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The Division - Tom Clancy Presents Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division, By Ubisoft

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http://tomclancy-thedivision.ubi.com/game/en-us/home/

 

Tom Clancy, in collaboration with Ubisoft, bring you The Division. New York has been ravaged by a virus that's probably a terrorist attack, and The Division is some sort of probably government agency sent in to clean up, establish order, and get some FAT LOOT with a bunch of mod slots.

 

From what I've been able to watch and gather, it's a 3rd person/1st person cover based not-massively-but-still-multiplayer story driven shooting game. You level up, pick perks, get guns and gear of increasingly rare color, and probably a story. The big hook is a place called the Dark Zone, a still-contaminated area where The Best Gear is. You can get a crew together and go in there, but the zones (in the beta) can have up to 30 players in them at a time. Everyone is neutral, until they're not. To get gear out of the zone, you have to call in an extraction, and everyone in an area is alerted. They can kill you, Go Rogue, and take  your gear. Or you could quietly extract with your crew.

 

I was mildly interested and more than a little skeptical until the closed beta opened this weekend at the end of January. Actually seeing it in action gives me vibes of Destiny, the weird MMO thing Defiance that was a tie-in with a scifi channel tv show, and the Dark Zone has some of the tension of being in a city you know is populated in DayZ. I didn't get into the first round of the beta, but I am way more interested than before I got to watch more than 10+ minutes of live gameplay. The best thing about it so far is the UI. The UI looks INCREDIBLE. I know that's weird.

 

Anyone in the beta, or have more than a passing interest?

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I got an Nvidia beta key, but turns out people could get into the beta by preordering, downloading the beta and then cancelling the preorder, so now the beta is over-capacity and they haven't sent my key. They say they'll be sent out in waves today and tomorrow but I have no idea if I'm actually going to get in.

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I'm checking out Twitch streams and this seems really directionless.

I can see why you might say that, but the feeling the relatively small box the beta puts you in is the same one you feel when you find some gear worth keeping in DayZ .The monsters are people, and maybe we're those monsters.

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I watched 3 twitch-streamers last night and I think they were all in the Dark Zone. On all three channels they were aimlessly roaming around city blocks looking for smaller groups of other players that they could pick fights with, assumably to get their stuff, but I didn't see them getting stuff.

Is there more going on in the beta? I admittedly have no concept of what people are going to do in this game besides wht I just described above.

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It has single player missions outside of the dark zone, but only a handful in the beta. I blew through them in about half an hour and then quit because anything else would require me to play with people I know to have fun, I suspect.

I definitely get Destiny vibes too, and as a result if sufficient people I know get it I likely will too, but it is entirely based on that requirement.

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What I hear from friends is that some of the reasons to go into the Dark Zone are glitched, so PvP is pretty much all there is to do in there right now. Hopefully, there will be some co-op stuff later on to encourage working together.

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Finally got the beta and got to play a bit. If they manage to sidestep the Destiny problem and actually put a full game in this game, the division is gonna be fucking incredible. The combat isn't crazy and innovative, but it is excellently executed. I absolutely adore everything about the UI and the presentation. One preview I read leveraged the "surprise, not as good looking as the initial video" which 1) is just petty and 2) I don't know what the trailers look like it looks really fucking good to me. The mod system on the guns means it falls between Borderlands where all the guns are on a template but essentially random and Destiny where all the guns are essentially specific weapons but could have minor perk variations. The guns increase on power based on level, but they also have additional attributes that modify them further, plus they have 1-5 moddable slots that means two people using the same rolled guns with different mods makes them very divergent weapons potentially.

 

e: yes, my understanding is that the Dark Zone is intended to be high level PvE with the risk of PvP as well.

 

I have to say, between this and Rainbow Six Siege I didn't expect this Clance joint to be the one that would grab me so thoroughly.

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What I hear from friends is that some of the reasons to go into the Dark Zone are glitched, so PvP is pretty much all there is to do in there right now. Hopefully, there will be some co-op stuff later on to encourage working together.

 

I watched a bit of some devs playing in the DZ the other day and there is definitely PvE stuff in there, but it seems risky as heck to go after it, as apparently a non-dev group had either worked out where it was and was camping nearby or was watching the stream. Either way, they ganked the dev team when they went after the PvE enemies, and as might be expected, the devs died horribly trying to fight a battle on two fronts.

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All of the places of interest are marked on the map. If you're looking to pick a fight, the best way to do it is to roll the bigger areas or camp the extraction points. There's a decent amount of real estate in the beta area, but an hour or two you get to know it pretty well.

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For what it's worth, apparently the way multi is handled in The Division (as of this last closed beta) is kind of a trainwreck in terms of its resistance to client-side hacking:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/thedivision/comments/43jr61/pc_version_will_be_plagued_with_cheaters/

 

UbiSoft has responded to this issue and promises to have a solution prior to launch, but I'd keep my eye on the upcoming public beta if you're planning to get this on PC. If the game ships without changes, the Dark Zone could be filled with invisible, teleporting people with unlimited ammo.

 

Given how these hacks work and how close the game is to launch, I suspect the fix that will be applied is likely to be an invasive third-party tool that dynamically detects code modification. But that's just speculation. I hope they find a less contentious way to address this.

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People with more knowledge than me have very confidently speculated that Ubi is going to be using FairFight as their anti-cheat solution. It's apparently really, REALLY cleaned up Battlefield 4 and been deployed successfully in Rainbow Six: Siege. From what I've read about it it's server side and the way it works is by setting values and game constraints and then checking against them, so the guys giving themselves a million health or 75 bullets per mag are literally giving the dev team data to set values against to wipe that stuff out before day 1.

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I had no expectations for this to be any good or interesting but after watching Gaintbomb's beta-look I was pretty impressed. I've placed it on my radar and might consider picking it up if it gets a PC release. It would be nice to have a small team of thumbs to play through the game with.

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I might pick it up? It sounds like a lot of my gaming friends really liked the beta, but I've been spending money on gaming a pretty quick clip over the last month, so I dunno.

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Very cool. If it's not terribly larger in scope I probably won't play a ton more that close to release, but I'll definitely check it out.

 

I'm less interested in another story mission as I am seeing more of the actual pieces of the player systems. I will see all the story missions soon enough.

 

I guess they go hand in hand, because I bet you'll be able to unlock the opening branch of a new wing.

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Whoops I haven't been around much this weekend, but the beta is running for about another 12 hours from this post if anyone wants to at least see what the commotion is about.

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I was surprised how much I liked it. It sounds like a lot of my gaming buddies are going to be getting it, so I'll probably get it too.

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