The Division E3 Preview

They say few places are better to visit at Christmas than New York. The huge tree at the Rockefeller Centre, a snow covered Times Square, looting, murdering and quarantine zones. Ah, it really is the best place to be.

OK, so maybe not those last few, but Ubisoft’s hotly anticipated new IP, Tom Clancy's The Division, is exactly that. Set during winter following the outbreak of a devastating virus, you take control of The Division, a team formed in the wake of the outbreak whose aim is to survive and deal with the chaos by whatever means necessary.

Announced back in 2013, there have been a lot of questions asked about this game, but we finally got to see a lengthy gameplay demo at this year’s E3 and those questions (some of them at least) were finally answered.

Despite initial thoughts, the game isn’t actually considered to be ‘post-apocalyptic’, rather Ubisoft have insisted the setting of the game be called ‘mid-crisis’ as the events take place only a matter of weeks after this catastrophe, which we still know very little about, has struck the city.

If you’ve seen or played any of Ubisoft’s list of Tom Clancy third-person shooters, Tom Clancy's The Division is going to be extremely familiar to you. You’ve a hi-tech UI system, can command your squad and have a huge selection of weapons to choose from. The difference though is that Tom Clancy's The Division is more of a progression RPG than the likes of Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six. As you wander around the city, you’ll stumble across loot dropped by soldiers during evacuation or bandits following a shootout. Of course you can’t just pick it up and start using it though, you’ll have to be the correct level and you progress by completing missions… obviously.

What Ubisoft showed us at E3 was a walkthrough of a section called The Dark Zone, a huge quarantine zone, separated from the rest of New York City. To enter, you sacrifice the use of your UI, which begins to scramble and fail, and scale one of the huge walls, which is keeping whatever is in there, out. Ubisoft told us that this was in fact not just a high level area of the game, but was how you transition from your campaign, co-operatively or other, and enter the multiplayer arena. There are no loading screens of various menus, it’s just as simple as hopping over the fence.

Everything goes out of the window once you get into The Dark Zone though, it’s a case of everyone for themselves; so much so that even your team-mates can kill you if they fancy a bit of your hard earned loot. What’s more, the only way out is to call for an extraction which means carnage is bound to occur when players are bottlenecked into a single extraction zone as they wait for their lift out and have to defend their honour in one final showdown. This will no doubt be the ‘water cooler’ moments of The Division if you like.

In a bizarre way, the whole thing reminded me of the Wilderness in MMO Runescape, the easy transition into a different area, the constant unknown threat and the whole ‘trust no one’ thing, it’s a fascinating vertical slice of a game that will no doubt get a lot of attention in the coming months.

There’s certainly no doubt that this is an ambitious shooter, and although we got the meatiest glimpse of the game so far, the largest question that still looms over Tom Clancy's The Divisionis a definitive answer to ‘what is it?.’ We’ve seen glimpses of MMO, RPG, and tactical shooter elements, but still no definitive answer. The same can be said for story and the end goal if you like, Ubisoft are still holding a lot back, but with just under year until release (8th March 2016) there’s no doubt it’ll all become apparent sooner rather than later.