Preview

The Division Beta Impressions: Why I’m Still Divided on The Division

 It’s terribly easy to scoff and sneer at Tom Clancy’s The Division. I mean after all, it has that supposed stigma of being a ‘Ubisoft Game’ and all the negative connotations that go along with that, not to mention the fact that the visuals don’t look quite as good as the original footage and gameplay (after Watch Dogs et al, we should be used to this, really). On first glance at least, it looks like Tom Clancy’s Gears of Destiny.

the division

Nevertheless while the sum of half-dozen hours spent with the recently released beta hasn’t entirely dispelled that impression, it has also yielded something that we might not normally associate with the French mega-publisher; the unexpected. On the face of it, The Division’s ARPG beats should prove familiar to just about anybody who has sexed up their hands with a PS4 controller in the last two years. That is to say, it combines a whole bunch of elements such as cover-shooter gameplay, exploration, progressive loot and skill systems while wrapping the sort of MMO-lite shroud around itself that players of Destiny will have come to know first hand.

Where the unexpected bit comes in, is just how well developer Ubisoft Massive melds it all together into one largely cohesive package. From the tense exploration of New York’s snow-crusted, yuletide themed city streets to the confident cover-based combat and progression systems that dictate its pacing, it’s clear that The Division gives a decent enough account of itself even at this stage. Nevertheless, while the game is seemingly on track to be a worthwhile affair, there are a number of idiosyncrasies which must be observed.

Much like Destiny, the RPG element indelibly creeps into the combat side of things and it’s this which will likely cause a fair amount of consternation, especially among ardent and long-time Tom Clancy fans. In short, those blissful one-hit, headshot kills that we’ve been accustomed to in everything from Ghost Recon to Splinter Cell and more recently, Rainbow Six: Siege, have been banished to the abyss. Instead, we now have bullet sponge enemies that soak up abuse in line with their own level designation against your own, destroying any attempt at realistic combat in the process (yep, we know it wasn’t ever intended to be a realistic yarn, but still) and instead representing the output of a numbers game that your skills and equipment are the key components of.

the division ps4

That shouldn’t suggest that the combat isn’t enjoyable however, since as the legions of Destiny fans will likely attest, FPS-by-numbers (if you’ll excuse the horrendous pun) can still prove satisfying if the base mechanics are handled right, and fortunately that is absolutely the case here – especially when done so in the company of friendly folk. Of course, using cover-based tactics co-operatively is nothing really new but somehow, when paired with the quasi contemporaneous setting, it feels fresher than before. There’s something wonderfully compelling about ducking into the various shops that line a snow-blotted avenue during a particularly fierce pitched firefight as you slowly inch up the street, switching from cover to cover and returning fire all the while.

In case it already isn’t crystal clear, this *is* a cover shooter at heart and as such, you will spend most of your time hiding and leaping out of cover when you’re not running about the place, picking up missions and hoovering up precious loot. Pleasingly, the nuances of the cover system leveraged in The Division appear to crib rather nicely from the Splinter Cell games; allowing your agent to hide behind cover and then, by aiming at the next surface that you want to hide behind, execute the cover switch and dash in a single button press.

The looting side of The Division also reveals itself to be compelling if perhaps a touch overly-familiar. A variety of different armour components can be collected for your body, legs, back and holster while a number of different weapons and modifications for each can be collected too. As with other games that aim to run loot collecting and level progression systems in parallel, the former are often level-gated, meaning that you need to be the correct level before you can use a piece of gear. Sure, it’s a very old-school way of doing things but it still manages to engage, even now in 2016.

Another aspect that ties directly into the combat are the various skill trees and the cooldown based abilities that they allow players to use. Though extremely limited by the constraints of the beta, players can still opt to pursue development in the Tech, Medical or Security trees with respective skills becoming available in each, using the experience points earned from killing bad guys and completing missions as currency.

