As predicted in my Anthem review, The Division 2 has ended up being a significant beneficiary of The Bad Game Effect.

This ties into my theory that you should play a bad game every once in a while to stop yourself from taking the good ones for granted. It’s quite easy, on a normal day, to totally overlook the things a good game does that are so seamless, so natural, so well-executed that you simply don’t notice them; they’re doing their job so well that they blend into the background as if they were always supposed to be there. It’s only when you play a bad game, that tries to do the same thing but, for example, locks the inventory behind a loading screen, and then locks the loading screen to get into the inventory behind a bigger loading screen, that you truly realise just how good the good ones are.

And yes, The Division 2 is good. I didn’t get on with the original Division all that well, as it seemed an entirely unremarkable, average game with no ambition outside of its interesting Dark Zone experiment, and at first glance The Division 2 is an entirely unremarkable, average sequel. If Anthem is responsible for anything here, though, it’s that some of those “unremarkable” features that I otherwise wouldn’t have given much thought to have been thrown into rather sharp relief. It is important not to lower the bar too far, so I’m not going to give The Division 2 many points for having a inventory system that you can access at any time or for only hitting you with a single (fairly lengthy) loading screen when you first boot the game, because those should just be part of the minimum required featureset you try to fulfil when you make what has (against my strong objections) come to be known as a “looter shooter” game: an always-online co-op focused experience where you gun down hordes of NPC baddies in constant search of better guns and equipment for your character. Of course you need a working inventory system, and that The Division 2 has one (barely) shouldn’t be seen as some kind of stunning success on its part.

There are other areas where I’m prepared to give it more credit than I was previously, though. Take the core loop, an industry term which basically means the smallest possible quantum of self-sustaining activity contained within your game. The core loop of a looter shooter is the same as the core loop for an ARPG: kill enemies, get better loot, equip better loot, kill bigger enemies. I think the loot part of Division 2 is not particularly exceptional; there have been improvements made that I’ll get into later and it’s held my interest longer than in the first game, but it’s also messy and flabby and something of a pain to interact with. The part where you kill enemies, though, is interesting, as a point of comparison to both Anthem and the original Division.

I had some big, big complaints about the combat in The Division. It had a decent enough cover shooter system, but all of its enemy types were broadly similar (except for the PMC faction, introduced far too late to make a difference) and it had gone for the approach of making its elite, high-tier baddies gigantic sacks of hitpoints who you’d have to empty several boxes of M60 ammo into to kill. Not only was this breaking the game’s internal fiction of a newly post-apocalyptic New York city set in something approximating the real world — which is supposed to be filled with regular human beings who should fall over when you shoot them, not alien supermen who can soak up absurd amounts of punishment — but it also made gunfights less satisfying because it felt like your weapons were absurdly weak. Hell, they were absurdly weak relative to the stat scaling. And that’s basically the same complaint I had about Anthem’s combat: the guns felt like peashooters and had zero character, which together with the totally braindead enemy AI made combat tremendously unfulfilling once the novelty of the various Javelin abilities had worn off.

The Division 2 has taken heed of the criticism directed at the first game, however, and has charted a new route via both big and small changes to its internal mechanics that ensures it successfully avoids all of these pitfalls. It’s no longer set the day after the apocalypse, but several years afterwards; this means it’s a little more divorced from reality¹ and so the factions and enemy types can be a little more distinct than “a bunch of guys with guns”. There are enemies with goo guns that’ll immobilise you and make your vulnerable; grenadiers who can be shot while they’re throwing grenades to make them drop it just after pulling the pin (and who carry around big red bags full of grenades that can be shot for a similar effect); snipers who will try and blind you with strobe lasers; techno-wranglers who’ll send out RC cars full of explosives or which are covered in sawblades like they’ve just been plucked out of an episode of Robot Wars; and when you get into the endgame the Boston Dynamics robot dog will show up and start shooting at you. With a railgun. And he’s got a friend who looks like a big, angry Johnny-5. There’s enough variety here now to sustain the game past the first few hours of gunfights, so much so that the stock flamethrower guys and suicide bombers are positively pedestrian by comparison.

