This past weekend, Ubisoft’s new quasi-MMO shooter, The Division, threw open the floodgates on an open beta test. Only a fraction of the game’s content was enabled for beta, but it was nonetheless enough to get a feel for what sort of game it is.
Through the days of sniping, looting, and wandering abandoned subway stations, I was repeatedly struck by two things: how incredibly empty the game feels, and how I was enjoying myself despite that emptiness — or perhaps even because of it.
New York fallen:
First, the basics.
For those not in the know, The Division is a third person, cover-based shooter set in downtown Manhattan. A biological weapon killed off a large section of the city’s population, and the quarantine zone is now overrun by looters, gangs, and murderous fanatics. It falls to the elite agents of an organization simply called “the Division” (IE players) to go in and restore order to what remains of New York City.
The Division also incorporates many traditional RPG elements, such as a gear grind, skills, and talents, though there are no classes and it seems like you can eventually learn most if not all skills and talents on a single character. It’s a bit hard to tell because the progression systems, like so many other things (including character creation), were only partially implemented for the beta.
It’s often talked about in the same breath as MMOs, but even knowing that it was not exactly the traditional MMO experience, I was struck by how much closer to a single-player game than an MMO The Division felt.
This was the first way in which the game can feel terribly empty. Outside the Dark Zone (more on that later), the only place you’ll naturally encounter players are in a few specific hub areas, and these form a sufficiently small part of the game that I’m not sure why they even bothered with them. It is entirely possible to play The Division, experience the majority of its content, and basically never encounter or have any meaningful interaction with another player.
Now, I tend to spend a lot of time soloing, and I like the idea of social elements being optional rather than something you must participate in to progress, but at the same time, part of me missed the sense of an MMO community, the buzz of general chat and looking at how other people have designed their characters.
It is easy to meet-up with other players if you want, though. The game features easy to use matchmaking that will quickly find you groups to help you play missions.
I’m not sure if this is deliberate, but the difficulty of missions seems to be tuned to favor groups, even with enemies scaling up somewhat to accommodate larger groups. Alone, I found story missions very challenging — frustratingly so — but in a full group, they were almost too easy.
As for the missions themselves, I found them nothing special. The fact the beta throws you into the middle of the game with no context can’t have helped, but I didn’t find the story particularly compelling.
In particular the dialogue bothered me. It seemed like the writers were being paid based on how many curse words they could cram into a single sentence. To be clear, I am not at all offended by mature language; it was just so over-used it made the dialogue seem ridiculous and cartoonish.
And the mission design was nothing to write home about. Go here. Shoot bad guys.
The Division’s talents lie elsewhere.
Going dark:
The game’s main multiplayer feature comes in the form of the Dark Zone, a sealed section of the city where the anarchy has reached its peak.
in the Dark Zone, mobs are tougher, loot is better, and you will actually encounter other players. The presence of your fellow agents is a double-edged sword, though.
In the Dark Zone, you will drop any recently collected loot if you die, and other players are free to take it. This encourages the other unique feature of the Zone: players have the option to attack and kill each other.
The only to way to guarantee your ownership of any Dark Zone loot is to call in an extraction from certain specific points, but this advertises your position, sending NPCs and players alike bearing down on you.
I had expected the Dark Zone to be a miserable gankfest, but that didn’t turn out to be the case at all. In fact, I saw more cooperation than competition between players.
The reason for this is that attacking a player unprovoked designates you a rogue agent. Not only does this give other players the right to kill you without consequence, there are even rewards for taking down rogue agents. This makes going rogue a very risky proposition. They are target number one for most players.
Only once was I ganked, and I had quite a merry time chasing down the perpetrator and exacting my vengeance. Otherwise rogue agents felt more like prey than predator, and the mobs actually proved a much greater threat than the players.
I do wonder if this pleasant balance will survive much past launch, though. In the beta, everyone had roughly equal footing. Once people have time to grind out the best skills and gear, I could see the Dark Zone becoming far less fun, especially for newer players.
The Dark Zone had its moments, but it was not my favorite part of the game, and now the issue of emptiness comes up again.
I walk alone:
For me, I found The Division reached its greatest heights not when performing grand rescues of civilians, or even when chasing rogue agents through the streets of Manhattan, but when walking alone down random streets, taking in the sights and hoping to find something useful to salvage.
The Division is not like other open world games I’ve played, MMO or otherwise. Most try to cram items and activities into every inch of real estate. While this can be exciting at first, over time I find it starts to make things feel like an endless checklist of chores.
The Division isn’t like that. It has a lot more empty space.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to find. Hidden loot caches are fairly common, and you’ll sometimes come across events called “encounters.” I initially took these to be similar to the randomized events in games like Guild Wars 2, but they don’t seem to be random or respawn once completed, so I’m taking them to simply be side quests by another name.
You can even get rewards by handing supplies to starving and otherwise needy civilians — a nice touch if I’ve ever seen one.
Because these things are less common than they would be in other games, they feel a lot more meaningful. It’s genuinely exciting to find a hidden cache of items in a random apartment.
I also appreciate that mobs in The Division are not omnipresent. One of my MMO pet peeves is when games stuff hostile mobs into every inch of the map, making it impossible to go five feet without being jumped by a (usually trivial) enemy. Hostile forces in The Division are common enough that you never feel entirely safe, but you can also explore without having to defend yourself every ten seconds.
It’s not just loot or bad guys that you’ll find while exploring, either. Abandoned cell phone recordings and other lore items help to flesh out the backstory of the outbreak, and while the main story is mediocre at best, the little stories told through these found items are far more compelling: intimate, personal, and believable.
This experience of exploration is further enhanced by the fact that The Division features one of the most detailed, realistic, and immersive urban environments ever to grace the video game genre. I’ve never been to New York, but I do live in a major city, and I found The Division’s environments hauntingly familiar.
The day/night cycle and weather effects are also spectacular. Snowstorms can strongly impact gameplay, cutting down visibility severely — especially at night. It makes the game feel incredibly real.
The lonely, haunting feeling of wandering the ruins of New York somewhat explains the need for the lack of other players in the greater game world, but it also causes some mixed feelings. It is a bit strange that an ostensibly multiplayer game shines the most when you’re playing alone. I could see maybe bringing in one or two friends without greatly impacting the experience, but more than that would begin to cheap the game’s ambiance, I feel.
Final thoughts:
I’m unsure whether to recommend The Division. It’s certainly not a good choice for those seeking a more traditional massively multiplayer experience. It ultimately seems far closer to single-player games than MMOs.
But it does offer very strong immersion and exploration, and the core of the game is quite solid.
I suppose it depends on what you’re looking for.
Dare I say, I like Division more than Fallout 4. Just because I like New York better than Boston.