I guess since I might as well: here are my private beta thoughts in quick summary form before the full, open to everybody one starts:
1 to 30 experience (or well, the small snippet you get to try): it's basically the Division 1.5. Like if you played TD1 recently it's going come off really familiar, and honestly by now TD1's pretty good as a game so it's nice to have the sequel be like that from the get go. It tries being a bit too frenetic here and there with a couple combat encounters but it's not like, unbearable or though.
Endgame experience: Remember when I said about the 1 to 30 experience being a bit too frenetic here and there? Division 2 endgame, at least in the private beta honestly just came off like Massive had a whole lot of ideas how they wanted the game to look like at this point, with you being high speed low drag tactical operators fighting against a massively numerically and technologically superior mercenary force without considering how it would feel to
play like.
Like to be a bit more precise I tried tackling this with
@Cornuthaum and one instance of trying to do so with a full team of randoms. In no particular order of complaints:
- Enemies being able to shit out multiple suicide bomber drones per second while your ability recharge rate can be summed up as "AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS, I CAN FINALLY DEPLOY MY TURRET AGAIN" relatively speaking absolutely sucks in terms of how it feels.
- The robot shotgunners just feeling like near unstoppable walls of HP that actively punish you with seemingly no counter player if you get pre-occupied with the everything else that goes on with a long duration fight against the Black Tusks sucks. And it sucks a bit more when people say why don't you just shoot it when you've already elucidated that you were busy trying to shoot everything else in the encounter that are very good at trying to shoot at you.
- The fact that the movement controls are relatively unchanged from TD1's relatively "submarine"-like controls, as Corn put it, when the Black Tusks seem set up for basically fast paced lightning relocating sucks when you try to do that because TD1's controls were way more appropriate for a more sedate cover shooter.
- The realization that signature ammo drops as they currently work are completely dumb if you didn't take the big sniper rifle specialization option. like sniper rifles get a chance to drop their signature ammo every time you score a headshot kill without it. Grenade launchers? Gotta get a normal explosive kill (so you know just gotta manage to pin down the people already pinning you down so they don't move for the 5 seconds it takes for your grenades to finally explode), and the crossbow requires you killing an enemy afflicted by a status effect. Corn and I both took the grenade launcher option if you're wondering.
I don't really have an issue about the AI because the general map design letting them do their tactical operator thing, on its own, would actually be pretty great compared to the more dumber (by comparison) story factions and as a great enforcer of how just much harder the situation got for the city: it's just absolutely let down by the everything else that got added on top.
Now the good news is that contrary to all the many people going to me how the above was perfectly fine and me and my friend were just playing bad, Massive basically seemed to have agreed with all of the above and nerfed/buffed things accordingly, so I'll see how things will be like for the near launch version of the game.
And I mean worst case scenario me and Corn are both getting the game for free via AMD Rewards, so we'll probably be around to play with other SVers for a bit before we probably put in the bin of games that were eh ok to us.
And in case you're wondering, we did not try PVP at all because honestly I feel like I'm gonna run into all the people who've been playing WT5 Dark Zone for the past year and nothing else the second I do.