More than that, though, Division 2 makes the actually sensible choices around enemy health that the first game should have — namely, that a standard enemy that takes four headshots to kill at level one will still take four headshots to kill at level thirty with the appropriate level gear and talent build. (And yes, four headshots sounds like a lot, but it’s an acceptable balance of enemy vulnerability versus needing to provide some baseline level of challenge versus not breaking the game’s internal fiction that these are normal human people you’re shooting at.) When you have multiple people in your party and the game needs to scale the difficulty up to compensate, it doesn’t do it by adding an additional 300% onto everyone’s health bar, it does it by spawning three times the number of enemies it would if you were playing solo. Individual enemies are still vulnerable and go down in a few shots, but so do you if you get flanked or caught out of cover, and so by piling on more enemies you really, really have to be paying attention to enemy positions and managing their numbers so that they never get too close. There’s a lot of gunfire and — thanks to the wider range of enemy abilities in the sequel — a lot of explosions, incendiaries, jamming effects, stun effects, and generally harmful shit flying around a combat zone that you need to be keeping track of. That is where the challenge is: your ability to think tactically, change up your position and prioritise enemy targets based on a dynamically evolving threat level. Not “Here’s a guy with a million hitpoints, have fun shooting him for the next fifteen minutes!” It’s a much more interesting problem than either Anthem or The Division managed to create.

But what about the elite and boss enemies you fight? Those guys need to have a level of toughness appropriate to their boss status, and the solution Division 2 has gone for here is a fairly good one: armour. Again, it’s not just a matter of “This enemy’s health bar is longer because he’s wearing armour”, because that would just be justifying lazy difficulty scaling with words; instead, elites and bosses are wearing physical bits of armour all over their bodies that can be shot off if you punt enough rounds into them. Until the armour is gone you can’t even scratch their health bar, but once you’ve punctured it in one or two places they’ll fold just as quickly as a regular enemy, kind of like the Elite shields in Halo. Armour is a mechanic that rewards precision targeting and focus fire: blowing off the armour on somebody’s left arm isn’t particularly helpful if they then turn so that you can only see their right side. Similarly, having three people in your party shooting a boss enemy in three different locations is very inefficient because each of you is chipping away at a separate armour piece; it’s far better to just coordinate — even if it’s just visually looking at where your teammates are shooting — and shoot at the same spot, as you’ll down the boss in a third of the time. Having armour that can absorb hundreds of rounds of ammo is almost as unrealistic as having an enemy absorb them with his face, but it doesn’t matter so much now because there’s now an actual, visible reason why my bullets aren’t doing damage with some very tangible feedback that introduces new and interesting gameplay considerations — again, just like the Elite shields in Halo — and it turns out that’s all I really wanted.

All of these tweaks, changes and additions come together to ensure that combat in The Division 2 is fun. It would be fun without the loot — you’re barely even thinking about loot when you’re fighting through one of its encounters — and something almost worth doing for its own sake, and that’s a surprisingly rare quality in a loot-driven game. And when contrasted against Anthem, The Division 2 makes an admirable effort to ensure that there’s always a fight happening somewhere in its rendition of a ruined Washington D.C if you want to get stuck in, with rival factions of bad guys sending out patrols that will tussle with each other if their paths cross, or if they run into a strongpoint. You can constantly hear the echoes of gunfire and distant screams as you pick your way through the streets, and if you run towards it you’ll likely be able to clear up a weakened control point or elite patrol and get the corresponding loot rewards — that, or you’ll end up fighting two factions’ worth of enemies at once and get overwhelmed. Either way it’s all about making that combat experience constantly available, even outside of a mission.

