1903

One of the weird things about The Division, and I’ll be curious if it’s true of the sequel, is that it doesn’t really open up for the player until you hit level 30. Everything else is prelude. At 30 you get full access to all activities on the map, plus you can’t even equip exotics or gear sets until 30 so the loot chase doesn’t even begin until that point. So you might be thinking the entire game up until then is kind of pointless and, well, you’d kind of be right.

1904

I felt the game was kind of pointless after 30, but very fun until then. The loot chase was the least interesting part of the game.

1905

I don’t understand that point of view in the least, since there is not a single thing you can’t do at level 30 that you can do before that, and many things you can’t do until level 30.

1906

You can’t play the missions for the first time.

1907

So what you’re telling me is that for you, The Division is the missions and everything else is pointless extras. Also, revisiting the missions again to try different strategies or pursue better gear is also pointless. And that’s fine, if that’s how you want to play the game, but it’s definitely not the way the game is structured. Sounds like you wanted a more traditional single player RPG or shooter.

1908

Well, not single player. The Division had the best PUG gameplay of pretty much any game I’ve ever played. But yes, traditional in the sense of broadly linear without a focus on the “endgame”. Borderlands, basically.

I realise that’s not how it was structured, which is why I didn’t engage with it much after I completed the story. If you’re going to do a loot chase, I want it to be like Diablo 3’s (post RoS) - material loot variety with crazy unique effects and randomised PVE content. I didn’t dig the Dark Zone mechanics at all and replaying the missions got old quick given the relatively boring loot.

1909

This is where expectation setting for The Division is pretty important. I can totally understand how someone approaching this game can find it underwhelming, even disappointing at first. It’s a “real-ish” setting, at least in comparison to other MMOs, and you’re working with “real-ish” gear and weapons. The exotic and high level weapons, and the gear sets you find do have distinct and unique abilities and perks to offer, but you’ll never be calling down lightning strikes or meteors from the sky. Hell, you won’t even be calling in air strikes. As pointed out above, I think there are RPGs and grenade launchers in the sequel but none in this game. Anyone who picked this up recently and is thinking of playing, it’s more like other Tom Clancy games in this respect that lots of other online games.

1910

This is largely because you haven’t hit the level cap, where gear, particularly set items, enables multiple distinct playstyles. The weapons become very different.

Maybe they should introduce this stuff earlier. For me, the storyline, setting and quality of the gunplay kept me going just fine until I got to the cap.

1911

Well, today marks the release of the last shield available to complete in the original game. I figured since I’ve spent a decent chunk of the last 8 or 9 months trying to accomplish them, I’d detail how that turned out for me.

In the end, I completed 9 of the 12 shields, which will get me the first three tiers of rewards in the sequel, so I got that going for me. The three I could not, or maybe I should say was not willing to complete, were Talon, Fang and Marshal. Talon required getting a commendation score of 3000 and I only made it to 2430. I could have grinded it out but it just wasn’t all that much fun. Fang required completing all missions at Legendary difficulty and holy crap, that’s hard. You really need a full crew that knows what it’s doing and is well kitted out with gear and I just didn’t have any of that. Marshall required getting each exotic weapon and I actually came really close! Got 95% - all 6 armor pieces and 22 of 24 possible exotic weapons. Again, could have grinded it out, played the odds, but I’m happy with my loadout.

Anyway, I think that’s going to wrap up The Division for me. I’m going to uninstall in favor of the sequel coming out next month. It’s a little sad, this was a game that I started out feeling pretty ‘meh’ about, then set it aside for a while after my comrades bailed. Then I eventually went back and had a blast! Here’s hoping the sequel turns out pretty good.

1912

Ground man, ground! Grinded indeed. Congratulations. Anthem for me though :)

1913

Yeah so I have been playing this since last month’s humble bundle. The loot chase is dope (not in a good way), the gunplay is crazy (bullet sponge ahoy). But the virtual tourism is worth it. The world is detailed and beautiful, much better than NYC in GTA4. In PvE I feel like a Wild West marshal helping folks out. Respwaning enemies who never remembered me one shoting them from 100 meters away every time not withstanding.

PvP is groanworthy because I just can’t beat PvP geared peeps when I’m out doing the tourist thing. Loot robbery is just pathetic.

1914

Why didn’t any of you jerks tell me that Division was actually a good game?

