The Division Beta Impressions

The Division

Well where to start with this game, I have been looking forward to this game since seeing it at E3 last year or might have even been the year before. I hate to start on a negative but I wanted to get this out of the way straight away, the graphics are not what we where shown at at E3 but I think that is just because they want to show the best of the best when doing a kick off game like this and it happens with most games these days but this is an topic for another blog or video, but I just wanted to clear this up as it is worth mentioning.

Before getting my hands on the beta a lot of my friends and the gaming community had heard a lot of bad things about The Division however I have no idea where this has come from as I can’t find any myself. I know Ubisoft had a bad year in 2014 which they are trying very hard to forget about and they are doing really well to let us forget about it.

Moving on I have been lucky enough to get my hands on both the closed and open beta of The Division and so far I am very impressed and I can not wait for this. I have spoken to a lot of people who have tried the beta and the feedback from any friends and the social are loving the game. There is so much to do and it although the obvious downgrade of graphics it still looks really good.

The game focus’s around New York and it is Black Friday so around Thanks Giving and just before Christmas. There has been a virus outbreak which grabs NYC by the throat and one by one all the basic and fundamental services fail causing chaos in the city. This is when a specially trained team call The Division are brought in to help keep the peace and try and get the city back on its feet. This team are a highly trained team who appear to be regular citizens until called up on.

You play a Division agent to try and restore order to the chaos in the streets. There is a lot of detail to creating your character, in the beta you just select from a random pick of faces etc however it looks like you could spend a lot of time on this when the game is live. If you want to see more of the this Angry Joe on YouTube released a video that he with Ubisoft.

Once you are in the game you are thrown straight on the streets of NYC where you begin the rebuild of the city to try and get basic services up and running. You start at level 4 where you have been rescued and you are on board a helicopter. Not sure if in the full game it starts before this but we will see when this is released.

One you have control you pick up some missions and you are on your way. There is so much to do in the game, there are loads of side missions where rioters are locking officers away and holding them hostage for food etc however you rock in, blow them all away and get the key to release the officer. As well as this there are a lot of random encounters as well, you will be running down a street to get to a location for a main mission and you run in to some rioters who are in a battling with other agents. After helping these guys out you normally get some decent loot to help you along your way. As well as these missions there are also a lot of random collectibles around for you to gather. These are things from phones with recorded messages, information found on dead officers with information on a gang strong hold or crashed drones which you need to shoot down to gather its intel.

There are also things called echo’s which is a reconstruction of a scene that has happened when everything kicked off giving you an insight to the history of what has been happening. It looks really good and plays out well they don’t last long but it’s effect and another nice touch to the game.

To start off with your main mission is to get your base up and running to aid any civilians
as well as upgrades for yourself. This is the main mission but also the top priority as you have three areas to get up and running, which are medical, security and tech. Each part has an area that you need to gather resources for to upgrade these areas. In the beta you have the tech wing as well as the medial wing. These then give you better perks and abilities to use in the fight to aid yourself and your partners. I am unsure what you get from the security wing of your base but it looks like it will become and armory so you can create better weapons and/or armor but we will see this in the full game.

The game also has a crafting system however I was disappointed in the beta that I didn’t get to try this out however I did pick up various items which I presume will be for crafting such as fibres and tech bits. You can also deconstruct weapons and armor that you loot from around the world which has a chance of giving you materials.

Finally in some of the missions you come across cleans, as nasty as these guys are they are awesome too. Cleaners are nasty guys who are what you presume they are, they go around cleaning up but not in a nice way. They are in hazmat suites with flame throwers who are going around burning everything in site that they believe to be infected however it seems there is more to these guys and they guys behind them as they are burning everything in sight regardless of the contamination. The best part of these guys is they have a canister on there back if you manage to shoot these then its BIG BADABOOM which I love doing. In any game where there is a petrol station, gas canister or anything for that matter I can blow up I will. Which is a nightmare for my inner pyro when playing Dyinglight as it attracts the Zombies to me.

Anyway the game is awesome I love it loads if you couldn’t tell and cant wait for release date. What are your thoughts?