Ah yes, the missions. They’re… okay? They suffer mostly from two things. One is that The Division 2 doesn’t really have a story to speak of, with your mute agent glaring at people during cutscenes and then swanning off to murder another 300 people in the name of Democracy. It’s never really explained why you’ve gone to Washington D.C, or what on earth you’re doing now that you’re there (something about turning a computer off and on again, I think — rescuing the President was entirely incidental to this). So the missions are mostly just a sequence of combat encounters in some interior locations; they get quite a long way on the strength of those combat encounters, on their own, being quite excellent, but the locations suffer from the second problem The Division 2 has here, which is that Washington D.C is a very dull place to set a game in. This isn’t a slur on D.C. particularly, but rather an observation that most US cities are built around a repetitive grid system that optimises traffic management and thus tend to lack character compared to their fictional equivalents.  I had the same problem with New York in the first game, and while Washington isn’t quite as bad — some time having passed since the outbreak of the superbug that wiped out the world means that everything is crumbling and overgrown with wild animals running through the streets, which at least injects some colour and life into the proceedings — it still struggles to identify memorable locations for its missions. Even the ones that take place around recognisable monuments like the Lincoln memorial end up being a fight through a series of murky underground rooms beneath the Lincoln memorial; the best missions end up being the ones set inside museums where you’re surrounded by the artifacts of somewhere else that isn’t Washington D.C. There’s also very little flair shown with encounter scripting or objective design, with most missions just spawning enemies and then leaving them to fight as they would in the open world. That’s not to say they’re bad, they just have few redeeming qualities of their own and wouldn’t get nearly as far if the core combat experience wasn’t quite so well-tuned.

The loot is also okay. Probably being merely “okay” would be a damning indictment of any other looter shooter since it’s half of the name, but it does a decent job of providing you with a range of outfitting options for your next brawl. The armour isn’t particularly interesting and mostly exists to make armour value and gearscore go up, but the guns are — and this is a marked improvement from the first Division, where I’d seen all of the guns ten hours in and wasn’t interested in using most of them because they were so weak. There’s a much wider range of them available in the sequel, and because there’s less emphasis on damage — there’s a range of time-to-kills across the guns, but the smaller enemy HP pools make it a lower consideration than it was — there’s much more room to experiment; the gun you end up using tends to be the one that feels the best to you, even if it’s not the best in terms of pure stats, and that’s a perfectly viable approach to take. There’s even a significant degree of variation within weapon categories, with different brands of shotguns, assault rifles and LMGs having different characteristics. Probably the biggest improvement over the original, though, is that nearly all of the guns feel powerful. They look great and sound great, as they did in the original, but this time around they actually have the in-game impact to match the meaty booms and metre-long muzzle flashes, and this makes them a pleasure to use.

In terms of drop frequency The Division 2 is probably more towards the Destiny 2 or Diablo 3 end of the scale, except dialled up to eleven. Loot is dropping all the goddamn time, with encounters with even a few random mooks having a good chance of coughing up an equipment drop, and thanks to the way the gear scaling works (it’s a more sensible version of Destiny’s light level system) it’s almost always going to be at least a small improvement on what you’ve currently got equipped in terms of raw stats. As somebody who likes picking up loot I found this very agreeable; what I didn’t find agreeable was the frankly pathetic interface for managing these huge quantities of loot pickups. I’ve been playing the endgame for a little while now and I have a 100-slot inventory. It fills up from empty to full in around an hour and a half. I have eleven slots into which I can equip items, so even if I wanted to do a complete equipment replace I’d still have eighty-nine items that need to be sold or deconstructed. To do this I need to go down a list and individually mark each one as junk. Eighty-nine times. The game is sorely missing a “Sell all except favourites button”; that or an inventory system that isn’t a giant list. It gets worse when you take equipment and skill mods into account since these go into a separate 100-slot mod inventory, doubling the amount of logistics you have to handle — and to add insult to injury skill mods are completely broken right now, with nonsensically low bonuses and ridiculously high skill requirements in order to equip them making them functionally useless. It’s just pointless cruft that clogs up your inventory and generates make-work, and it is terrible.

