Our last chance to see Tom Clancy’s The Division before the game’s March 8 debut, has come and gone. Naturally, we’ve got a few thoughts about last weekend’s open beta, which concluded on Sunday. There was some great content on display in the final The Division beta. Still, not everything we saw over the weekend left us feeling super-positively about the game’s future.
The Good
Side Quests
One of my favorite features in Tom Clancy’s The Division is the way Massive uses side quests to give players a tour of Manhattan’s many nooks, crannies and other hidden places. It doesn’t matter if you’re working missions from the Situation Board – Ubisoft’s take on the job boards we’ve seen in everything from Monster Hunter to The Witcher 3 – or random encounters on your way to the Dark Zone. To finish side quests in The Division, players must frequently fight their way in/out of multi-story buildings, across rooftops and even down into the city’s sewer system.
Along the way, players discover all manner of new loot and more than a few shortcuts to help get around New York City a bit faster. It’s a refreshing change of pace from the usual Visit Town -> Solve Everyone’s Personal Problems -> Rinse And Repeat gameplay loop seen in many open-world RPGs.
Player Communication
This will probably vary a bit from platform to platform, but there was no shortage of PC players ready to use The Division’s built-in chat system to establish some kind of rapport with their fellow agents. Without a doubt, player chatter was most common in the Dark Zone, where players hunt for top-tier loot while fending off a combination of enemy units and rogue agents. In fact, unexpected player chatter is actually one of the best ways to know you might soon be in more danger than originally expected. But I overheard more than a few conversations while exploring Manhattan, too.
As you’d expect, given the game’s narrative, New York City is still a pretty quiet place to explore in The Division. Occasionally hearing another human voice, without joining a party or running a third-party chat app, was surprisingly refreshing as a solo player who’s been forced to use Destiny’s underwhelming emote system for any/all quick communication over the last year and a half.
Endless Loot
The loot just doesn’t quit in The Division.
Gear drops typically fall into one of two categories: Armor or Cosmetic. The former comprises a wide variety of items, from armored vests to weapon holsters, which gradually increase your Division agent’s combat readiness. The latter encompasses all of the usual clothing that a human would need to survive a powerless NYC in the winter: puffy jackets, hats, gloves, etc. Armor upgrades have a minor (sometimes unnoticeable) impact on the player’s appearance. Conversely, while new clothing options let you tailor your agent’s appearance to your liking, cosmetic gear doesn’t affect his/her combat stats.
Combined, the two systems give players nearly 20 equipment slots to fill. And there are still dozens of consumable items, crafting supplies and blueprints to collect throughout NYC. With such an expansive inventory system, Massive has an unbelievable freedom to rain loot on The Division players without overpowering the community. It’s not quite a 1:1 ratio, but there weren’t many combat situations we encountered this weekend that didn’t see some kind of loot hit the ground. Furthermore, players can always disassemble unwanted gear, into crafting supplies, bringing them one step closer to the high-powered assault rifle or extra-beefy chest armor they recently discovered the blueprint for.
Improved Mechanics
We’re also happy to report The Division feels much better, mechanically, than it did the last time we got a chance to play the game. Most importantly, shooting felt more natural in the open beta than we remember from playing the game at PAX Prime last year. Weapon stability feels more balanced, as does the range on certain classes of firearms, and enemy units don’t feel quite as bullet-spongy as in previous builds. The Division is still an RPG first, meaning headshots aren’t always the one-hit kill some shooter fans have come to expect, but dropping standard enemies doesn’t generally take more than a few well-placed rounds from your preferred weapon.
The game’s cover system also appears to have been reworked. Players can work their way around cover objects, as enemies change position and/or arrive from new locales, to make flanking more difficult. Blind-firing has been reined in a bit, by exposing a small part of the player to damage, and I’m not sure switching from one cover spot to another has ever been easier in a third-person shooter. These changes go a long way towards making The Division’s cover system feel less like a second-rate Gears of War clone and more like a project other games will mimic in the coming years.
The Bad
Needs More Fast Travel
So here’s one of the few areas where our experiences seemed to shift from staff member to staff member. iDigi editor Mo Mozuch swears he used fast travel to go to/from the Dark Zone after extracting some loot during a solo run. He also mentioned being able to teleport to party members when grouped with other players. But iDigi senior games reporter Scott Craft had no such luck during his time with the game. No combination of button presses on the map screen seemed to be enough to conjure The Division’s mythical fast travel options.
And don’t even get us started on how frequently lone wolves will find themselves hiking half a kilometer (or more) back to a mission area after dying. Similarly, we found it quite boring to run laps between the Dark Zone and base of operations, just to grab one or two pieces of extracted gear from our stash. All of these situations are frustrating, in part, because fast travel isn’t exactly new to the games industry. And it’s definitely not a foreign concept to Ubisoft; you know, the same company behind Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and a smorgasbord of other open-world titles.
More importantly, The Division’s fast travel options (or lack thereof) unnecessarily extend the time between gunfights and/or other interesting encounters. It’s one of a handful of mechanics that seem to prioritize keeping players signed into the game for longer periods over letting those same players make the most of their time with the game. Exploring New York City is fun. But we’re here for the gunplay. If fast travel doesn’t break games like Fallout 4 or Far Cry Primal, two recent release which rely heavily on world exploration, then what possible excuse could Massive have for leaving it out of The Division?
