This is now the third E3 in a row that I've seen The Division in action. The first time, it seemed like a pipe dream of impossibly good visual tech in a sprawling, persistent open world New York, with some vague mixture of co-op shooting and MMO elements—it was a presentation that earned its wow factor at E3 2013, despite being so pie-in-the-sky. Last year, it started to look a bit more like a real game, but without being playable, still felt like a long way off being complete and kind of fluid as a concept. Now, I've actually played it, and while the snapshot of the game I sampled felt tiny, I feel like I'm starting to understand the kind of MMO shooter it is, and how it can potentially get its hooks into players.
Destiny immediately comes to mind with The Division. Bungie's console game is a powerfully addictive FPS/MMO that cultivates an obsession with loot from the player, though it functions as a great first-person shooter that’s friendly to new players, too. The Division feels like a co-op cover shooter from moment-to-moment, but there is indeed loot, a progression system, and a heavy PvP aspect that exists as a literal part of the game world.
This demo focused on the last part. I was in a group of three, against two other sets of three players in the Dark Zone, a gated off area of Manhattan where all the PvP takes place in The Division. We start outside of that in a deserted street of Manhattan. To my eye The Division doesn’t look as good as that astonishing reveal demo from two years ago, but it’s a really handsome game, for sure, helped by maintaining that washed out blueish colour palette and the corridors of skyscrapers stretching off into the distance.
The thing I always remembered from that 2013 reveal was being able to shoot out individual bits of glass from cars, and you can still do that here. I do just that as I get used to the controls, and jumping on a car prompts a contextual suspension animation, and the water effects look fantastic, too; all the details are high-end. It doesn’t feel like a completely different game to that reveal right now, though I only really see isolated parts of Manhattan in my demo and one slightly larger open battle zone.
The idea of separating PVP into a whole other part of the environment certainly has a narrative logic here—in case The Division’s story has eluded you, a disease spread throughout New York during Black Friday, leading to the city’s evacuation and these tactical agents (the titular Division) being deployed to sort all of this shit out.
I reach the Dark Zone by vaulting over a few walls with the B button on the Xbox controller (which was the available input method for the demo). Entering requires the players to wear a gas mask, and it's where the military kept most of the best weapons in the city when it fell. During my demo, that's manifested as a Wild West-like war zone where groups of three players are instanced into the same part of the world. It’s competing for loot via Tom Clancy, really—nothing new, but the novelty of wandering from one part of the world into another, seamlessly, to reach PvP is a cool touch that's unique to this game.
Each player has a primary, secondary, and sidearm weapon slot in The Division, as well as six gear slots and two skill slots. The latter two is where much of the tactical nature of The Division becomes clear. I’m carrying a smart mine, which skids along the floor and homes in on an enemy and triggers an explosion, as well as a sticky bomb. Another of my team is carrying an automated gun turret that can be deployed at any time, while the third member carries a pulse, which scans the vicinity and highlights enemies on the entire team’s HUD. I can see how creating compatible skill sets is key to the strategy of playing The Division competitively, and there are apparently loads more skills on top of these that unlock at a later point in the game.
As a team, we didn’t gel those together particularly well, but we got through waves of NPC soldiers called cleaners in the Dark Zone—flamethrower dudes, basically—with relative ease. Along the way, I pick up a rare piece of what’s called infected loot, which means it can’t be used on the spot and has to be extracted, so it can presumably be decontaminated and added to your inventory. Oddly, all the players on my team see the same loot during this demo so it’s unclear how that is distributed.
I ask producer Fredrik Rundqvist about this—it seems like the loot you find in the Dark Zone is visible to all players, but outside of the PvP area, visible only to each individual player. “It's a progression-driven game so it's all about getting the best loot. So the loot outside of the Dark Zone, it's private, just for you. And in the Dark Zone, part of the charm is that people can go after the loot.”
Extraction is where the PvP part of The Division seems to kick in. Extracting requires calling in a helicopter, waiting for it to arrive for over a minute then successfully airlifting your out of there. This is where the two other teams joined the fray. I switched out my basic SMG for a heavier M14, and picked off a number of unsuspecting rival journos. The guns have a good chunky feel in The Division, and the smart mine’s detonation is a tricky thing for other players to listen out for, giving me a tactical edge. I'm a bit jealous of the automated turrets, though. That's a cool-looking thing to carry around.
Until someone fires a bullet, no-one is really an enemy in The Division. In the PvP zone, everyone is neutral towards each other until someone starts a fight, which means your team has ‘gone rogue’ in The Division’s parlance, spotlighting them as red on your HUD. This will presumably make for some uneasy alliances and tactical pacifism while other teams pick each other off.
In my playthrough it made for an interestingly paced if initially confusing firefight, a multi-way battle where everyone was trying to extract their loot and hold fort with gunfire coming from every direction. Twice, my team was on the brink of winning the game and extracting our loot successfully, but as soon as the team member who called it in dies, you have to start the process again. We all die on the second failed extraction, and a rival team manages to fend everyone off and win the match, ending the demo.
“Obviously it's the lawless area of the game with much less rules,” says Rundqvist. “And we wanted to be suspenseful, asymmetrical PvP experience, where you really don't know if it's a friend or foe you're approaching. And we'll have this gesture and emote system that will let you communicate with other players not on your team.” How PvP is balanced between players of different levels isn’t something Ubisoft Massive is talking about yet.
This is a confident if brief first showing of The Division. I was pretty impressed by the drama of how PvP played out in The Dark Zone, but there’s also so much I haven’t seen that’ll shape the potential future of this long-awaited Tom Clancy game. After three E3s, it is starting to seem like a real thing, but there’s still a lot to learn about the world, progression and how much content there is to keep people replaying.
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