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Looking at The Division, and wondering if it's worth it.

ArchAIngel

ArchAIngel

Sorcerer Supreme.
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Right behind you.
So, The Division. New game that I've seen come out, and from what I've seen, it looks pretty cool. However, as I am a shit judge of things, I wish to ask SV a few things about it before I get it.

1: How's the gameplay? From the streams I've seen, it seems to be STALKER meets Borderlands, with less OMGWTF bullshit then Borderlands and it's pecs of +10 bulletproofness, but less realistic than an actual firefight. Is it fun, or at least reasonable?
2: How's the story? I admit I'm not looking for much here beyond an action movie, but is it any good? So far, I know there's a bigass money-transmitted virus that's fucking everything up, you're a special elite agent that's busting in and fucking bad guys up, and there's a bunch of fire-obsessed maniacs that think they're Blackwatch and dress like road cops. Also a group called the JSF that are honestly pretty badass.
3: How's the game itself? I haven't seen bugs much, and they've either been incredibly minor(oops, leg of mook went through the floor) or very, very strange(...How did you make your game monochrome for a good twenty minutes?). Any thoughts on this part?

Thank you in advance for any advice you deign to give, SV. Hoping to spend my money well here, and I already squished X-COM 2 and Warframe's latest update.

EDIT: Also, we don't seem to have a thread about it. Why is that?
 
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As im a bit busy atm. Its good but if you arent looking for a shooter, wait for sale.
 
ArchAIngel said:
So, The Division. New game that I've seen come out, and from what I've seen, it looks pretty cool. However, as I am a shit judge of things, I wish to ask SV a few things about it before I get it.

1: How's the gameplay? From the streams I've seen, it seems to be STALKER meets Borderlands, with less OMGWTF bullshit then Borderlands and it's pecs of +10 bulletproofness, but less realistic than an actual firefight. Is it fun, or at least reasonable?
2: How's the story? I admit I'm not looking for much here beyond an action movie, but is it any good? So far, I know there's a bigass money-transmitted virus that's fucking everything up, you're a special elite agent that's busting in and fucking bad guys up, and there's a bunch of fire-obsessed maniacs that think they're Blackwatch and dress like road cops. Also a group called the JSF that are honestly pretty badass.
3: How's the game itself? I haven't seen bugs much, and they've either been incredibly minor(oops, leg of mook went through the floor) or very, very strange(...How did you make your game monochrome for a good twenty minutes?). Any thoughts on this part?

Thank you in advance for any advice you deign to give, SV. Hoping to spend my money well here, and I already squished X-COM 2 and Warframe's latest update.

EDIT: Also, we don't seem to have a thread about it. Why is that?
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Serviceable.

And that's what it kind of is.

1. It's MMO meets TPS so enemies can get bullet spongy but with the correct gear its largely a non-issue. I've yet to find any enemy that is bullet spongy outside of it being supposed to be bullet spongy. (Its an MMO boss. You cant seriously expect to win with one head shot.)

2. Action movie is kind of spot on. You are a sleeper agent activated to go into New York because shit has well and truly hit the fan. Twice.

3. The game is pretty good. Devs are on the ball and fixes are coming pretty regular. There's been some rumblings about Dark Zone(Aka PVP) balance but its been largely okay. Game is stable for the most part. Rare crashes and that's only when I'm traveling to another part of the map as part of a matchmaker group.

Still, unless you are seriously seriously looking for a new game to play, I'd wait for a sale. As it is, get the standard edition. If you do like the gameplay and feel like it'll hold your interest. Then get the season pass too. I'd hold off until you hit like level 20. 30 is the max right now. You can hit level cap pretty damn easily though.
 
It's fun in the beginning. Cover based combat is fun in the early levels when enemies will go down in a believable amount of bullets, but later you're going to need some friends to keep things fun, as your foes turn into bullet sponges that can take two and a half light machineguns worth of bullets to put down.

