There is a strange dichotomy at the heart of The Division, which says a lot about where games are right now. Show In one sense, it is an utterly artificial experience. The Manhattan we see in this post-pandemic nightmare is an ethereal filmset of a city. A majority of buildings are inaccessible, the vehicles are useless, and the enemies take dozens of shots to bring them down. This is fine, of course, in the sense that all action video games are artificial. They hinge on the ridiculous premise that deadly violence is a fun thing. It’s not. It’s the absolute worst. But 40 years of design conventions have brought us to a place where some journalists and YouTubers are complaining that The Division isn’t realistic because the enemies are bullet sponges. Well, I have a shocking revelation for you: in the event of a mass global disaster, the streets of our major cities won’t be filled with heroic games writers taking out hundreds of gang members with high-tech weaponry.  Loss, fear, wretched misery ... Tom Clancy’s The Division. Photograph: Ubisoft The problem is The Division wants us to understand its disease-ridden New York as an authentic place. The streets of Midtown are rendered in incredible detail: the burned-out trucks, the stray dogs, the people huddling together for warmth – all of these provide the weirdly dislocating look of Don McCullin war photography. Loss, fear, wretched misery. Yet we can do nothing about any of it. The story says we’re trying to restore order to the city, but the most tangible aspect of that is occasionally handing a can of soda to some passing wretch who thanks you pathetically. You don’t stop to listen though – you’re on the way to a task that will give you XP and cash. Their voices trail off in the swirling snow. You don’t really care. Perhaps this is a comment on how common humanity is easily obliterated in situations like this, but more likely it’s that caring for people gets in the way of the shooting. Caring for people is a really difficult design problem. And the shooting is definitely fun. In The Division, you’re a spec ops agent brought into action after a deadly disease is released in the city. Now the streets are overrun by different gangs; some are just criminals looking to take advantage of the chaos, some – like the flamethrower-wielding cleaners – think they’re restoring a new world order by setting fire to the potentially infected. A literal scorched earth policy. You get a big map and it’s filled with missions and side-quests and encounters. You go to those places and you shoot stuff – either alone or with up to three other people. As you shoot, you gain experience and unlock new abilities, perks, weapons and gear. The role-playing structure is incredibly complex, providing a huge amount of control over the evolution of your avatar. This process is made concrete through the development of your home base: as you gain points, you can unlock new areas of your tech, medical and security wings – so as your base gains power, so do you. It’s a meaty, interesting and compelling system, and after each mission, you end up with so much loot, and so many upgrades, that returning to HQ feels like taking part in your own YouTube haul video – except you have body armour and assault rifles rather than make-up or action figures. Combat is very different from Destiny, the game this one is being most commonly compared to. They’re both online shooters with RPG mechanics, they both mix campaign missions with side quests, and they both have enemies that take a lot of hits to bring down. The central difference, in terms of game feel, is the choreography of the shoot-outs. Destiny is more acrobatic, using boosts and jumps to provide spatial freedom; The Division is a cover shooter in the Gears of War mode, so your relationship with the battle zone is more guarded and modular. As a team, you spread out across the battered landscape, edging from cover point to cover point, trying to snare your prey in a flanking grasp. The launch of Destiny in 2014. Photograph: Michael Nelson/EPA Fights are brutal and long. You need to think carefully about your mix of weapons, skills and talents, and certainly on the harder missions, you need to think about how your specialities combine with those of your team mates. Bringing down an end-of-level machine gun boss is about applying persistent explosive moments of pressure, using sentry guns and powerful projectiles, while being kept safe by dedicated medics with portable shields and medi-packs that emanate health boosts. You need to get organised. Either that or rely on luck and brute strength. Either way, The Division can be enthralling, exhausting and entertaining. It balances its obsession with systems and its desire to give you exciting moments of all-out blast-’em-action quite well, and it always provides quiet moments to recover, to let the tension wrack up again. There is a good steady rhythm. Then you have the Dark Zone, a ‘player vs player’ environment, which may be one of the most fascinating studies in player psychology ever devised by a mainstream developer. Here, you are free to wander the streets, taking out enemies for loot, you can also team up with other people on the fly. But if you shoot at another human player, you become a rogue agent: this means you can steal their loot, but that everyone else in the area is free to attack you as they please. In some ways it’s like the Bounty mechanic in GTA Online, in that it’s both a punishment for bad behaviour and a way to goad players into conflict. There are reports that players are throwing themselves into the firing lines of other people, getting killed in the process, but then turning their victims into rogues whose loot is now fair game. I wonder if this behaviour will somehow be patched out or whether it is going to be part of the tactics of this lawless place. The thing is, we’re so early in the development, not only of this game, but this whole genre, that it’s hard to work out where things will go. The Division is suffering a few technical glitches (symbolised by the amazing sight of players having to queue to use the computers in a safe house), but this is a huge undertaking and that is to be expected. Of more importance is how this world will evolve once enough players have completed all the current missions and find themselves in an end-game that is effectively a treasure hunt in an anarchic moral wasteland. Even at this early stage though, The Division is an experience that’s worth having if you’re at all interested in mainstream action games, or role-playing adventures, or co-operative online play. You will not be bored as you blast your way through. Meanwhile, in the background, there are the other inhabitants of this grittily realised New York. The ones you see falling to their knees amid the dogs and trash and apocalyptic flocks of great black birds. What are you supposed to do about that? How are you supposed to feel? Has human misery become an acceptable signifier of detail, like the graffiti on the walls, or the stuttering neon signs? New York is the city on to which Western film makers imprint our nightmares. This is the city that monsters destroy. You have to wonder how conscious the decision was, to place this fiction in Midtown – because, right now at least, you can’t get to the bottom of Manhattan; you can’t look up and find out what is there instead of those two towers. Should we be thinking about this while aimlessly blasting our way through countless faceless thugs? Well, The Division brings us into a city that feels real and provides us with tableaus of fear that ring true. Then it says, come on, run past, we’ve got things to do. The only humanitarian solution is to use your XP to build an infirmary – but that’s effectively turning compassion into a Skinner box mechanic. And all the while, in your base, the voices of the wounded are drowned out by the yells of the gear vendors offering their cool new wares. It’s a microcosm of this whole fascinating, weird, flawed, compelling, artificial, authentic, divisive experience. The Division is a fun game. You fire weapons. Weapons are fired back. Rats scuttle along the dead city streets; dogs peer into empty cars. Sometimes you can’t tell from a distance who you are meant to be saving and who you are meant to be shooting. Is Division 1 or Division 2 better?Division 1 schools are widely considered to have the best athletic programs. Why did Division 2 flop?The game's sales on consoles failed to meet Ubisoft's expectations, with Ubisoft citing increased competition in the genre as a factor leading to the game's disappointing performance. Ubisoft added that the sales on PC were similar to that of the first game. Does the division have a good story?the division is a great game with a good story and combat system, but it can be violent a lot. combat is mainly shooting enemies and the blood is minimal and theres not really that many hostage situations where the hostages are killed. Is the Division 2 as good as the first one?Division 1 at the end of its life was better than Division 2 at launch. Now, I'd say the two are more or less equal with Division 2 maybe having a slight edge. The atmosphere is certainly better but the game play isn't. I love them both differently. |