The Tech tree for instance, allows players to launch a sticky bomb which can then be remotely detonated and thus proves useful for either flushing stubborn foes out of cover or causing widespread damage to a group of enemies who have wandered into its detonation radius. Folks who follow the Medical tree on the other hand, will not only gain access to a typically useful healing skill but also a very handy Pulse ability that allows the player to effectively ‘ping’ the area for sneaking or approaching enemies. Finally, players who plough their hard won level-up points into the security tree will gain access to a retractable riot shield which protects you from a fair whack of front-loaded abuse and when used in tandem with mates, allows your friends to perform funky flanking manoeuvres while you draw enemy fire.

Neatly, the various skill trees are actually tied into the story missions too, which allow you to expand and improve your home base, also have a welcome side-effect, as they unlock additional skill trees to use with your character. Perhaps most closely equivalent to Destiny’s instanced Strike missions, the beta only has one of these missions and in all fairness the one on offer feels a little shop-worn as you storm an abandoned hospital and begin laying waste to identikit goons before finally taking on a boss in a somewhat anti-climactic rooftop encounter. While I’m somewhat confident that other missions in the full game will better fulfil the epic premise hinted at in the earlier trailers, not to mention give a better idea how all the abilities and tactical opportunities that they allow can properly coalesce, it’s certainly by no means a foregone conclusion based on the evidence here.

Elsewhere, smaller sorties on the other hand, such as rescuing hostages or liberating a hostile district provide incentives that come in the form of additional experience points or equipment to improve your operative. They’re not a bad distraction all told, but in the full game proper, we’ll need to see more variety in their objectives lest they fall into the realms of banal busywork glimpsed in other Ubisoft titles.

Exploration in The Division is also handled decently for the most part; the city is broken down into districts which in true ARPG fashion are gated according to level. Again, in the beta, there is only a single district available to you and so while the game certainly looks the part from a technical standpoint, it remains to be seen just what sort of variance each area will present outside of an uptick in merely more troublesome foes.

One aspect of The Division which looks to show a decent amount of potential, even now, are the forays into the Dark Zone – effectively the PVP area of the game which weaves traditional PvE and competitive elements into its domain. Here, players are free to attack one another but doing so paints them as a ‘rogue agent’ and thus a reward is placed on their heads for other players to collect. The effect of this is two-fold as not only does this on one hand discourage lone wolves from attacking everyone on sight, it also fosters the creation of player killer gangs who go cut about the place, murdering anybody they deem fair game when they become confident enough to do so. In short, when you go into the Dark Zone you are taking your life into your own hands.

the division

Another key aspect of the Dark Zone is how loot works. You see, the Dark Zone offers up some top quality weapons and equipment, the problem is, all of it is irradiated and cannot be used until it’s been sufficiently cleansed. To do this, players must reach an evacuation zone and fire a flare up into the sky to signal for a helicopter to come along and scoop up the equipment for cleansing before it’s transferred into their respective stashes. The kicker is, when you do this, every man and his dog is notified that an evacuation is inbound and as well as the roaming bands of hostile NPC forces, the addition of player killers and cheap shot firing robbers lends a hugely entertaining dynamic to the proceedings, creating hotspots of conflict as everyone struggles to secure their newly found loot.

Ultimately, the Dark Zone looks to be a chaotic playground where the strongest and most organised of player clans will thrive going forward, and it will come as little surprise to discover that it’s this part of the game which gives The Division its long-term legs. Arguably then, with a bespoke focus on player-to-player interactions both in and out of the Dark Zone, it’s clear The Division is best enjoyed with friends. When played solo, the game, at this reductive stage anyway, feels desperately dull in much the same way that Destiny did when it first released; its accomplished marriage of mechanics feeling perfunctory rather than something approaching thrilling as it is when played with other folks.

Although perhaps premature, another big question has to be the sort of endgame content that The Division will provide. Specifically, it’ll be intriguing how the team at Ubisoft Massive intend to keep the game chugging along with special events and other such fanfare to keep capped level players logging in every day. A mean feat indeed and one that even Destiny still struggles with over a year and a half later.

Obviously there is every chance that once the game has released that it could fall catastrophically flat on its Massive bum, but based on this modest morsel, The Division appears to be holding together pretty robustly, even if I’m still not totally sold on the calibre of Ubisoft Massive’s overarching vision for the game going forward.