It’s not too hard to find nice things to say about Tom Clancy’s The Division, especially as it unfurls in its strong opening hours: its open-world version of Manhattan is both gorgeous and authentic, its cover-based third-person combat is sound, and its RPG elements run surprisingly deep. And yet, next to every good thing The Division does, there hangs a big, ugly asterisk. That same open world is barren and unengaging, combat gets bogged down with samey waves of walking bullet sponges, and character progression is awkwardly fractured in inconvenient ways. Outside of the tension of the PvPvE Dark Zone, there’s little that makes this virtual Manhattan feel alive or dangerous.
Visually, The Division leans heavily but very effectively on the all-too-familiar iconography of post-biological-disaster Manhattan. Coming out of an early security checkpoint, daylight blinded me until my “eyes” adjusted, and then I saw it: an improvised memorial to those who had given their lives trying to take Manhattan back from the chaos that's swallowed it in the wake of an unprecedented terror attack.
I’ve spent time in the real New York City, and in fact my father was in Manhattan on 9/11. I've seen memorials like this, littered with the helmets of fallen firefighters and hastily scrawled children's drawings with "thank you" writ large across the top. It is, perhaps, a cheap way to get me emotionally invested in the conflict that drives the fragmented story forward, but it worked – at least for a time. From the quaint Christmas lights in Chelsea to the ominously unlit Times Square, The Division is full of evocative visual moments. It never follows up on them in any substantive way, but they do manage to make the city itself the most interesting character in the cast.
Winter Wasteland
But as full as the world is of eerily beautiful sights to see, it is equally devoid of worthwhile things to do. Imagine an open-world game with hardly any dynamic elements, or worse, a long-dead MMO where you and a handful of party members (should you invite folks along for some co-op) are the only people left on your server. That’s a solid approximation of how engaging of a play-space The Division’s Manhattan is.
Enemy encounters are spread thin across the city like too little butter over too much bread, creating long stretches of eventless walking where very little happens. I’ve walked for minutes at a time without more than one or two small packs of easily dispatched thugs to entertain me. That would matter a lot less if there was more going on around me, but for a city of eight million that’s supposedly just been mortally wounded by a terror attack and subsequently overrun by multiple gangs of militarized fanatics, the streets are suffocatingly calm.
That’s mostly owing to the fact that there are virtually no random events; just illusions of them. That detachment of peacekeeping troops getting into it with a gang of looters a block over sound like they're engaging in an impromptu skirmish, but it's all a scripted show for your benefit. Once you help them end it, they'll be on indefinite leave. Though some other IGN editors say they’ve seen gangs dynamically fighting in the world, in more than 50 hours played, I never did. What’s more, these pre-set, one-and-done missions are all minor variations of one of a few simple missions types, and once you’ve done all of them in a zone, there’s no material reason to come back to that location besides some inconsequential collectibles that I quickly gave up on grabbing, even when they were only steps out of my way.
All of this comes together with Manhattan’s grid-like structure to make the act of exploration tedious when it should be exciting. A good open world teases you off the path from A to B with the promise of discovery and emergent shenanigans; all I really got from The Division was a breadcrumb trail to follow through a series of 90-degree turns with some conveniently placed people to shoot at the end.
I Fire A Gun
To its credit, shooting those unfortunate looters and mercenaries does feel pretty good, if a bit standard. The gunplay model is a few steps toward the technical realism of most Tom Clancy-branded games from the run-and-gun action of Gears of War, but not many.
Things like muzzle travel and bullet spread play a big enough role that guns feel distinct from one another. The M4, for instance, is the reliable mid-range stopgap you’d expect it to be, while the 7.62mm-spitting AK-47 starts bucking like a mule by the time the second or third round has left the muzzle. One is better for sustained fire; the other is best fired in short bursts to inflict maximum damage in a short span before ducking back behind cover. And cover is important, as is covering fire, since enemies can actually be properly suppressed by firing at them when they’re behind cover. Should you bring along a friend or three, this makes co-op tactics particularly rewarding, especially when one of your squadmates suppresses a deadly enemy sniper while you flank around and lace into them.
However, the bullet-sponginess of the enemies, and their tendency to shrug off torrents of small arms fire without so much as flinching does rob the shooting of the tactile power that should come with unloading a street sweeper into some poor fool’s chest at point-blank. This exemplifies a larger set of problems that plague The Division: the clash between its grounded, realistic look and the conventions of RPG gameplay.
Years of virtual experience in other shooters have taught me that a Saiga-12 will send a person tumbling to the ground in one, maybe two shots, but here, that same gun might take a full clip to get the job done. Getting a Saiga-12 with better stats will obviously make them go down faster, but the problem is that good progression systems need more powerful motivation than just bigger numbers. The long-term gear game in most great RPGs relies on, among other things, a sort of lustful visual progression that makes you eager to see how the next drop will change the look of your character. But the only difference between the level 5 SCAR I used at the start of my journey and the level 28 version I ended it with were the size of the numbers that popped out of my enemy’s head.
Weapons, enemy types, and even the gorgeous city itself all fell prey to this fatigue over the nearly 60 hours I played. The promise of the spectacular, of things you haven’t yet seen - these joys are rarely found in The Division’s combat, or in any other facet for that matter. By the end, it’s all one blur of masked men, Kalashnikovs, and smoking urban ruin.
Still, the mere fact that the action leans so heavily on sharp aim and smart tactics makes it rewarding when the last leathery-tough foe in a pack finally goes down. That goes double for the main story missions, which throw you headlong into some seriously heated firefights.
