Revisiting the Division (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, March 08, 2018, 10:48 (2249 days ago)

I picked up the Complete Edition of The Division (Xbox) last month when it was on sale... I'd already played the main campaign over on the PS4, back when the game first launched. But I keep hearing good things about how it's improved over time since then, so I figured I'd start fresh and see how its evolved.

It's AWESOME :D

The "end game" of The Division has matured in some really fun and interesting ways. I thought I'd share some of the cool things they've done. If I'd known about all this stuff sooner, I probably would have jumped back in a long time ago.

World Tiers and Difficulty Levels

The Division has a "power level" system, similar to Destiny's "Light Level". You're given a rating that reflects your overall gear strength, and driving that number higher and higher is one of the core goals of the end game. When replaying missions, you have the option to select from several "Difficulty Levels". These levels will make the enemies you face progressively stronger and more deadly (think of taking red-bar enemies and turning them into yellow-bar enemies, in Destiny terms). Completing missions on higher difficulty levels will yield better gear drops as you'd expect.

As you complete the main campaign and side quests, you will eventually reach a power level sufficiently high enough to trivialize most of the enemies that you'll come across in the open world. Even replaying missions on the harder difficulty levels will become trivial, because you so drastically outclass the enemies in terms of power level. Related to that, you'll have outgrown the gear that drops from replaying missions, because it will all be below your current level. So Ubisoft added "World Tiers" to the game. Basically, once you reach a high enough power level, you can choose to jump up to the next World Tier, which raises the power level of all the enemies, as well as the power level of all gear drops. There are a total of 5 World Tiers to choose from. When selecting a World Tier, the appropriate power level is displayed right next to it in the UI, so you can easily gauge if you're ready, gear-wise, for a given Tier. Plus, you can go back down to a lower tier whenever you want (while also retaining the ability to select the difficulty level of a given mission within any world tier). The gear drops you get from any activity will always be appropriate to the suggested power level of the World Tier you are currently in. This way, every activity in the game can constantly yield loot drops that are useful to the player, even as you reach maximum power level.

So all together, this system lets the player choose the difficulty and reward levels that they want to experience at any time, without narrowing down the choice of activity. You can do an "easy" version of a raid by jumping down to a lower World Tier, or you can make the very first story mission a white-knuckled experience that rewards end-game loot. Whatever you want.

The Underground

At this point in its lifespan, the Division is roughly where Destiny 1 was just before the launch of Destiny 2. There are a bunch of different end-game activities, from Incursions (the Division's version of a Raid, although not as long or mechanics-heavy), to Survival (a take on the PUBG formula), the exciting and stressful Dark Zone (PvPvE).

One of my favorite activities is the Underground, which is basically the Division's equivalent of the Infinite Forest, except it is fully fleshed-out and well developed. You journey down into the under-city of Manhattan to complete semi-randomly generated missions. The missions are built from a bunch of pre-made "pieces" that are randomly assembled and populated with enemies in a variety of ways. But unlike the Infinite Forrest, there are so many pieces of environment that I'm still fighting in new rooms and locations even after spending 5-6 hours running these missions. The spaces are all well designed and fun to fight in. But that's just the start.

What makes the Underground so much fun is the level of customization the player has access to. Before you begin a mission, you help design it. You can decide how many "phases" the mission will include (each phase having its own objective/destination to reach). Like everything else in the game, you have loads of control over the difficulty of an Underground Mission before you launch it. Plus, there are modifiers. There's a whole selection of modifiers that you can activate if you want to, and they significantly change the way the game plays. None of the modifiers are purely helpful or harmful. They all involve some kind of trade-off. One modifier grants the players increased health while they are running, but reduced health while they are behind cover. Another grants the players electrically-charged "stun" ammo in all their weapons, which can stun enemies if you put enough bullets into them... but these stun bullets will also overload your gun and stun you if you don't stop firing and let your weapon cool down frequently while in combat.

I played this one Underground missions with a group of 3 other players... we cranked up the difficulty to an insane level, so that the enemies dealt massive damage and had huge amounts of health. Then we turned on the stun-ammo mod that I mentioned above, as well as a mod that decreased the recharge time of our deployable turrets while increasing the recharge time of our deployable health-stations. Using specific Gear Perks (more on that later), several of us were able to spec out our characters so that we could toss these deployable healing stations that would also nullify the overload effect of our stun bullets. So as long as we had one of these health stations deployed, and as long as we were all within its AOE, we could fire our weapons full-blast, with no fear of them overloading. BUT, we had to be extremely careful deploying these stations, because the other mod was slowing down their recharge time. We worked out a system of taking turns deploying our stations, so that one player would have time for his station to recharge while the other player had his deployed. Meanwhile, we were throwing Flame-Turrets and unloading stun-bullets on the hordes of super-enemies like crazy. We made a sort of spider-web of fire and shock ammo that kept the enemies stunned long enough for us to take them out before they were right on top of us... and when we failed, we'd get wiped out almost instantly.