Speaking of the endgame, the last interesting thing that The Division 2 does is actually have one. That is, it doesn’t just pat you on the back after finishing the story (if only because it doesn’t have a story) and then tell you to repeatedly run slightly harder versions of the missions you’ve already done, as most looter shooters do on release when they’re waiting for the dev team to finish the actual endgame content. Instead, after you finish the final mission it’ll show you a short cutscene of the fourth faction — the Black Tusk PMC — attacking Washington and taking over the map; this introduces new activities and makes the open world far busier, and it also sets up remixed versions of the story missions that have Black Tusk as the opposition instead of the faction you originally fought there. This is where the standard RPG levelling system stops and the World Tier system starts; you’re no longer chasing XP to level up but are instead looking to boost your gear level to the point where you can tackle the next tier of these remixed Black Tusk missions, which is a nice short-term carrot to keep you playing through the 3-4 hours each of the first three World Tiers takes. Once you get to World Tier 4 the world changes slightly yet again, with the standard control points scattered around the world now gaining an alert level that can be manipulated by the player; raising it dramatically increases the number of veteran and elite enemies that will be defending the point, but will also yield much better rewards should you manage to clear the point. Taken all together there’s about 15 hours of structured content here that Massive have planned out for after you finish the story, which is 15 hours more than anyone else working in the genre bothers with, and a very pleasant surprise for someone like me who really dislikes repetitive grind with no distinct goals; this should be the standard approach for one of these “games as a service” things, and it’s absolutely shocking to me that The Division 2 is the first one I’ve played that’s actually done it.

This review has been generally positive so far, and deservedly so. The Division 2 is very far from perfect, though, since I have a huge laundry list of minor and not-so-minor flaws that I could take the game to task for if I were feeling particularly mean. In general its biggest problem is that it’s not particularly joined-up in its design thinking; there’s a lot to the game, and enough of it is good that the parts it doesn’t do so well can generally be ignored, but they are a significant minority that will require some attention from Ubisoft and Massive in the months to come. Things like the already-mentioned problem with the skill mods, and skill power in general being rather meaningless, and talent recalibration being an arcane process that isn’t explained to the player at all, and a fair chunk more besides. I can get by without really worrying about any of these things too much, but the fact that they’re there and they don’t really work takes some of the sheen off of what’s otherwise a quite polished experience. Probably the biggest of the minor criticisms I’d make of The Division 2 is that the enemy spawn system seems set up to punish player aggression, which is a weird thing to do in a game that’s all about cover and flanking. Enemies will spawn from fixed points on the map during a fight — usually a one-way door that you can’t go through — and these points don’t change based on player proximity, so what will usually happen if you’re being aggressive and pushing forward to a good flanking position is that you’ll clear out one set of enemies and then find that five enemies have all piled out of a door directly behind you into an ideal flanking position on you, and so you die extremely quickly when they start shooting a split-second later. That’s not to say that a good flank is impossible, but you need to be extremely bloody careful of where the spawns might be coming from; if you’re not it’s usually better to stay where you are, stick behind your cover and trade shots from the front, even if it turns some of the fights into ridiculous Naked Gun shootouts.

I should probably start wrapping up now, but I’m sure there’s something else I should mention before I do… oh wait, the Dark Zone! I almost forgot to talk about it, and for good reason: The Division 2 basically forgets about it as well. I thought the Dark Zone’s mix of PvE and PvP was one of the few high points of the first game and I was looking forward to seeing what the sequel would do with the idea, but unfortunately it turns out the answer is “Split it into three much smaller separately-instanced chunks that dilute the player population to the point where I’ve seen a grand total of one other player in two hours spent in the various Dark Zones.” There’s very few other players bothering with the Dark Zone this time around, likely because this time around there’s much more efficient ways to get good loot outside of the Dark Zone, and also because the actual Dark Zones themselves are much duller than they were in the first game with nowhere near as much to do — and without other players who might go rogue providing that sense of tension, all the Dark Zone is is a worse version of the PvE experience you can get elsewhere. There’s a special Dark Zone called the Occupied Dark Zone that I haven’t tried yet, and it might be that this is where all of the actual cutthroat players are spending their time. I’m not holding my breath though, and I think the Dark Zones are possibly the biggest failure of The Division 2 in general since they’re a regressive waste of a good idea that had been proven to work (more or less) in the first game.

