The Division
I have been playing The Division from Ubisoft on PS4 quite a lot over the past couple of months, I am Level 30:99 so I have put in the hours and have purchased the season pass, Doom and Overwatch which I have recently downloaded are sitting there barely touched as I keep coming back to it. So it must be doing something right to keep my interest. I would say that the game has given me some of the best and some of the worst gaming experiences I have had. Here I will detail some of those.
The Good
The first time I went into the Dark Zone was pretty awesome, it was incredibly tense and fear inducing, combined with the atmospherics and over powered flame thrower dudes it really got my pulse racing. I did spend a lot of that early period running away, which is not generally like me as I’m a more charge in and die type of player. This doesn’t happen very often for me, I think because I am usually sitting there trying to analyse how people have done things whether consciously or unconsciously, so it takes a lot for a game to immerse me and affect me on an emotional level.
The Matchmaking in the game is great, joining up with random people to do Incursions, or Missions or farming the Dark Zone, adding people to your friends list and inviting people to join you really makes the game a social experience. The majority of my play with the game now is with random people I have friended over the last couple of months from all round the world. The voice chat is a little clunky so we tend to use Party mode on PS4, but I don’t like to use the mic anyway, I tend to swear quite a lot when playing games so don’t want to subject people to that. The team play with groups is really good, and how you setup your character and combine it with others to develop tactics has a great level of depth. When a team is working well together and you are tearing through enemies quickly and efficiently the game really does feel great.
The atmospherics in the game are pretty stunning, the volumetric lighting and the dynamic weather and time of day really add to the game, not just visually but have a real effect on gameplay. When a snow storm comes in and spot lights cause huge blinding volumes in the fog it really changes the visibility and the way you play the game.
The game is so open to griefing allowing players to be absolute a-holes that random acts of kindness really stand out. People from other groups healing you when you are down, helping you take out enemy AI mobs, help fighting off rogue groups, popping a healing cloud for you to run through, inviting you to join their group if your running around on your own. Some early experiences were more experienced players showing me around the map where all the best loot locations like Division Tech.
Not so good
Rogues, sigh. I still have mixed feelings about the Rogue System, in some ways its great and in some ways its absolutely terrible. Not terrible in the way it has been implemented as I really like the concept of it, terrible in the way that it can give you an absolutely appalling playing experience. There is nothing worse than having spent an hour or so farming loot in the Dark Zone when a group comes up behind you as your fighting AI and kills you going Rogue before you know what is happening and steal all your hard earned loot, especially if you have managed to find a weapon you have been after for some time. This system has given some of the worst playing experiences I have had, and continually causes players to rage quit and for some to never come back to the game again. I think this system has likely had a real impact on player retention in the game, and would most certainly be a deal breaker for more casual players. My preference would be to make the penalty for being killed as Rogue much higher.
The game has suffered from a fair amount of bugs and exploits, the most annoying for me being a terrible sound bug where everything would repeat itself 5 or 6 times which meant I was forced to play with no sound until they fixed it. There seem to be a fair amount of cheaters in the game, although Ubisoft do seem to be addressing this issue. I suspect that these issues have had a fair impact on player retention, but to some extent I think these kind of issues are to be expected in a game of this scope and ambition.
The guns feel a bit impotent, when I first started playing it kind of felt like I was tickling people to death. I can totally see why they have taken this approach as a more Counter Strike approach with one shot headshots would have made the whole upgrade path a lot more restricted, and would likely have made the Rogue system even more punishing. Fighting Rogues can start to feel a bit ridiculous as you dance around pouring clip after clip into people, healing and rehealing. You do settle into this mechanic, and getting more powerful guns does help, but there are moments of disconnect when you empty a full clip into an enemy AI’s head who’s only protection is a bandana or baseball cap and you have only taken a fraction of their health off.
I’m really interested to see how this game evolves and where Ubisoft take it and will be interested to see if they can retain their player base and win back those who have left
