the beta was pretty accurate on how the final product is, at least game play wise. the graphics got really beefed up though. if you're looking to play solo though, I'm not sure how much fun you'll have. the game style is not much different than borderlands. with borderlands, you beat it and then go through playthrough 2 and whatnot to get better loot at a harder difficulty. with the division, they treat it more like an mmorpg where you hit end game and grind currency for better gear. fetch quests in standard rpgs are concealed as protecting supply drop quests and disrupt arms deal quests. main missions are well done as far as the intensity goes. some of the side missions are too. they add a bit of meat to the game since some of them unlock some story behind the events that led up to the situation new York is in. there's some cctv and found footage things that get unlocked and put a chill in your spine. if you know that's the type of game play you're getting into, you should be fine.
It sounds a bit like a third person Borderlands 1/2. And those games were absolutely miserable if you tried to play them solo, but they could be fun in coop. Is it easy to find people online to play with, or do you really have to know other people who own the game?
The Division includes a matchmaking mode. You can access in the base of operations, safe houses, and at the entrance of main missions. I imagine that it is currently really quick to find people to play with since the game is brand new. But like other online rpg style games, I imagine that it'll take a while to find people while leveling if you buy the game later in its life as a majority of people will only be active at max level. Here's some video of the game in single player mode. No idea what kind of system he's running to get it in 4k at a reasonable framerate. Some of the effects and details are nuts. The fog.. the barrel of the gun starts heating up and turns orange and smoke comes out of the muzzle. your character extends his trigger finger when not using the gun. when it snows, you see the buildup on your shoulders and bag, Massive created every single ad and sign in new york from scratch. also all of the graffiti. it's pretty crazy when you look back at all of the tiny details they added. also since this is an online rpg game and it's still really early, they are still making adjustments to it. they have already had to nerf a gun and do a 90% decrease nerf in the rate you get the end game currency.
So like other MMOs you think it will have a shelf life, where if you don't start playing around launch you will be missing out? I still regret not getting into WoW back in the vanilla days. I guess I could buy it on Steam and get a refund if I don't end up liking it.
Sort of yeah but not in the extent of wow though. It's hard to say how it'll play out since I'm not sure what the intentions are for the game. Destiny has/had a long term goal for multiple years of support. Ubisoft never really mentioned anything pass year one yet. As such with these games, when you hit the end game content, a lot of it consists of grinding and time consuming things to get better gear. So as the game matures and you jump in as a new player and hit max level, you'll be playing with/against these other guys who are on one hand the same level as you but vastly outgear you since they've been at that level for much longer. And when the new content comes in such as the DLC, everyone will be moving on to that. With wow, it was more of a culture shift that effected the game. The greatness of vanilla wow was that everyone was still learning the game as well as compacted onto the single server so the community was close. The regular content was much harder and promoted group effort. Everything was still new. As the years passed by, the veteran players knew all of the fundamentals of the game and blizzard shifted the game into more casual solo play. They also added in cross server support. This caused the community to become pretty toxic. Either people never talked to each other anymore since you were likely never going to see each other again (due to cross server) or they just shit on the new players if they didn't know something fairly basic. Dungeons became easy and trivial.. no more group effort needed. People just wanted to get stuff over with like it was all chores.. etc. I think this is just a curse of super successful aged titles. League of Legends suffers the same fate. The community is regarded as one of the most toxic out there.
So what's the consensus on this game now that people have been playing for awhile? Good? Bad? It's breaking every sales record and becoming one of the best selling games of all time. From what I've been reading and seeing, it seems like the Dark Zone is the big selling point of the game. People really seem to like having the PvP be a big chaotic free for all in the middle of the city.