The Division 2 is a big improvement over the original game, and a dramatic contrast to the shitshow that was Anthem. It’s gone from being something of a misfire to having some of the tightest combat mechanics of any third-person cover shooter I’ve played, and it is extremely technically accomplished; it runs very well on my machine, there have been very few network problems and I have experienced a grand total of one crash in fifty hours. Even the bugs have been comparatively minor, with the worst of them (involving highly inadequate level scaling for players in your party who were lower level than the host) being fixed a week after launch. There’s plenty in the game that misfires, or doesn’t land, and there’s unfortunately rather more systems that got the “fix after launch” label attached to them than I’d really like, but there’s enough content and structure to Division 2 that this simply doesn’t matter in the way that it might for something following the usual AAA developer strategy of putting out the minimum viable product for release and hoping they’ll be able to fill in the gaps later. It’s got a solid enough foundation that it can stand strong despite the weight of its not inconsiderable list of issues — and importantly for The Division 2, that foundation will make it much easier for Massive to deliver the “service” part of this game-as-a-service. I’m still not wholly on board with the looter shooter as an ongoing concept², but The Division 2 is about as good an attempt at releasing one as I’ve seen so far.

The post Thoughts: The Division 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The headline “Why The Division isn’t Destiny for the PC” edrew hollow chuckles from me when I read it the other day. Because it is. It totally is, and trying to pretend otherwise by implementing some nebulously misguided quality standards as a bar separating the two is simple overcontortion of an argument to generate inevitably clickbait-y column inches.

I have a somewhat lower opinion of Destiny than the author of that article, which I suspect is why from my point of view Destiny and The Division sit side by side so comfortably. Given how long these games take to make (both of them were in development for half a decade or so) it’d be unfair to accuse The Division of ripping off Destiny entirely, but I’m sure Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment were very much paying attention to the success of Destiny’s MMO-lite metagame trappings that kept players coming back month after month. It may be bolted to a different genre – the third-person shooter, which very much plays to Ubisoft’s strengths since it seems like every damn game they release is a third-person game — but The Division’s metagame is driven almost solely by that drive to do missions and kill bosses to acquire better, shinier loot that’s been the hallmark of the MMO since time immemorial. In terms of implementation it’s a perfectly adequate system, if a little more unpolished and limited than Destiny’s thanks to The Division being a year and a half behind on the development curve. Where The Division falls down, however, is that this system of shooting hordes of generic mooks to get bigger guns makes absolutely no goddamn sense when you transplant the setting from Magic Future-Earth to modern-day NYC — and worse, actually gets more than a little uncomfortable if you stop to think about it for more than a couple of seconds.

This being a Tom Clancy game, The Division has precisely the sort of right-wing nightmare/masturbatory fantasy for its backstory (delete as appropriate based on your politics) that you’d expect from the dearly-departed master of brick-thick “US Kills Everyone Without Even Trying” potboilers. Somebody has dosed New York with a supercharged variant of anthrax called the Green Poison which promptly spreads out of control, killing thousands and causing an unrealistically rapid breakdown of law and order to the point where the city has been quarantined and the denizens left to fend for themselves. Gangs and other armed groups are running rampant, and the only semblance of government influence left in the city — aside from the scattered (and utterly useless) NPC forces of the National Guard-esque Joint Task Force patrols — are the paramilitary secret agents of the eponymous Division. These guys have carte blanche to shoot as many people as they want in the name of restoring order, so obviously you’re a member since that’s what you spend 70% of your time in this game doing.