Frankly, if your looking for a "shared world shooter" I'd suggest Destiny. You're fighting aliens, so when an enemy takes multiple rockets to take down it can be justified. Destinies world is more vibrant, and frankly more interesting than the Divisions empty, snowy new york. Also weapons are more unique. You say, "No Land Beyond" or "Gjallerhorn[sic]" or "The Red Death" I know what weapon you're talking about in Destiny.
You say that you got a Police M4 in the division, I have no Idea how good that weapon is, as most weapons are just a better-statted version of a select few archetypes.

Finally, The Division has no dedicated PVP mode. I mean, there's the Dark Zone (Which, don't get me wrong, is great when you're rolling in a group) but even that is swarmed with NPC bullet sponges.
 
The best thing I can say about Division is 'it's way better than Destiny'. :V

The SP structure seemed very rigid and restrictive in terms of levelled content, but at least it brings up the lower levels so they don't become useless. SP only really exists to gate the build options for PVP, though - the 'story' is terrible and badly told... But, again, better than Destiny.

I really enjoyed the PVP, however. Party chat breaking ambient chat is lame, but when people aren't doing 4-man whack-a-mole laps it really adds to the feel. The balance was a bit iffy, but the things I noticed have been addressed since. The flow and risk/reward for the PVP area, as you gain and lose specific xp and currency while trying to extract high-value items using known landing zones, leads to some interesting stuff.

I imagine once everyone learns the 'good spots' it'll become extremely lame, however - I saw several such places while I played. At least they fixed the weapon balance from beta.
 
Sublink said:
The best thing I can say about Division is 'it's way better than Destiny'. :V

The SP structure seemed very rigid and restrictive in terms of levelled content, but at least it brings up the lower levels so they don't become useless. SP only really exists to gate the build options for PVP, though - the 'story' is terrible and badly told... But, again, better than Destiny.

I really enjoyed the PVP, however. Party chat breaking ambient chat is lame, but when people aren't doing 4-man whack-a-mole laps it really adds to the feel. The balance was a bit iffy, but the things I noticed have been addressed since. The flow and risk/reward for the PVP area, as you gain and lose specific xp and currency while trying to extract high-value items using known landing zones, leads to some interesting stuff.

I imagine once everyone learns the 'good spots' it'll become extremely lame, however - I saw several such places while I played. At least they fixed the weapon balance from beta.
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Touché :cool:
 
You're spot-on that Destiny has a traditional arena shooter mode and Division doesn't, though. Once the PVP is broken by map knowledge etc, Division be much less fun and that might cost the game a lot (depending on the player). I wouldn't even have tried the game if the PVP hadn't been fun in the beta.
 
I really enjoy the game. I'll echo it's way better than Destiny, in that it actually has a story it's willing to tell even if it isn't the greatest in the world and it has a single player at launch I can't breeze through with a four-man party in an afternoon.

Enemies get progressively more difficult as you move along. The Last Man Battalion being the most difficult to deal with as their AI will try to pin you down with automatic fire to let shotgunners walk up to you and blast you in the face and snipers with dazzlers to make sure you can't just plink at them all day. It's not perfect, there's been time where Heavy Gunners just stop moving and won't shoot so I can slowly attrit them because they don't have a perfect LOS, but I enjoyed it. I will however disagree that enemies aren't bullet spongy outside of bosses, Challenging mode mooks are pretty bullet spongy with shotgunners being able to wipe your entire team if you don't focus CC and combined fire at them because they get one-shot guns and even just a stray pellet can drop you 3/4 of your health even with >50% Damage Reduction.

There's also a dearth of High-End (the game's term for yellow/legendary/exotic) sniper rifles, I can't find one to save my life. And finally the Recalibration System, the recalibration station allows you to adjust stats on your equipment, but each time you use it on a given piece the price of doing so increases, the problem being you can only ever adjust one trait so if you adjust say the stamina to turn it into firearms bonus you can't then change the +Pistol Damage to +AR damage, I feel if you're willing to pay the inflated cost of continuing to make changes you should be able to do so because certain gear still has better base stats than other gear.