It was intense, crazy, stressful, and fun, and completely different than the usual Division combat. And that was just one of countless possible combinations of modifiers.

Seamless Matchmaking that runs in the background

When the Division first came out, a lot of people praised it for its seamless matchmaking for all activities. Any time you start a mission, either by selecting it through the always-available mission menu, or by walking up to the start-point in the open world, you have the option of activating matchmaking for that mission. Once matchmaking begins, it runs in the background while you go about your business until it either finds players to add to your fireteam, or finds another group and presents you with the option to be pulled in with them. So if I want to do a tougher mission and I want some help, I can select the mission from the menu and start matchmaking, then go about my business in the open world, completing side quests and bonus objectives, until a match is found. Once a match is found, I can teleport to the start-point of the mission with the click of a button whenever I want. Sometimes I'll be joined by a couple other players who will help me complete whatever side-mission I was in the middle of running when matchmaking added them to my instance. Or sometimes I'll start the mission by myself and have other players join my session as I go.

With matchmaking available for every single mission and every single activity (including the option to be matchmade with people who are just patrolling the open world), it can sometimes take a few minutes for the game to find other players to group you with. But Ubisoft has done something brilliant IMO, because they let you cue up matchmaking for multiple activities at the same time.

So if I jump online and I have a list of activities that I might want to do, I can select each of them from the mission list and matchmake for all of them... then I'll get a prompt when a group is found doing any of the activities I've selected, and I can choose to join that group or keep waiting for another group. And while all this is happening, I'm still playing the game doing other stuff. In Destiny terms, this would be like selecting both raids, the nightfall, patrol, heroic strikes, AND Iron Banner from a matchmaking list, and then playing story missions or side quests while I wait for matchmaking to find me a group that I want to join. It's simply an amazing feature for a game of this sort.

Gear sets and perks

The final note I wanted to make is about the way end-game loot works in the Division.
There are no character "classes" in the game... rather, there are abilities that fall into 3 different categories, and you can select up to 3 abilities to use at a time. Your character has stats associated with each of the 3 categories that affect your potential... uh... effectiveness with abilities of that category. Then there are mods that can be applied to your gear that tweak all that. It's all a bit convoluted and overwhelming and I'm still learning how it works, but it's cool and gives BOATLOADS of flexibility and customization in terms of specing out a build. And speaking of builds, the game has a "loadout" system that lets you save any combination of gear and abilities that you've chosen into a loadout slot. You can then swap loadouts on the fly, pretty much any time you're not in direct combat. This means NO NEED TO JUGGLE MULTIPLE CHARACTERS JUST TO HAVE ACCESS TO DIFFERENT ABILITIES. You can play 1 character, and make that character effective in any way that you want, and change it quickly and easily at any time.

On top of all that, there are "Gear Sets". Gear sets are items that, when equipped in combination with each other, provide extra perks or abilities to the player. The perks that come with each gear set are usually designed around a particular playstyle or ability. So one Gear set has perks that improve your flame turrets in a variety of ways. Another grants perks that will improve the damage and effectiveness of sniper rifles, etc. These set perks are activated based on how many pieces of gear from that set you have equipped. So equipping any 2 pieces of gear from a single set will grant you a "level 2" perk. If you equip 3 pieces, you get the level 2 & 3 perks. 4 pieces from the same set will grant you the level 2, 3, and 4 perks. The level 4 perk is usually pretty awesome... but comes with an interesting trade off.

You have 6 total gear slots. Part of the fun with Gear Sets is that their perks stack on top of each other. So if I equip 3 pieces from one set and 3 pieces from another set, I'll get the level 2 and 3 perks from BOTH sets. The level 3 perks are usually pretty darn good, which makes this a tempting loadout to build. Or, do I go all out and equip 4 pieces of gear from a single set, so that I can unlock that level 4 perk, and sacrifice some diversity in favor of being ultra-effective in a specific way?

There are a bunch of other subtle layers to the way the gear works. For example, all the high-end guns have specific perks, some of which only activate if you spec your character out in certain ways. Some guns gain extra perks if you equip them along side another specific gun (think Mida Multitool+ Minitool). There's just a huge amount of customization and flexibility when it comes to creating different builds or loadouts. I don't feel like I'm chasing a number so much as I'm gaining new ways to play the game as I find more loot. But as far as numbers go, you do have the ability to upgrade the power level of any piece of gear at any time, just by dumping a certain currency into it. So once you find a piece of gear you like, its simple to continuously upgrade it to match your power level, with no RNG involved.

Whew... I think that's all I wanted to say for now. Long story short, I'm having a blast with the game, and I thought some of you might be interested in checking it out.

<3