my loot onto the chopper. There were also times when I held my hands up and got shot (even though I had no loot on my back) by other players. It is an interesting concept and feels similar to what the PC has with the game called DayZ (Only with much better graphics).

The Looters a.k.a the bad stuff

I wish that were the end of it, but there are some pretty major problems with The Division that will hopefully get resolved by the time of release. First of The Dark Zone while seems neat many appeared to miss the concept of what it is supposed to be. A hardcore PVE section with difficult enemies, with the option to screw over your teammates or other players. The problem with this was that (rumor) according to the developers they lowered the NPC count in both general New York section and the Dark Zone to a bare minimum. Sadly this meant two things: One that most of the time you would be starved for encounters in both PVE and PVP section, and the other was that there was not enough loot to go around in the Dark Zone. Which meant that most players got bored and at times just shot at anyone to get some action going. While there were Manhunts against certain groups at times, it was rare. We hope that the Dark Zone and the general PVE section of the game will get more enemies.

The gameplay reminded me of Gears of War or Uncharted; it is a cover based shooter, nothing more and nothing less. Some of the contextual button mappings are off, and I ended doing the wrong set of movement with my character in certain situations (can be quite annoying). The other issue I had with this is that when leaning out of cover to aim I ended up just aiming at a rail guard or an object in front of me. So I had to move around to find a different cover where nothing was in front of me. It was frustrating, and I hope this gets fixed in the final release. It is a pretty standard Third Person Shooter regarding movement, and cover mechanics with not many risks taken by the developers.

I also was frustrated by the fact that while we did get a small intro video from the developers about the basics of the game, they skipped on explaining the leveling, gear, and DPS section of the title. Your gear affects your damage output, and most of the times having the rarest item is not the best idea in The Division. You end up questioning whether an individual piece of high-level gear is worth equipping if it lowers your damage output in the end. I hope that in the final version there is a form of a tutorial that explains the mechanics of the skills and levels and how it affects damage output. That was also a problem in the Dark Zone, where I was never sure if I should use a sniper rifle with fast firing option or an AK-47 with upgrades. As there were times when even blind firing with the sniper was a better option against players and NPCs.

Finally, while the AI is not the most advanced in The Division, I was quite shocked at how they respawn into the game world (at least in the beta). They seemed to appear out of thin air, at times when trying to ambush people in an extraction zone, the enemy would just suddenly spawn (at times behind my back). It was frustrating as there is no visual (doors opening etc.), .or audio queue signifying that new NPCs have spawned. They need to provide a small window between the player and the new enemies spawning (especially if powerful elites appear later down the line).

Welcome to New York…

Still this is just a beta, and hopefully, the developers listen to our feedback to iron out the problems. I do think that this beta was a misfire in a way due to the lack of roaming NPCs, and the forced PVP. While I did not mention it in the „Bad Stuff” section, currently we have no idea what the endgame of The Division is. There are missions, but the developers did not hint at any other high-level activity besides the Dark Zone. I do hope there will be some form of an epic raid available down the line. Cause if not many people will stay only for a short visit in New York before moving onto other games. Sadly most of the contents were locked out of the Beta including crafting, and most of our skills/talents available. These will probably be linked to other Base of Operations missions or currency. A topic that I also did not talk about since I could not decide whether this part of the game will be good or bad as we only seen a small part of it.

In summary, Tom Clancy’s The Division is an interesting mix of TPS/MMO/Loot gathering games like Borderlands, but my reaction to this beta is mixed. It is good, but there are a lot of things that need to be fine-tuned for the final release of the game.

-Dante-

 

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Publisher: Ubisoft

Developer: Massive Entertainment

Genre: MMO, TPS

Release date: 2 March 2016