I’ve been playing it for the past couple of weeks. The idea was just to play enough of the campaign to unlock Survival mode, since that’s the thing that people seemed most enthusiastic about.

The initial playthrough to level 30 was pretty mediocre, except for a few of the main missions which required some proper planning and communication when played with a team of two and a little under-leveled. But mostly the systems and the loot were doing nothing for me. A billion items each giving +3% to some secondary state. The mod management was just painful.

And then it seemed to just be getting worse for the first five hours or so of world level 5. Tons of junk and no way to figure out which of it was any good.

But then we hit something properly challenging (trying to stupidly do an incursion with just the two of us), and had to start experimenting with different builds for the very specific problems that scenario had. And then the way you’re actually supposed to optimize the build (and decide what loot to keep) clicked into place.

It was a bit like Monster Hunter, except more generous drop rates. But strangely they made the good part totally irrelevant and cumbersome early on.

Hm. I’ve done legendary matchmaking with randos five times (three distinct missions), and won all of them except one that disbanded after an instant team-wipe. Of the four wins, only one had any team-wipes.

I think the legendary missions and Resistance are where the game really shines. That’s the whole point of having a loot system with a billion tunables!

Like I’d been playing with a SMG+ballistic shield D3-FNC build for the last few days. I really like it. But it wasn’t really getting the job done when trying to play solo Resistance. Problem was that I obviously needed one skill slot for the ballistic shield, but also living without any healing at all is painful. But I really wanted a turret for some of the later waves…

Eventually ended up adding two pieces of Nomad gear and swapping to an SMG with a Predatory talent instead of the one that had the three DPS talents I love. And suddenly it felt like I was immortal. Even if I got flanked, as long as the ballistic shield was pointed toward the main mass of enemies I would heal faster than the flankers could hurt me. But then that build is totally useless for many other tasks, so it’s not like I’ve solved the game.

1915

You had better luck than I did I guess, I always seem to fall in with a bunch of Leeroy Jenkins whose personal dictionary seemed to be missing the page with “teamwork” on it. Oddly enough, I had pretty good luck with randoms on the incursions, but nobody ever seemed ready to deal with the unique challenges of legendary missions, and I am not able to carry a full team at that level.

1916

Hey, @jsnell, head’s up: The Division, for all of the wonkiness of trying to fit a PvE game into a PvP box (common with “games as a service” these days, unfortunately), is actually a pretty good game.

1917

You can easily disregard the PVP crap if you don’t want to deal with it. I’ve got 427 hours logged and I have not unlocked the achievement for killing another agent that has gone rogue.

1918

Actually, you can’t. No, I don’t mean the “go into the DZ and shoot fools” part… I mean the part where every weapon and skill was normalized into homogeneous vanilla pudding because of PvP concerns.

That’s why I loathe the whole GaaS stuff, because no matter what, it’s always about chasing the meta, because the rest of the weapons are all basically the same with different shapes.

That being said, I never bothered chasing the meta in TD and like you have a bazillion hours in it.

Plus the game’s New York is dead sexy. If there’s one thing that Ubi does right (the execrable Watch Dog 2’s San Fran comes to mind, as well).

1919

Oh right sorry, forgot who I was talking to. Blah blah blah, I hate thing. Got it.

1920

For Division 2 Ubisoft has opted for EAC for anyone looking for information on that. Got an answer from one of the beta-test streamers.

Luckily it looks very similar to D1 so I guess can just continue playing that.

1921

You know, I love the way they mixed in PvP and PvE. It is just one open world and you are given almost complete freedom. You decide whether you want to kill or help randoms, or anything in between.

And that New York. Hawt, in a goth sort of way. Especially for someone who hasn’t been to New York.

But I can’t get over the bullet sponge bit. A headshot is an instant kill, not bazillions shots. And the endgame loot chase has a very steep rate of diminishing return. The gap between “good enough” gear and top gear is huge (so many precious division tech needed, so many bosses to farm).

1922

Nope, as I said, I have a bazillion hours in TD, and liked most of it. But no game is perfect. I mean, three simple little things would have made the game damn near perfect to me:

  • actually wrapping up the storyline – the ending is way lame. “Whoops, your terrorist is in another castle!”
  • randomizing item placement/distribution in Survival (why oh why couldn’t Ubi do this???)
  • And the constant meta/nerf tail-chasing

Other than those, TD is probably in my top ten games

Hater