Here, the action is concentrated and highly demanding. Particularly with a squad of four using complementary skill loadouts, these sections are the highlights of The Division. Hunkering down behind a teammate’s deployed piece of cover with bullets whizzing overhead while one of my sentry turrets suppresses and stuns groups of enemies for another squadmate to light up with an incendiary seeker mine is a thrill. The promise of these kinds of moments ends up becoming the main reason to persevere through the banalities of The Division’s open world. Thankfully, you can easily matchmake and fast travel directly to these gems - a welcome convenience that allows you to bypass parts of the open-world slog.
Not for long though. You’ll rarely come out of one mission with the gear, skills, and level to be successful in the next, so it’s back out onto those empty streets again to progress your character. The RPG elements in The Division are more interesting than I expected, but like everything else, they too have their problems.
The three core stats that drive your character’s performance (Firearms, Stamina, and Electronics) really move the needle, to the point where changing out just one piece of gear can make differences you’ll immediately notice in your next battle. One particular holster single-handedly increased my overall health pool by around 25%, which went a long way toward enabling my reckless desire to aggressively close in to shotgun range. The chance for such substantial gains in power makes gear choices engaging almost right away.
The problem is how fragmented the various ways of progressing are. The most reliable way to get great gear is through the Dark Zone, The Division’s walled-off PvPvE area where everybody’s out for themselves and turning your back on an ally is a good way to find yourself dead. The catch: you don’t gain XP toward your character level there. Even if you did, new skills don’t come with levels, but by upgrading different parts of your personal base, for which you’ll need supply points provided by side missions that don’t dole out much XP or gear rewards. So you could be a high-level character with only average gear and few skills, a character with tons of skills but poor gear and a low level, or somewhere in between. It’s a muddled system that makes it hard to accurately gauge just how strong you really are, and as a result, easy to get in over your head in a mission that your character level indicates you can handle.
What’s more, having to return to your base in order to spend points and gain other benefits is an odd, regularly inconvenient bit of design. Finally have enough points for that next skill mod? Time to fast travel back to base (cue long load time), walk to the appropriate wing of the base for the upgrade you want to purchase, fast travel back to the safe house nearest to where you just were (another long load), and then finally walk back to the exact location of whatever you were doing. I’m sure that sequence was annoying just to read, and it’s doubly annoying to actually do – and you’ll be doing it for however long it takes you to unlock every skill (which I still haven’t done at max level).
Alone In The Dark
Sadly, once you do hit the level cap of 30, The Division’s endgame is pretty thin. The only new(ish) type of content you get access to is daily challenges, which consist of replaying the same story missions with even spongier enemies. Not so thrilling. What can be thrilling at this stage is diving into the Dark Zone, because it’s the only place in the entire game where you can actually run into other players in a dynamic setting and see unpredictable things happen.
The sense of omnipresent danger here is a stark contrast to the empty world surrounding it. Random packs of elite enemies patrol the streets and lurk inside abandoned buildings, and other agents run around either shooting at them, or shooting at you. Your allies one moment could be your killers in the next, and the temptation to prey on a weaker player creates a tense, dynamic environment that kept me looking over my shoulder.
You’d think it would devolve into mass chaos and griefing, but thanks to a few vital design elements, it doesn’t. The Dark Zone and its vendors have some of the best gear you’ll find anywhere, but since it’s the most heavily contaminated area in Manhattan, everything there has to be decontaminated before you can bring it outside and use it. To do this, you must reach a designated extraction zone and call a helicopter to come ferry your loot off to be processed and dropped in your stash at HQ. With NPCs swarming the landing zone, the stage is set for high heroics and some dastardly double-crosses.
In one of my most memorable moments, I raced towards an extraction point that had been cleared by a group of fellow agents, but then a group of high-level rogue agents intervened at the last second, slaughtering almost everyone and looting their corpses. I escaped in the chaos, only to be gunned down by a pack of elites I happened upon. After respawning, I darted back to where my corpse was, but it was too late. My corpse was picked dry, save for one so-so piece of gear.
Dejected, I made my way towards the extraction point to get my now-disappointing haul out, when I came across the corpse of another player…and a stack of sweet loot. I scooped it right up like the savage I am and made a beeline for the extraction point, which I reached just soon enough to get my cargo home. It took less than two hours for The Dark Zone to turn me into an opportunistic jerk, and I don’t feel even a little bad about it.
I’d likely have even more memorable war stories to tell, possibly with me as the aggressor, but developer Massive has tilted the risk/reward balance dramatically against those who would consider attacking other players to steal their loot. The potential rewards are currently far outweighed by the risks of being labeled as a rogue, being hunted zone wide, and potentially losing hours worth of Dark Zone rank progress as punishment. I get the need to keep it from being so attractive that everyone goes rogue all the time, but right now they’ve limited the allure of betrayal to the point where I just wasn’t willing to risk it. It very much needs adjustment, and hopefully that will happen, but for now the Dark Zone is playing it a bit too safe.
Regardless, heading back to “the real world” beyond the Dark Zone’s walls was a always a deflating experience. The Dark Zone is where the real action is: it fixes just about every problem I have with The Division’s pacing, its lack of player-driven moments, and the overall toothlessness and emptiness of its open world. I’d feel much better if The Dark Zone were a bigger, or at least a better-integrated part of The Division’s main gameplay loop, but it’s literally gated off and kept separate instead. No matter how well you do in the Dark Zone it never affects anything other than your loot, so until you hit the cap and have shifted your focus from level progression to loot progression, going there feels like wasted time. And by the time I did, The Division had already largely worn out its welcome.
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