One big difference from Destiny is that The Division takes place in one single moderately large map of New York City rather than being split up over 6-7 planets and other areas, and you seamlessly transition between safe areas, the free-roam environment of the city and the scripted mission areas. This means you spend less of your time sitting in loading screens (there’s just one hefty single one when you first load the game, plus a wait whenever you fast travel), which is good because my memories of Destiny are mostly watching my ship fly through a loading screen¹. Unfortunately a natural consequence of there not being any equivalent of the Destiny Sparrow hoverbike in the game is that those loading screens have been necessarily replaced by the questionable experience of having to slog your way from point A to point B on foot – this is what you spend the other 30% of your time on in The Division. On the one hand this provides more scope for emergent gun battles with roving patrols of mooks; on the other these get old roughly three hours into the game and end up being annoyances more than anything else, especially since shooting people is what I’m probably going to be doing once I get to my destination anyway. Exploring for its own sake is out of the question; the New York environment is technically very pretty, but there’s practically zero variation from area to area. This is to be expected since it’s trying to render a real place and you can’t really find the scope for fitting, say, a swamp zone, a desert zone and a volcano zone inside a modern-day city. One side of the map looks indistinguishable from the other, and these unchanging visuals are rendered even more bland by that perennial blight of the third-person shooter: a vast, vast quantity of box-shaped waist-high cover that ensures that even when you get down to street level everything looks the goddamn same²..

Speaking of cover, I should say a word about the shooting mechanics, which are as polished as you’ll find in any other title currently on the market — but which don’t do anything outside of currently-accepted genre norms. You crouch behind cover and you headshot the baddies, and if you’re in a group you can think about having one player tank with a shield special ability while the others flank or heal or whatever, and that is how every single encounter with The Division’s walking bullet sponges will go. I did like the system for moving from cover to cover, where there’s a line showing your projected route and holding the spacebar will make your scramble to your target point while pathing around/over any obstacles fairly organically, and I also appreciated that it was possible to suppress enemies by firing half a box magazine of LMG ammo over their heads; suppressed enemies can’t do anything but crouch behind cover, making this a good tactic in a group when you have friends who can take advantage of that to flank them, and otherwise useless because once you stop shooting they recover from being suppressed very quickly.  On the flipside the cover system can be more than a little bit finicky in what it does and does not consider to be cover, with the player avatar often refusing to hide behind a seemingly-solid piece of wall because it is too “short” and subsequently getting shot full of holes – this is a cover shooter, after all, and if you’re not physically attached to cover you die very quickly.

The weapons themselves are fine for what they are. There’s a decent selection of shotguns, SMGs, sniper rifles etc. on offer, and they all sound great and handle well (there’s a particularly satisfying headshot sound effect). This effort is unfortunately muted somewhat by the actual effect your weapons have in-game, with even regular mook enemies often taking most of a clip of assault rifle ammunition to put down. If you’re in a group fighting purple or gold enemies (i.e. the standard MMO/ARPG colour-coding for elite and champion goons) then you can pump a hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammo into them and it’ll shave off maybe two thirds of their health bar – and that’s if you were aiming for the head. It’s still possible to do significant amounts of damage to non-boss enemies with headshots from a slow-firing sniper rifle — all weapons of the same type, quality and level will do roughly the same amount of DPS, but a rifle that fires less often will do more damage per shot and thus gets more out of the headshot crit bonus, as well as using less ammo overall — but otherwise your weapons appear to be dismayingly weak and that robs a lot of the satisfaction of using them.

This brings me on to possibly the biggest non-thematic problem I have with The Division, and it loops back around to the “makes sod-all sense” problem I mentioned at the start of the review, and which the rest of it is going to focus on. The weapons appear weak because the enemies are tough. The enemies are tough because The Division is a quasi-MMO, and tough enemies are basically necessary in order to provide the player with a suitably grindy challenge. This is acceptable – or at least doesn’t break suspension of disbelief all that hard – when your enemies are heavily-armoured aliens or frothing orc berserkers, as these are fantastic creatures that might have a similarly fantastic level of durability. It’s less acceptable when they’re just people. People do not get back up after being shot in the head by a heavy-calibre sniper rifle. People are not merely staggered by a full box magazine of M60 ammo. It’s the same problem I have with playing CoD on hard mode multiplied by a hundred; The Division has made a conscious choice to have a modern-day setting, but it can’t reconcile that with its mechanics and this throws the gamey nature of it into sharp relief. And because The Division wants to be an MMO, it’s super gamey.