I'm interested but from everything I've read I'm sure this is a game I'd play for 10 hours and then put down. PC gamer gave it a 68 which is kind of surprising. "Beneath all the excess is a challenging and strategic eight hour co-op cover shooter that deserves an audience, but it’s occluded by a thick, noxious loot haze." I guess you could buy it on Steam and return it. http://www.pcgamer.com/tom-clancys-the-division-review/
This game seems to be aptly named because critics are divided on it. Gamespot gave it an 8/10 and Giant Bomb gave it a 4/5. I was kind of suprised the Giant Bomb review was so positive. Jeff Gerstmann tends to be very critical. He only gave Fallout 4 a 3/5. He's the guy who got fired from Gamespot for refusing to take bribes from advertisers to write positive reviews. I have no idea when or if IGN is going to review this game. I find PC Gamer a bit hard to take seriously after they gave XCOM 2 a 94. That game was a complete mess with very negative user reviews. I hated the mission timers and had major performance issues, and ended up returning it. They also gave Duke Nukem Forever an 80% (what most people would consider a very positive score), which is odd because most people consider DNF one of the worst games to come from a major publisher in the last decade.
After reading PC gamer reviews for a long time the thing I noticed is that the reviews don't seem to have a moderator that neutralizes their non-average reviews. The reviewer writes from the heart and for good or bad that gets published. With IGN and Gamespot I've always imagined one guy writes the review but there is a whole group of people that picks the final rating. It also seems like those two are always within 5 points of each other. I'll bet a cookie they are again for this game.
I think that's actually how it works at Gamespot and IGN. When they have a "review in progress" they have videos where 4 or 5 reviewers talk about what they think of the game. I think they have a group of people working on the review and moderating the score, but one guy does most of the work of writing it all up and puts his name on the review. IGN tends to be more lenient, while Gamespot is more harsh, but they are usually close together. For instance, in this case I would bet money that IGN gives this game an 8.5/10. I think that commitee approach means you don't see such extreme scores from them. Not much ever gets a 10, but something also has to be pretty bad to score below a 7. But the reviews also become a little more impersonal. The review feels more like a consensus on a game and less like one person's opinion.
I remember when PCGamer would punish developers with low scores for buggy games but those days are long gone. Now no one bats an eye at games that are unplayable.
Jeff Gerstmann also gave Borderlands and Borderlands 2 4/5's. Looks like he has a soft spot for these types of games.
The final verdict on the game will probably depend on how they handle updates and DLC and keep the game interesting. An upcoming free mission icon has already popped up on the southeastern edge of the map. Ubisoft has also been pretty quick in attempting to address imbalances and problems, the exact opposite of Bungie, who let two exotic hand cannons (Thorn and The Last Word) go unchecked for around 6 or 7 consecutive months in Destiny, which basically broke PvP. Some of my friends are catching up to me reaching the level cap (30) in The Division, so I'll start doing some Dark Zone soon. I played DZ in the Beta, but the levels are bracketed by range of levels, so I haven't been able to play with friends recently because I was ahead of them by level. At level 30, the bracket is "30-30," meaning I can't play with anyone but other 30s. Everyone will hit 30 soon, so that won't a major problem. The Dark Zone is a very clever blend of PvE and PvP that I expect to be copied by other games. You never actually need to start any PvP confrontations, but you will encounter people stalking you at extraction points trying to take your gear. You never know when you'll be attacked, which makes the experience much more intense. It's best to roll with a full 4-man squad with people you know to get your loot out of there, but I imagine elite players can be successful with a smaller squad. I bought the PS4 version because I knew people who really wanted to play this game. I plan to get the PC version in a Steam sale. Currently, I'd probably put it in the 8 to 8.5 range, but this could rise or drop depending on how Ubisoft manages it long-term. If I'm understanding their plans, Brooklyn is going to be added later, which would be a huge expansion of places to explore. I'd compare the basic "end game" mechanics to Mass Effect 3 online co-op Gold and Platinum difficulties (crowd control, DPS, consumable boosts, buffs/debuffs, ect.) but with an open world to wander and explore and an innovative Dark Zone area/ mode. As usual, I'm finding the most difficult PvE content to be much more interesting if I'm going to play a mission repeatedly. So far, it seems like all the character abilities can be viable. I was skeptical about things like the Ballistics Shield (huge shield and sidearm right out of Rainbow Six Siege), but I actually used it effectively enough that it got our team through a part we had failed numerous times. I actually think it's pretty awesome that the Security branch of skills is basically lifted out of Rainbow Six and placed in a shooter/ RPG like this. I've played Siege with a friend who is a much better FPS player than me who loved using the shield classes, and he flipped when he saw he and his brother can use the same shield/ sidearm setups in the Dark Zone that they use to dominate in Siege. He's been very competitive in 1 on 3 encounters in DZ and can't wait to get a full team together when he hits level 30.
