Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Beautiful Disaster - The Division Review
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Beautiful Disaster - The Division Review
From Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment studio comes Tom Clancy’s The Division. Read on to find out what we think about this new RPG Shooter below.
Comments
Sorry about your shitty port PC Masters! (lol) Otherwise I agree. Game is a 8/10 with potential. Going to be interesting to see what is added and changed over the next few months in the free updates, followed by the paid for DLC.
It's Diablo 3 in third person with guns.
I hear that The Division involves a lot of grinding for rewards, such as beanie hats.
Apparently the boss fights are awful - unrealistic bullet sponges with the appearance of a normal NPCs.
One chief complaint about games such as the Division is that your opponents feel like bullet sponges. While there may be a grain of truth to that accusation it is no worse than what you find in most RPGs with climactic encounters. What is the difference between shooting a person carrying a flame thrower for 5 minutes and hacking away at some mythological dragon’s leg for 5 minutes with a sword? Other than the psychological difference of one being human and carrying a weapon and the other being a dragon armed with their teeth not much. They are both RPG tropes where upping the difficulty scale on an encounter almost always implies that an adversary will have an increasingly complex attack pattern and an increased pool of health. If the Division falls victim to this critique it is one that is unfairly leveled at the game when it should befall the genre. Does it feel like it takes an obscene amount of shots to kill a man at times? Yes. But then again this is a work of fiction
Twitter Facebook RantOnRob Youtube
The basics are solid but the game is in an identity crisis. Much depends on what direction the content updates will take, but I'm not overly optimistic on that score.
I'm enjoying the game, but I doubt it will "stand the test of time". Not a waste of money imho, but definitely not a potential classic at this point.
They should never have tied it to the Tom Clancy brand. The relationship is strained (at best) and totally stifling (at worst). Having to stay in the confines of a Tom Clancy game severely limits what can be included in the future.
Don't take him seriously. He said the exact same things about Destiny. Even I hesitated about buying Destiny because of him. Then I bought and played it about 7 months without a break. And the game got very VERY succesful. These type of games are just not his cup of tea and he is too ignorant to accept this. If he didn't like the game he will just bash the hell out of it. Now I bought Division and I'm loving it.
And the journey to end game is like playing any other high quality singe player game with co-op
angryjoe makes jokes off of beanies and now all the haters take it as some kind of doctrine.
But all that is said and done, and the fact that you need the Phoenix currency to buy recipes and weapons and equipment, I get, but I dont at the same time. Plus with the amount of this currency you need at end game, it is insane. For one recipe for a single type of equipment (may have health or skill or dps, but not interchangeable within the same recipe) you need 100+ Phoenix tokens.
To put this in perspective, you get 1 Phoenix token (now) for every named boss in the darkzone. Bosses respawn every what? 15, 30 minutes? Plus you have other players trying to get to the same boss and may not like your company there. So if you go around and kill 5 bosses, every 15 minutes you will have 100 tokens in like 80 hours... no I dont know, it depends on how much you want to play.
But that is for a single recipe. And there are daily missions, but they are so "Challenging" that you NEED to have your gear at a certain power level to even survive the first wave with a group with the same level of gear.
I dont have the time, or inclination to be doing that. The enemies are repetitive enough, to have have me buy a recipe. Because after that recipe, I have to RNG craft it and then RNG customize it to what I want to do.
Then a patch comes out and I have to do the same thing all over again.
I really like what the Division is when leveling, but I do not like what it turns into.
A party faces a dragon in an RPG : the tank needs to watch his positioning and thread generation. The healer must focus on his healing and watch for positioning, boss abilities (tail swipes, breaths etc) and healing aggro. The dps must focus on rotations and watch for positioning, boss abilities (tail swipes, breaths etc) and dps aggro.
A party faces a boss in The Division : okay guys, all have 3 dozens ammo magazines on them ? We good ? Go go!
Yeah, not even close.
Phoenix credits, you get 80 every day from doing the dailies. In a weeks worth of time you can buy most blueprints you need and/or at least some gear from the vendors that is already created.
There is a lot of disconnect on the gear types... you really only need to look forward to buying the power level 31 gear once you hit 30. I don't even know why they gated the level 30 golds that don't require phoenix credits to buy... they don't require more materials, they should have gated them at DZ rank 35 or 40.. not the same as the 31 gear.
Also mobs do respawn in about 5 - 10 minutes. At the ice rink you can do a quick circuit and gain about 60 credits per hour if you have a solid group, including a handful of gold items.
I like the game. It definitely has a lot of potential, and needs some variation. I would easily give this in the 8 range.
As for people who have hit max with all gold gear etc (like myself) It's not so much fun once you exploit Bullet King is it? That is what the vast majority of max levelers did up to this point. Unlimited Phoenix Credits ... nearly 100 an hour, buckets and buckets of purple drops for mats.
As a basis for comparison, using that exploit.. in 2 days, I was able to purchase my entire set of level 31 gold gear and have nearly 1000 left over. That is 2 days..... 2. The exploit was available since launch. It has since been patched.. but so many high level players exploited it so much that -- yeah.. when you have everything you'll ever need in the game long before anyone else, it can get really boring.
Aggro is still important as a tank. Healing as a support (which you do see less of) and DPS is possibly one of the toughest to play of them all as you will die from everything all the time unless you're actually fairly skillful.
Most bosses in MMOs I've played are literally faceroll bosses. All you require is the team composition. You don't get that opportunity in the division. it is much tougher.
Yeah no. Not even close... Actually combat is the best thing about Division. İt is where the game shines the most.
Man that's high praise @righteous_rock
Twitter Facebook RantOnRob Youtube
You make some good points but most people aren't very good at using logic to form their opinions. They just aren't very flexible in their ability to interpret what their playing in more than 1 or 2 ways. They see guns they see humans they think 1 bullet to the head should kill someone, in this game it doesn't so that's somehow now a design flaw.
They just cant see the game in a different context other than its a "shooter" and needs to behave exactly like say COD.
Guess I got my money's worth, but there really is no long term play here. I won't be wasting any money on their DLC either.
The difference is that one is an RPG, a proper RPG (unlike The Division which has some RPG elements) and those tropes are common to most RPG's with a fantasy setting.
The other is a tactical third person shooter depicting a modern day setting and uses modern day weaponry that we are all familiar with to some degree, some of us more than others. The inclusion of RPG style bosses in a tactical shooter using AK's and Glocks just doesn't work. We're too familiar with the weaponry and Kevlar for these mechanics to make sense because they fail to suspend disbelief. We're now faced with gang members wearing Kevlar hoodies that absorb half a dozen headshots and bosses that soak up hundreds of rounds of ammunition before their armour suddenly disappears.
No? Let's put it another way then. One is a mythological creature imbued with magical abilities and the other is some dude with a flame thrower. I would have thought that anyone who stops to think about it can see that the rules for the suspension of disbelief would be different for a fantasy setting and one in the modern world with modern weapons.
In Borderlands there are lots of humans who are bullet sponges too
Twitter Facebook RantOnRob Youtube
It's a harder sell the more familiar we are with the setting and tools used. It may not be important to a lot of people but in order to sell the story, the setting, in order to get me invested I need to believe it to some degree. This is why suspension of disbelief is a key component of any story be it books, film, tv or video game.
Unfortunately I have some experience of this kind of thing and it's made me very critical of films and games.