The Division Preview – Coordination is King
The Division has been anticipated since it’s announcement trailer over two years ago and at this year’s E3 Ubisoft finally showed the game in playable form. However, while the game shows promise, it doesn’t yet live up to the transcendent online experience many billed it as initially.
In a post-apocalyptic New York City destroyed by disease, players work in teams of three to survive the inhospitable landscape, scavenge the ravaged urban environment, and defend themselves against hostile forces. In other words, it’s an excuse for Ubisoft to create another third-person shooter, this time one influenced by the RPG genre and focused on small, squad-based combat in a shared, online world where players can stumble upon hostile human players just as easily as typical NPCs.
Based on the demo I played, the world map is split into PvE sections and PvP sections called Dark Zones. While PvE zones make for the typical co-op experience where three friends work together to complete objective-based missions, the PvP Dark Zones add an additional level of challenge and unpredictability: human opponents.
At the start of the demo, my team had to kill a squad of NPC enemies and acquire small yellow pouches full of hazardous materials, either radioactive or diseased, I couldn’t tell. We then had to take these materials to an extraction zone to meet up with a helicopter. The catch was that three other online teams were headed toward the exact same extraction zone. Initially, it’s a race to see who can get to the zone first, but after we all converged, it became a makeshift King of the Hill game type, for better or for worse. Each team tries to control the area long enough for their packages to be lifted into the helicopter.
The game controls like a typical third-person shooter, with cover-based combat and a rolling maneuver. However, to me, the controls feel sluggish. Notably, The Division lacks the smooth running and tight snapping-into-cover of the Gears of War games. Exploring the environment and jumping and dashing between cover points just felt a little off. Running is currently mapped onto the L3 button, like many FPS games, but since players want to run often, it would be better suited to one of the face buttons for easier use.
Everybody playing the demo was assigned a character with a specific load out. I had a healing-based character, while my teammates had a turret and mines, respectively. It’s unclear to what degree players can customize the physical appearance of their characters (ours seemed randomly generated), but I assume that player load outs can at least be tweaked. In addition to primary and secondary weapons (typical rifles and shotguns), players can make use of special weapons, such as the aforementioned health packs, turrets, and various kinds of mines and grenades.
Interestingly, the developers described The Division as an RPG shooter when discussing the game. However, outside of displaying the damage of each of your bullets when attacking enemies, the RPG elements were not shown off during the hands-on demo. Therefore, it remains to be seen how character development will actually be implemented.
Honestly, my short time with The Division was a frantic experience. My teammates did not coordinate with me, and we were stomped by an opposing team consisting of writers from the same venue who obviously had the tactical advantage of knowing each other. It also doesn’t help that during the heat of battle, while all three teams converged on the extraction zone, my demo build froze up on me and the developers had to restart my Xbox One unit. This mishap, combined with the rather shaky mechanics and a complete lack of RPG features in the demo, makes me think that The Division is still a long ways off.
A promising game, but one that still needs a lot of work in order to live up to its potential.