Take the guns, again. I got my first M60 at around level 8. It was a nice gun for the level, and with some modifications I was able to give it a 120 round clip that basically let me shoot for ever. At this point I wasn’t regularly fighting purple enemies so those 120 round woulds put down, oh, three or four guys if I was shooting straight – still unreasonably tough, but I could kill them quickly enough that it didn’t feel like too much of an issue. As I levelled further the damage of the M60 started to drop off in comparison to the health of the bad guys, and this is the point where an MMO would usually throw a different fictional sword or laser gun at you with the argument that it does more damage because it’s enchanted or comes from a different manufacturer or something. Not The Division, though. The Division’s approach was to offer me another M60, this time at level 15. It looked the same as the old M60. It was the same quality as the old M60. It just happened to do 50% more damage because it was a level 15 gun as opposed to a level 8 gun. Weapons are constantly recycled in this fashion, with damage being determined by their level rather than what the weapon is — not only does this make no sense, but it also contributes to that problem with sameiness that I talked about earlier, as the weapons you are using at level 10 are the same as the ones you are using at level 30. They just do more damage now, is all.

This is an issue that extends to the enemies, who are members of one of four factions. One of them is the Last Man Standing PMC, who are edging their way into becoming the fourth member of the Universally Acceptable Enemies club (the first three being Nazis, zombies and aliens). They don’t show up until the end game, though, and their introduction is the first thing to shake the game up in a good long while since they like to fight using a lot of grenades fired from underbarrel launchers. For the first fifteen hours of the game, though, you’re fighting one of the first three groups of enemies. You’ve got your basic faction of “rioters” that The Division conflates with criminal gangs and whose just reward is to be shot on sight.  Then you’ve got a group of escaped prisoners called the Rikers; if you maybe feel a little conflicted about indiscriminately murdering these less-advantaged segments of society the game justifies it by showing you flashbacks of them all turning into deranged axe murderers the moment the quarantine went into effect, which I think says rather more about The Division’s writers and designers than they possibly intended. The same is true for the Cleaners, who are basically a bunch of blue-collar workers — the city’s garbage men, in effect — who have inexplicably decided to try to cleanse the infection by burning everyone who has it. Alive.

Once again, not only does it make precisely zero sense that society would break down to the point where you have binmen roaming the streets with flamethrowers to roast people inside their cars, but since all of these groups are introduced in the first two hours of the game (and the mechanical difference between them is so small anyway) you’re effectively fighting the same baddies throughout the entire thing.  For twenty hours. The only difference between a level 5 enemy and a level 30 enemy is the size of their healthbar and their damage output. The same goes for the quests and side missions you undertake in each area of the game; after you unlock the main hub area you get a mission to go to a safe house that’s a brisk couple of minutes’ walk away. Once you’re there, you get 1-2 “main” missions (think Strikes or dungeon runs; these are scripted experiences but every single one of them is just “shoot a bunch of dudes”) and 5-6 side missions. The side missions come in one of about seven types, but five of them (bounties, disrupt the arms deal, defend the supplies, defend the JTF officer, rescue the hostages) are completed by shooting people and so are functionally identical with minor variations. Again, though, you’ll see all of them in your first two hours with The Division, and I really hope you like them because that’s all the game has to offer for the next eighteen. Well, that and the Dark Zone.

