Revisiting the Division (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, March 08, 2018, 19:43 (2452 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

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.

Reminds me a lot of Diablo III and it's Torment difficulties. The game just keeps scaling up through Torment 13. The higher the level, the better the loot. I made a post a long time ago that Destiny should adopt a similar system and really embrace its loot cycle, or it should drop it entirely rather than staying in the weird middle ground it is now. That's maybe more difficult to do and make feel good in a shooter than in a Diablo styled game (as evidenced by The Division and so many folks complaining about bullet sponges), so maybe it's not worth chasing, but I certainly enjoyed the way Diablo III handles it's difficulty and loot.