Tom Clancy's The Division Beta Preview

The Division beta began late last week, starting a day early for those on Xbox One, with PS4 and PC coming the following day. It has had a long and interesting journey since its first unveiling three years ago. Since then everyone has unanimously agreed that it is a pretty game, but the world kind of wondered what you’d actually be doing in it.

As we’ve gotten closer to release in recent months, more and more information has trickled out about The Division and what the developers Ubisoft have planned for the game. It started to become quite obvious that they were going for the Destiny crowd, offering an expansive game world in which you can collect loot.

The beta starts with the standard character select screen, offering you a few different generic avatars to choose from. The game then makes the player watch a short cutscene of the player entering Manhattan, more specifically the army base at the bottom corner of the map. A base that includes a few small shops and is also a matchmaking hub, think of the Tower in Destiny, but in Manhattan with loads of tents.

It’s not long before the game sends you out on your first mission, players must clear themselves a base. This isn’t just an ordinary base, it’s the Base Of Operations or B.O.O for short. Similar to Metal Gear’s Mother base, this is a player's individual space, and it’s progression is directly linked to players skills and perks. The more you upgrade your B.O.O, the more skills you can unlock. The skill tree in the beta is limited to four perks, one of them is aggressive while the others more defensive. In the full game, I think running perks in tandem with your teammates is going to be the most efficient way to progress. Having designated aggressive and defensive players could make for very interesting co-operative gameplay.

After clearing the base, you can then start a mission in Madison Square Garden that involves you saving a doctor being held by a group of terrorists. I have to admit, it’s seriously cool running through these real world locations, shooting people in the face. I have these occasional moments of absolute awe, staring at the environment around me. Wondering how much legal mumbo jumbo it must have taken to enable players to explore these real world locations. The mission is a number of firefights, with players able to use cover based shooting to attack enemies. The mission ends with a high level enemy that takes an absolute barrage of bullets before going down, with less tough enemies acting as a distraction. Much like Destiny, defeating the higher level enemies drops that sweet, sweet loot. So me and my friend have repeated this mission quite a few times in order to nab ourselves some loot, also because it’s the only main mission available in the beta.

Enough of that, I should probably talk about the gameplay itself. The Division plays like your standard Tom Clancy cover shooter, that’s not a diss though. The Tom Clancy games have a pretty good knack for nailing cover based shooters, (Uh, hello Rainbow Six Vegas) The Division is no exception to the rule either. The cover system is very similar to the one in the recent Splinter Cell titles, where you can line up a bit of cover, and then press to initiate a sprint to towards pressing X. It sounds very simple, but during fast paced hectic gunfights it is essential, the simplicity of this mechanic is brilliant.

The time to kill was something I was worried about, especially after watching a few gameplay videos. It’s not really a big issue when you are good with your aim, hitting enemies with headshots often does the job more than well enough. It’s similar to Destiny, enemies have high health pools, but often have obvious weak points. Destiny gets away with it a bit more as it doesn’t look like a modern shooter, whilst The Division does. So I feel maybe people are looking at The Division as if it is trying to challenge the likes of Call of Duty, when in actuality it is closer to RPGs like The Witcher and Fallout.

The real fun in The Division is found in the Dark Zone, an area that runs directly down the middle of downtown Manhattan. The Dark Zone is home to the most virus affected parts of the city, where gangs run wild and contaminated buildings are common. It is also the stage for PvP, where players can work together to earn loot or simply shoot other people and steal loot. Boasting 30 player servers alongside an impressive plot of land for a beta, the Dark Zone is where players are going to spend most of their time.

My first forray into the Dark Zone did not end well, me and my friend walked directly into a firefight right at the entrance. Not knowing what was going down, we ended up in a three way firefight, where all hell broke loose (which is often). We died, and ended up coming in a little bit more cautiously on the second run. The unpredictability of the Dark Zone is surprisingly addictive, even if it is a little bit frustrating.

Loot that players find in the Dark Zone is contaminated, so in order to use it they must extract it via a helicopter pick up. The helicopter pick up is one of the most stressful minute and a half waits I have ever had. The server you are in is alerted to your pick up attempt and people are able to come and steal your loot. This leads to an interesting dynamic as you can’t ever be sure if people are on your side or not. I’ve had plenty of players show up and help defend the point as they wish to extract items but every now and again someone will have much more sinister plans. The Division is tense because of this, every corner you walk around could lead to death.

The Division beta also gives players a sneak peak into how some of the harder end game items are going to be collected. Chests are scattered throughout the Dark Zone that require special keys to open them, these chests grant players access to some pretty cool weapons. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to work. I wasn’t sure if I was doing something wrong on my end, but after a Google search, I found out that other players were having similar issues, so maybe there were server issues or something.

While The Division is fun, it does have its issues. The story missions are okay, but it is just cover based shooting. Hopefully the game manages to shake things up a little bit and add some variation to them. I’m worried we might get a repeat of year one Destiny, with the developers adding more interesting and varied missions to the game in the second year of release.

The Dark Zone can be a little frustrating at times, you have to wait for someone to shoot you repeatedly before they turn rogue and you can shoot back without being penalised. I have ended up rogue on a few occasions just through defending myself when being shot. I’ve read about groups of people roaming around online, firing off occasional shots at people and waiting for them to retaliate. Meaning they get to steal people’s gear without turning rogue, it’s going to be interesting to see if this can be balanced or not, especially with the release so close. I found the gun handling to be a little basic at first, with the guns mostly having terrible accuracy for the first hour or so. Once players start finding weapon mods it does get a lot more manageable though.

The Division Beta was better than I thought it would be and it has me excited for the full release on 8th March. There are a few things that have me worried, but for once Ubisoft have delivered on what they originally promised. I’ll assume lessons have been learnt from Watch_Dogs...