Tom Clancy's The Division

My wife and I just picked up the Underground expansion to this for ~$5.60 CAD each from the Ubi store (Canadian link).

The pricing is a bit odd as it’s listed as $7.49 CAD but changes to $4.87 CAD once it’s in your cart. Then, in our case, it bumped up to $5.60 CAD at checkout. Either way, it seems a pretty good deal for a regularly $15 piece of DLC.

Season Pass is currently $20 on Ubi’s store; 50% off.

http://store.ubi.com/us/tom-clancy-s-the-division-season-pass/575ffdb6a3be1633568b4ec4.html

It will all be multiplayer only stuff, right?

Depends what you mean by MP. The first 2 expansions offer PvE content. The most recent one, Survival, gives players the choice of a co-op experience or PvP. So I think there might be some interest for solo players.

Tried survival mode, got put into a group with 3 other players.
Loaded the map and watched them run off in 3 different directions while I tried to get my bearings.
Died as the #13th survivor left, never saw the other 3 guys again but it looked like they all died before I did.

Survival seemed interesting and should probably be marketed to the DayZ crowd, except, the whole no zombies in the Divison despite it being " made for it "., just wish I had a map of New York handy so I could get my bearings easier.

They should do some ‘holliday’ themed stuff with things like that; course, it not being a subscription mode game i suppose that would be hard (even though Warframe excel); Suppose they could sell more cosmetics.

1.4 and 1.5 is how the game should’ve been at release to retain more players I would think.

Still, DarkZone has remained a gankers paradise with griefing rewarded. The “rogue” timer should be a lot longer and blue-on-blue ganking should make the ganker perma-flagged for the player who gets ganked (until they have exacted revenge).

Is this game in better shape? I haven’t played since week 2, but I’d love to have a beautiful game set in snowy NYC to play on my new TV. I loved the first week, but lost interest in the end game.

Can’t speak to comparison since I started playing recently, but I’m really enjoying the Division. Just hit level 30 and I find the loot curve very rewarding.

My only real complaint is that the servers seem overloaded this afternoon and the game was hitching pretty badly.

Well I got the 50% off season pass. Want a pretty & snowy game to play on my new tv this holiday, and the survival DLC appears to be especially snowy.

Can’t even remember how I played this- anyone use it with a controller? Does it work well? I have no interest in the Dark Zone (had enough of that aggravating gank-fest last time) so I’m not worried about being competitive. Although I gotta say- for the first couple of days after release the dark zone was really thrilling- players were nervous, the thickness of the weather effects were still novel, and NPCs were a threat. For one weekend I thought this game was going to revolutionize multiplayer.

[quote=“instant0, post:1367, topic:72755, full:true”]Still, DarkZone has remained a gankers paradise with griefing rewarded. The “rogue” timer should be a lot longer and blue-on-blue ganking should make the ganker perma-flagged for the player who gets ganked (until they have exacted revenge).
[/quote]

Wait, are we slamming DarkZone? Let me support this - DZ is a meaningless and stupid place and they can delete the whole zone and most of us still playing wouldn’t notice.

I’ll third that on the Dark Zone. Total waste.

I absolutely love playing in the Dark Zone you PC Master Racers ;) On XB1 at least it has remained fun, even solo. :P

It’s impossible to play solo DZ, at least on PC. You will definitely be ganked while fighting anything else.

with only 24 people in the zone, there are plenty of places the other 23 people should have to look first. Seems odd to me. Not sure what would make it different on PC. Years of being a solo rogue in mmo frontiers I naturally skirt around, watch other groups, wait for opportunities, etc.

I’ve had a lot of fun out there with a few exceptions when patches mess things up a bit.

It does! Beautifully, like it was made for one… ;)

This is in PVE at least.

It is in a much better place now (except for Darkzone on PC).

The underground thing is quite nice, as you level up you unlock different flags you can set to make the mission harder, and longer (and I suppose, Larger areas underground you have to walk around).

You’re basically exploring a huge underground (hey!) system of subway stations and what-nots to complete one of several “randomized” missions, i.e. kill this guy, pick up this intel, destroy these supply dumps (with a timer), etc…that are randomly placed somewhere in the “map” tile you randomly get (sure is a lot of random) when you enter the tram.

How do you fight and extract gear? Everytime I start a firefight with NPCs or signal for extraction I get rolled by a gank squad. Eventually I just said screw it.

fighting isn’t a problem as long as you read where people are and fight where they aren’t. fighting in popular spots or in popular paths will get you found. extracting is a lot trickier, but again go out of your way to go to wherever they aren’t. the zone is big enough that typically they can’t be everywhere. solo you never extract in the big open area in the middle either.

a lot of times solo I was able to extract in DZ5 or 6 just fine with the difficulty of the npcs being the biggest hurdle but doable. Most of the time on XB1, if there are lots of people in the dz5-6 area, the dz4 or 1-2 are available for extracting and the opposite also holds true.

Bad breaks will happen, you just roll with it. running solo in the frontier in any mmo and getting stampeded by a zerg sucks, but you just get back out there and do what you can. avoiding conflict is an art of it’s own and why I tend to play rogues in mmos

At the moment I’m DZ Rank 63 and I can say that, the game got worse over time in terms of ganking, as well as support from other players.

The whole DZ mechanic is flawed.

  • You ignore a group of players that come up to you -> They gank you as you extract, then extract the loot and win.
  • You engage a group of players that come up to you -> You’re flagged and other (neutral) players attack you because you’re an easy target
  • You get ganked by a group of players, respawn, and find that their “timer” has run out so you are unable to attack them without going “rogue” yourself, even if they have done it X ammount of times to you already.

I guess the only way to play DZ will have to be with the mindset that.

  • If you are in there solo, kill anyone else who is solo and run away from groups bigger than you.
  • If you are in there with a group, kill anyone solo, or smaller/equal size group, run away from any groups larger.
  • If you are in there with a 4 man group, kill everyone that approach you.

I suppose warning shots may have to be used as well, but if you’re a solo player, I don’t think warning shots vs a group of 3 will work, and if you engage them from distance, they can kill you easily as you’re flagged, and if you do not engage them from a distance, they can close up the range, activate their super and then kill you. Either way you are going to die.

Unless you have the Banshee gear set, in which case, you can play DZ as you feel since you will not lose anything on death.

Another thing to take into account is how cheating affects the PC version; It was pretty bad for a while, haven’t been in DZ since 1.1 (and a bit in 1.4 until I got ganked three times in a row and alt-f4’ed for a few weeks) so maybe it is less of an issue now.

I would think that, any impressions or “tips” on how to play DZ on console will not be applicable to the PC version, and vice versa.

You perfectly summarized how I felt about the dark zone. Also, I had totally forgotten how once everyone got to 30 firefights revolved around supers. And then, of course, there was the cheating, but I bailed right around the time that started to become more prominent.

I’d never been unhappier about moving on from a game. They were so close to something special with their multiplayer. If they could have somehow maintained the sense of danger you experienced upon first entering the dark zone…

I loved the how multiplayer worked outside of the darkzone, though I wish it had been expanded upon. Like dark souls, it implemented MMO elements without all the immersion breaking antics you get in those games.

I like how you put tips in quotes, as if they aren’t even really tips.