The best place to go hunting for better Lvl 30 drops is the 32 Zone in the Dark Zone, the majority of enemies are LBT and Cleaners but the drop rate is higher and if you're packing something like the Liberator (a Legendary AR) and some decent 30 gear then they're not too problematic.
 
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I... kind of like the game.

The problem I have with The Division is that it's so obvious that it could have been a much better game than it is. It's not abysmal, but the indications of what it could have been only highlight its deficiencies.

Graphics: 5/10. The developers have invested what seems like a huge amount of time in making unique art assets - cars, buildings, graffiti, etc. Except when it comes to your own character's outfits, facial features, or hair style. Then you get one of three facial styles and hairstyles. :???: Moreover, the developers have taken the very easy way out and set the game in winter, which gives it that very-gritty grey feel and also saves them from having to place plants. The lighting is good, but also not amazing. In short, they've done an excellent job asset-wise, but that's about all.

Technology: 6/10. It's a mediocre cover shooter and a shitty RPG. As a cover shooter, the mechanics are often clunky - characters will enter and leave cover when you don't want them to, there are issues with shooting over cover some times, changing arms with your rifle, the zooming is handle badly - everything you'd expect from, say, the original Mass Effect. There's nothing new here, and it's not implemented particularly well. RPG-wise, it's even worse in some ways: very little character customization, few quests, no effort put into making the quests at all unique or different or even appear different. It's an RPG in the same way that, say, Call of Duty is a RPG. That said, it is redeemed by how it handles phasing and instancing. This game has the best handle on phasing and instancing of any game I've ever played. Transitions between instanced locations - your base of operations and the outside, for example - is almost totally seamless. So too is transition between 'dungeons' and the main overworld map. This is done amazingly, and they deserve total props for it. Phasing - moving users from public areas to private instances and from server to server - is only a little more poorly implemented. You can enter public areas from private ones and go back and forth amazingly smoothly. It might seem like a little thing, but it's actually had a hugely positive effect on how I play the game. The only place that doesn't handle it as cleanly is dungeon matchmaking - but this is still better than in most games.

Plot and Story: 7/10. It's good - where it exists at all. The developers have done with the story exactly what they did with the graphics: that is to say, they put a lot of effort into a very specific set of materials, and the rest basically is mediocre. A good deal of effort went into making excellent intelligence, videos, and art assets, and then they basically ignored...everything else. That's very frustrating to me. Some sections of the plot are filled out nicely and work well: the cleaners, the JTF. Other parts are clearly just randomly snatched from Tom Clancy being Tom Clancy: the Rikers, the rioters, and the LMB basically make no sense. No effort has been put into making them make sense. They're just shit. And the plot is very thin: between story missions and the intel, there's literally nothing. No real side quests, nothing beyond the basic intelligence. It comes across as almost superficial.

Implementation: 7/10. Besides the specifics as above, the problem I have with The Division is that a lot of effort clearly went into making what is ultimately a very mediocre game. Some things are thought out, careful, and well-detailed. The Base of Operations is amazing, both in implementation, in assets, in progression - I love it. Same with the Cleaners. Some things are well thought out or well designed, but not both - the Dark Zone, the art for the world. Other things are clearly neither. The game feels deeply... uneven in that respect. Moreover, as a MMO, the game suffers the substantial annoyance that most of it plays through as a single or co-op game: all of the story missions and all of the overworld areas are just you, or you and your team. You never run into another agent in the outerworld. The instancing is done well enough that this doesn't feel poorly implemented, but design-wise I think it was a poor choice. The game goes to great effort to make it "you're just one of many", but you never run into these many in the overworld (other than the Dark Zone, of course, but I don't see that as part of the overworld).

There have also been weird connectivity issues, but I'm not sure if that's on my side (they're digging up the street and the internet has been giving me trouble as a result) or on the server side.

It's not a bad game, but it's... eh. Mediocre, with great flashes of promise.
 
