The Division Beta - First Impressions - Is There Enough Content Here? - A Review of Sorts

Channel:

The Doctor & The Wizard

Subscribers:

12,400

Published on February 4, 2016 5:31:25 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cley63J8XRQ

Game:

The Division (2016)

Category:

Review

Duration: 10:10

236 views

6

Hey Everyone I'm HubSmash and let's talk about the Division.

The division is something that I've been looking forward to since I first saw the announcement at e3 2013.

I didn't know what it was or really have any idea how it would turn out - but it looked great and different than other survival shooters. At the time that's what I thought it was. Another survival game - but finally one that intrigued me.

Of course now I realize it isn't a survival game at all - but that it's more of a third person shooter mmo loot fest set in New York City, with an overall survival theme.

You start the beta after skipping what appears to be the games tutorial. Some stuff has happened and your friend is injured. She explains that establishing a base of operations is key to success, so your first and only story mission is outlined as establishing your base of operations and finding a doctor to run the medical wing.

Let's talk about your base of operations a bit. It has 3 wings. Medical, Security, and Technology. Each wing corresponds to a skill or ability tree in your characters load out. Eventually you learn that by spending resources on a specific wing (resources for each wing are separate "currencies") you can upgrade the wing which unlocks abilities in that wings associated ability tree or modifications on abilities that you can apply to existing skills, changing the way they function. There are vendors here, people to send you on side missions, and your stash.

For example - the first medical ability you get allows you to mark targets in a 60m area of effect centred on the player - and players in your squad will receive benefits for attacking marked targets (ie higher crit chance). You can modify this ability to show loot able objects or if you're of the pvp mindset, you can jam other sensors of other players, making you and your party invisible to the scans of other agents in the dark zone.

This is all well and good. The story seems to progress well and at least the small bit we got to see was interesting. There was also an interesting side mission where you're looking for a lost person and interacting with a sort of alternate reality system using "echoes" to piece together the tale of the missing person and hopefully find them.

As you play enemies will die and drop loot that can have mods applied to it that give functional enhancements to a weapon or adjust stats. For example an an acog scope might increase accuracy by a % but also allows you to actually aim down the scope of you would like to.

The character screen has lots of information and you can dig deep into your specific stay bonuses in fairly high detail on your character screen.

Performance wise I found that everything worked pretty well on the high preset. I did experience some frame drops but mostly it ran at a pretty solid 50-60 fps, even in the dark zone firefights. I'm running a gtx 970 which would probably be classified as an enthusiast card - but I am imagining that it should run decently on 760,770 and 960's respectively.

PVP was a ton of fun in the dark zone. Think of it as a sort of mixture between something like h1z1 or dayz, with elements of destiny or other pvp mmo's.

Gear obtained in the dark zone is contaminated, so you'll need to extract it via a helicopter at an extraction zone. The helicopter takes 90 seconds to arrive and then waits for a bit for players to attach their contaminated loot to the rope for it to be carried off to their stash.

This makes for some really tense situations, especially if you have some contaminated loot that you're excited about such as a powerful new weapon or a cool modification. You have this kind of uneasy trust of the people with you (provided neither of you decided to shoot on site) because you recognize that they could just beR waiting for the perfect moment to ambush you.

The engaging player upon another non-hostile agent will trigger the aggressor to go rogue. Going rogue causes you to be more visible to your enemies for a set duration based on how many people you've killed.

What ensues is a fairly fun game of manhunt, while other agents have you as a target. You'll receive rewards for taking down a rogue agent - in the form of dark zone currency and rank. And that isn't including any contaminated items they might have recently stolen from another player.

it's extremely hard to get a sense of how "good" the game will be. There are multiple systems we had absolutely no access to, such as crafting, perks and talents, and the beta only offered 4 equip able skills (one of which could be modded if you had enough medical resources).

Thanks again and take care.

Music -
Cryptic Sorrow - Atlantean Twilight by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100276
Artist: http://incompetech.com/
And Haus Guest by Gunnar Olsen

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