when you get to end game and start going challenge modes, you'll find that the crowd control skills and skill cooldown reduction talents are your best friends. rusher type enemies are super rough.
ign review is up http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/03/08/the-division-review to save a click, it got a 6.7/10 for some humor, they gave evolve a 9 and star wars battlefront got an 8.
lol at Evolve getting a 9/10. That game vanished like a fart in the wind. Even when it hit bargain bin prices people were still saying not to buy it because the community for it was dead (or more accurately, never existed in the first place). I don't think I've ever seen a multiplayer game that the community so completely rejected from day 1. Reviewed by the same guy too. Either he's trolling people, or he really doesn't know what people want out of a multiplayer game.
Bought the game. It's actually pretty fun. Kind of like an MMO third person Left 4 Dead, where you fight street gangs instead of zombies. I'm not sure if you could solo the missions. They get pretty hard, even in coop. Matchmaking works fine, but I'm sure this would be better with a group of friends. lol at the 6.7/10 rating. Seems more like an 8 from what I've played. The graphics look better than the beta. The city is really detailed.
Once you get a bit further, you'll start meeting different factions. After the rioters, you meet the cleaners, Rikers prisoners, and LMB (Last Man Battalion). The cleaners can really mess you up if they get close enough to set you on fire and their rushers run at you with a shield. The Rikers prisoners are more brutal since the move quicker and smarter than the cleaners and rioters. Their rushers got shotguns. The LMB are much smarter than the rest. Since they're a military trained security group, they flank faster and don't peek when you're pinning them down and aiming down sight on them. Also, their grenadiers use grenade launchers to hit you with multiple at a time. They also have medics and engineers who set down turrets. Every once in a while, there will be an elite with a ballistic shield. For solo play, I'd recommend just using Pulse and First Aid skills. It pretty much covers everything for yourself. DPS boost and enemy tracking with pulse, and unlimited healing just on a cooldown with First Aid (along with medkits). As you keep playing, you'll get more comfortable with the controls and the map layout so you can flank faster and better. Don't forget that you can shoot through the windows of the cars if an enemy is hiding behind one. Also keep in mind that the gear has specific stats related to them so you'll want to be careful with what you equip rather than just equipping anything higher level than what you have. You don't want to wear too much firearms/electronics gear and not stack stamina. This also matters because when you start getting blue/purple gear, they'll have talents where you'll have to have x amount of each stat to enable.
I played some Dark Zone. I'm just under level 30 (DZ rank), where I'll need to be to buy anything considering my PvE rank is 30. I have found that most will need to run with a 4-man squad primarily to get your gear extracted. If you just want to explore and level up a bit and don't care about extracting things, solo is fine. But you're really going to have a tough time consistently getting your loot out of there because extraction points draw in strong PvE enemies and are where most rogues love to stalk players just trying to get their gear out of there. When you call for extraction, there's a 90-second wait and it alerts everyone in the area. If you're a lone wolf, that tends to put a target on your back for packs of degenerates. However, I'd also point out that most of the time I did not get attacked by other agents and have frequently fought PvE enemies in the Dark Zone together in a cooperative manner. The intensity and paranoia you feel are more from anticipation of being attacked, especially when you try to extract considering everyone is alerted to your position and knows that you have good loot given you're trying to extract it. I'd say over 90% of the time a PvP fight broke out was when I was trying to extract my loot. The majority of the time I've lost it because they initiated the attack by throwing a sticky bomb on me and mobbing me, but it has also been quite thrilling to respawn to find the bastards and kill them, which is much easier if you're on a 4-man team. When they are rogue, they are marked on the map. Even if they extract my loot, they will lose a ton of experience, keys, and money if you kill them while rogue. In the Beta, I actually spent a lot of time hanging around extraction points just to kill rogues trying to prey on other players. When I killed the rogues, there was no penalty to me and I grabbed the loot they stole.
Roving packs of degenerates, lol. I haven't made it to the Dark Zone yet but it sounds like my kind of place.