Somewhat paradoxically the Dark Zone is the single shining point of light in The Division’s otherwise bleak MMO-esque landscape. You see, The Division goes a little light on the “massively” part of the descriptor as the entire game world is instanced rather than sharded. I’d occasionally see other players running around in Destiny finishing their own quests and in one case even randomly ran into a few high-level friends who were completing some dailies, but there’s naff all chance of that happening in The Division because the only place where you can even see other players are the insides of the safe houses. Once you go out of the safe house door you’re into the instanced portion of the game that’s shared only by you and whoever you happen to be partied with. This makes the vast majority of The Division more of a co-op game with an overelaborate loot/crafting system than it is even a pseudo-MMO.

(Personally I think the descriptor is still accurate considering how many of the MMO mechanics it steals; it just forgets to include the other players for the most part.)

Anyway, the only place you can encounter other players who are actually playing the game is in a walled-off area in the centre of the map called the Dark Zone. This area has been completely abandoned by the authorities; there are no quests and no JTF presence. The only inhabitants of the Dark Zone are groups of very tough purple and gold enemies who drop better-quality loot than non-Dark Zone enemies. If you succeed in downing one of these groups and picking up a nice epic-level machine gun, you’ll find you have two obstacles to overcome before you can actually use it. The first is that the Dark Zone is the area of the city where the virus infection is at its most severe; anything you pick up inside it is heavily contaminated and can’t be taken out through the ground-level checkpoints. Instead you have to call for a special extraction helicopter to remove those items and (presumably) take them to some sort of lab where they can be disinfected. Dark Zone items are kept in a special section of your inventory with a very limited number of slots, so it’s likely that even if you’re being selective you’ll have filled it up within twenty minutes or so and you’ll have to call for an extraction. And this is where things get interesting, because:

• Calling for an extraction helicopter sends out an alert to any nearby players with your location and the amount of time remaining before the helicopter arrives.
• Because the Dark Zone is also The Division’s PvP area, those nearby players can come and shoot you.
• And because you drop your Dark Zone inventory on death, they can then steal your items and extract them using your extraction helicopter.

This is a setup that’s supposed to promote paranoia and infighting amongst the various groups of players scavenging the Dark Zone for items. You’re always supposed to be watching your back in case any opportunistic bandits come along and decide they want your stuff. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way; if you shoot another player you get marked on everyone’s map as a Rogue Agent and become fair game to be killed yourself without any repercussions, and in my experience (from the other side) this will result in a constant stream of law-abiding players trying to storm your location and collect the sizeable bounty on your head.  This makes it highly unlikely that you’ll be able to extract with your ill-gotten gains, and so most people don’t go Rogue since it isn’t worth the risk; the Dark Zone is for the most part a pretty well-mannered area where the players actually help each other out (since you’ll get a loot drop if you cause some damage to a named baddie even if it’s being shot by five other people at the same time) instead of killing each other. However, there is a minority of players that will try it on just for fun, and the experience of being cold-cocked from behind while you were engaged with an elite group of mobs does lend future ventures into the Dark Zone a certain nervous thrill that the rest of the game is sorely lacking.

The Dark Zone is accessible from level 10 (so about four hours in) which is one of the rare good decisions The Division makes; it’s the sort of thing I’d usually expect to be locked off for the endgame, and the fact that I can split my time between scavenger hunts in the Dark Zone and more braindead mashing of the fire button in the regular game is refreshing – and necessary. Outside of the Dark Zone The Division is nothing more than a mishmash of mechanics and features that might be individually well-executed but which are tied together by a nonsensical metagame that doesn’t even try to adapt itself to its setting³. As for that setting, it is remarkably dull with a backstory that has more than a few questionable overtones (the last time I played a game this unpleasant was Splinter Cell: Blacklist, but that at least had the saving grace of otherwise being an excellent stealth game) and a main plot that might as well be nonexistent.  I wasn’t too impressed with Destiny when I played it, but The Division’s mistakes rather ironically demonstrate how much Bungie got right and my opinion of it has retroactively improved just a little bit. And that’s about the best thing I’m going to take away from it since I’m deleting it from my hard drive now and I’m not looking back. Adios, The Division.

The post Thoughts: The Division appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.