Repetitive Enemies
One of the more disappointing aspects of The Division beta is how cookie-cutter enemy units began to feel. And we only spent one weekend with the game. So how are things going to feel when players have invested dozens (or hundreds) of hours of time?
We understand that, to some degree, many game designers firmly believe in making enemy units easy to identify at a glance. Unfortunately, it means they also become visually uninteresting quickly. It also feels a bit disingenuous to the setting. Sure, if New York City found itself in such dire straits, any concern for daily fashion would likely get tossed out in favor of function. But am I really to believe every ne’er-do-well in Manhattan grabbed the same three clothing items before heading out to join the riots?
More importantly, if the concern here is that players need to be able to recognize (and react to) the presence of enemies as quickly as possible, can’t we acknowledge the fact that The Division gives you plenty of other cues about who’s friendly (or not) on the streets of New York. For starters, the player’s reticule only turns red when aiming at enemy units or rogue agents, and the various civilians roaming the streets of Manhattan don’t ever get visible health pools. Most survivors also don’t carry guns, or down-talk Division agents, so cross words and/or the presence of firearms are big giveaways. With so many other indicators of which NPCs are friend/foe, it doesn’t feel like too much to ask Massive to give us a more diverse collection of enemies to face on the streets of New York.
Perks/Skills As Quest Rewards
It’s hard to know how big of a problem this will be for The Division, since the Perk system and a large selection of skills were locked during the open beta. So I’m not going to spend much time dwelling on this issue until we’ve seen the final build of the game. But I’m not a fan of Massive’s apparent decision to tie player progression to the game’s central quest line. Many of the skills and perks available in The Division are unlocked by upgrading the player’s base of operations; a process that can’t even begin until you’ve completed a handful of rescue missions. To make matters worse, most of the skill tree was locked during the beta, so we don’t have any idea how long that trend continues. And that sucks.
If this were a single-player game, the decision might make sense. After all, the top skills in many games can break early story missions. But The Division is a multiplayer-focused project; one that (like Destiny before it) borrows heavily from MMORPGs. Fans of such games typically don’t appreciate developers taking a heavy-handed approach to player progression. Players who enjoy the Dark Zone might not want to be forced through the game’s narrative content. If you take away the chance to pick cool new abilities for your character, there’s not much reason to get excited about leveling up anymore. Sure, there’s a cool particle effect to celebrate the occasion, but it’s going to be difficult for some players to get excited if their agent’s skills aren’t growing alongside their experience level.
The Ugly
Dark Zone
For whatever reason, we just cannot get behind the Dark Zone in its current form. Granted, we’ve never been huge fans of competitive shooters. Still, there’s something about the Dark Zone that feels aimless, as if the game’s player-versus-player content was only included so Massive could check another item off Ubisoft’s internal list of Must Have features (like forcing us to use Uplay).
For starters, Ubisoft is either doing a bad job of instancing players or a terrible job of populating the Dark Zone with new enemies to fight. Perhaps it’s a bit of both. It’s hard to know without a detailed breakdown of the servers keeping The Division open beta online last weekend. What we do know is that there always seemed to be WAY more fellow agents around us than the enemy units who drop the prime loot we were all searching for, and the ratio wasn’t even close.
The extraction system also doesn’t make much sense for the game anymore; particularly now that we know Manhattan is the only borough we’re going to see in The Division at launch. But players are typically never less than a kilometer away from an entrance/exit to the Dark Zone. Inside of those checkpoints you’ll find vendors selling Dark Zone gear, none of which appears to be contaminated. But if you try to carry loot out on foot, players are greeted with a message informing you that the only way to decontaminate your loot is to have it extracted back to your stash. Yes, the one accessed from your base of operations, which happens to be a several minute run (each way) from any Dark Zone checkpoint. And you can only carry six pieces of contaminated gear at a time. Hope you like running laps.
Sure, the whole experience is a bit tense, since every player in the area has around two minutes to kill you and steal your stuff while you wait for extraction. But the studio fails to provide any real incentive for you not to be an asshole to your fellow agents. Worst case scenario, you might get killed while still considered a rogue agent. Even then, it only takes you an extra 30 seconds to respawn, with longer waits for those who’ve killed several friendly players. Yes, you might lose a couple pieces of Dark Zone loot, but there’s little reason, outside of a desire to help your fellow man, for players to intervene on one another’s behalf if things get crazy in the Dark Zone. So how do you think most people are acting when they see another agent running down the street?
***
All things considered, The Division shows a great deal of promise. There’s content we weren’t fond of, as is the case with most new releases, and a handful of design decisions that feel a bit dishonest. But there are some great ideas on display in The Division, too. We’ll just have to wait and see what the final build of the game is like when Tom Clancy’s The Division heads to stores on March 8.
Be sure to check back with iDigitalTimes.com and follow Scott on Twitter for additional Tom Clancy’s The Division coverage throughout 2016 and for as long as Massive supports The Division in the years ahead.