I found a lot of the things @LordSquishy liked really lame. The BOO seems like a skill tree locked by grinding encounters, one which you have to walk around really slowly. Nothing happens there, nothing changes (except vendors lol), and they don't even drag the dead bodies away from the front fucking door. It was a cool idea, and probably isn't what the developers had hoped to achieve originally, but to me it's just plugging in my skill points security supplies to unlock bonuses. Could have been a menu and saved me a lot of time.

Overall SP progression was really rigid - post level 10, but especially post 15, a few levels either way kill the experience. The zones are levelled in such a way that you have to go up the west side then across town the east. The impression of emptiness that he talks about seems to me to be due to encounters being fixed, rather than random or dynamic or emergent or anything interesting.

Things like the cleaners - fully garbage man union kills the world apocalyptica led by Immortan Joey - are very silly. They're supposed to be 'burning out' the 'contagion', but there are MILLIONS of biohazard bags lying around every street in town. Their huge use of (game breaking, wall-ignoring) flamethrowers is so silly they had to make a whole mission about how they manufacture the enormous amounts of napalm to have hundreds of flamethrower guys just standing around... and of course the solution is send in some guys, and not a mortar in the BOO. The focus on NYC makes it unclear to me if this silly virus has wiped out NYC, or the entire world; if the former, the story makes no sense on any level and if the latter the focus on NYC is bizarre.

The PVP and coop work well, but aren't well thought-out as discussed. With a full squad, some missions are full of MMO-style ablative hitpoint guys, which is hilarious when we're talking about four guys with M60s blasting one dude. In the SP areas, they just multiply the guys in each group, so you end up with a dozen guys from some lazily defined faction hanging around every intersection. It just pushes people to use the fast travel... and once people are fast travelling, all that time you spent making the map and building the ambience is wasted.

But when the ambience is police cars with infinite battery wailing their sirens weeks after being abandoned, and dead guys outside the super paramilitary Tom Clancy's Rugged Individualist HQ never rotting or being removed, I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Ignoring all the SP stuff - to me its just week-1 locking the build options for PVP - the gunplay and itemisation is good. What you do in the game is fun, much like Destiny. Why you're doing it, and the ways the game reward you for doing it, is better than Destiny. I guess they never played Prototype and think their story is interesting, but at least it isn't saying direct to the player 'I could tell you about the great battle when Jesus fell defending us all and died for our sins against the forces of Horus the Corruptor in a week long space battle that scorched the world and cracked the moon ... but nah' the way Destiny did.
 
I just found it boring. There's nothing that flat out bad; the cover mechanics are iffy at best but they tend to work. But it's just not very fun.
 
I say this as a person who has put about20 hours into it.... Wait for the price drop. Its a 30 to 40 dollar game with a 60 dollar price tag. Nothing wrong with it but not enough to warrant such a price. It just seems a bit lacking in substance.
 
I bought the game and tried it out for a couple of hours. I can say that I had absolutely no issues with any of its components or the complete product. It wasn't art but I could honestly say the game is pretty good and would actually be pretty fun while running with friends (of course, none of my friends who play multi actually have PS4s though). But despite looking at it and thinking it's pretty good, I just can't play it. It genuinely wasn't doing anything for me at all. I made it to Manhattan and I just didn't feel like playing it.

So I took it back and got Disgaea 5 instead.
 
Ford Prefect said:
I bought the game and tried it out for a couple of hours. I can say that I had absolutely no issues with any of its components or the complete product. It wasn't art but I could honestly say the game is pretty good and would actually be pretty fun while running with friends (of course, none of my friends who play multi actually have PS4s though). But despite looking at it and thinking it's pretty good, I just can't play it. It genuinely wasn't doing anything for me at all. I made it to Manhattan and I just didn't feel like playing it.
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I wonder, looking at the game, and what people comment about it. Is it just that it doesn't really offer anything interesting and new? Just a solid generic MMORPG modern military FPS. Nothing exotic about it. Like going to McDonalds for dinner.
 
Since this seems to be the only Division thread here.

Song about the Division written by Miracle of Sound
The song is from the perspective of a regular person during this whole crisis.
 
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