Tom Clancy’s The Division 2
How the Washington-set shooter sequel hopes to improve its endgame
PC, PS4, Xbox One
The Division 2 is about “saving the soul of America”, in the words of creative director Julian Gerighty, and what it means by “soul” is essentially “loot”. Set in a plague-ridden Washington DC seven months after the first game’s virus outbreak, it’s an always-online shooter in which government agents fight to reclaim a ravaged world while profiting from its disorder – a portrait of a fallen society whose ideals of self-reliance and unchecked consumption are alive and well in the game’s own progression systems.
It’s an experience in which the main characters aren’t really people, but weapons: a procession of exquisitely recreated shotguns, drones, riot shields and crossbows, bristling with modifiers such as toxic ammo or faster reloads for every critical hit. The game’s acquisitiveness is complemented by the pleasing heft of its thirdperson combat, each player scurrying from cover point to cover point under the weight of a bulging backpack. That this doesn’t expand in proportion to your rapidly filling inventory feels like a missed comic opportunity.
The original Division enjoyed a strong following – according to Gerighty, more players have finished its main storyline than that of any other Ubisoft title – but was criticised for a lack of endgame activities. The sequel’s mantra is accordingly ‘the same, but more’. There are new character subclasses with signature weapons and skills to unlock, and raid missions for veteran squads to sink their teeth into. There are team deathmatch and objective-capture modes with distinct reward paths, and three different incarnations of the original’s hybrid PvPvE Dark Zones to comb for rarer kit. New opportunities for pillaging aside, the game’s open world now includes civilian settlements that evolve alongside your home base, throwing up side missions as you roam. The Dark Zones have also seen much development, with introductory narrative missions plus a complex rework of the original’s concept of banditry.
Many of the new features can be traced to the first game’s updates. “It’s definitely been a journey,” lead designer Keith Evans tells us. “I joined the team a little bit before the launch of the first game, so I was involved in leading the design on contributions to endgame over all three years. And the main lesson we’ve learned is that players kind of devour content. So the biggest thing that we’ve done designwise on The Division 2 is to start with that mindset. It’s not just about that level 1-30 journey, it’s not just about reclaiming this beautiful 1:1 version of a city. It’s about making sure there’s a ton of interesting things to discover, and that the world is much more replayable once you hit endgame.”
Much of that world is appealing for its own sake. In a medium saturated with apocalyptic settings, few can rival Massive’s creations for grandeur and delicacy, though it’s sometimes hard to see your surroundings beneath the overloaded high-tech HUD. If The Division 2’ s landscape is discreetly made up of spawn-huts and cover, the art team’s rearranging of Washington DC is splendid nonetheless, the vast greens and marbles of the Mall giving way to faded European townhouses and hardscrabble post-industrial districts.
Even without the expected audio diaries and holographic ‘echoes’ of past events, it’s a setting that says a lot about previous and current residents, one that challenges you to distinguish new growth from decay. During our hands-on we pass roadside verges converted into allotments, and deserted checkpoints plastered with missing-person fliers. There are the previous game’s signature heaps of trash bags, melting into the contours of alleys and hallways, but the move from wintry New York has brought about an explosion in wildlife, with frogs and dragonflies adding texture to the soundscape. The game’s stylistic range is particularly pronounced in Dark Zones, each of which has its own origin story. In the wreckage around Union Station, sunbeams dig sickly orange trenches through a chemical haze left by a botched clean-up operation, while swathes of tarpaulin cover the high rises of the Wharf. The Dark Zones – areas worst affected by The Division’s virus – remain the game’s most dangerous regions. They are grandiose
It’s an experience in which the main characters aren’t really people, but weapons
“social experiments”, as Gerighty puts it, that “span the whole range from greed to murder”, where players are free to turn on each other while fighting the AI. They are, however, a lot safer this time around thanks to a reworking of how PvP is triggered and a more elaborate, mission-based superstructure. Rather than being mandatory, friendly fire within Dark Zones can be toggled on and off. This means that would-be griefers lack the advantage of deciding when to start a fight, and also means you’ll never enter PvP accidentally when allies stray into your line of fire. The game also collapses differences in level between warring parties, where its predecessor was content to let your stats decide the outcome.
There are now several flavours of ‘rogue’ status. Gun down another player and you’ll be slapped with a bounty and tagged red on the map for other players to track. Kill six players, and you’ll be tagged gold and plunged into a manhunt. This unlocks three terminals around the Dark Zone which you can use to either end the manhunt or hack, one by one, for more valuable rewards should you weather the wrath of other agents. Each hack requires a player to hold the button for a few moments, which is easier said than done when the bullets are flying (fortunately, the percentage doesn’t reset when you’re interrupted). The real feat, however, is getting from terminal to terminal, as rivals lay ambushes or manoeuvre to catch you from behind while you’re duelling NPCs. We have a rough time in the Wharf thanks to its denser infrastructure, at one point finding ourselves sandwiched between teams in an alleyway strewn with car hulks. A manhunt doesn’t end when a member of the rogue team dies, but your rogue status must ‘resync’ before you can rejoin the proceedings. This serves two purposes: it makes the loss of a teammate more of a handicap, and it means defensive fixtures near Dark Zone saferooms won’t immediately target you when you respawn. Less aggressive players can indulge their anti-social instincts by stealing from certain supply caches, which tags you on the map in grey. The appeal of theft is less for the fact that you can now take many items (including weapons dropped by AI foes) out of the Dark Zone yourself, rather than summoning a helicopter to extract them for decontamination. But stealing does expose a set of terminals you can meddle with to gain access to the Thief’s Den, a lair for unsavoury sorts with unique vendors and rewards.
It’s a comprehensive expansion and clarification of one of the original’s most divisive aspects. But is it really an improvement, or a betrayal? The fear of attack without warning in The Division’s Dark Zone was integral to differentiating it from the comforting pulse of level-ups and loot-drops elsewhere. For all the plot’s talk of cultural breakdown, it was the one area of Massive’s New York that felt genuinely lawless, the one place that pushed back against the game’s deadening ethos of farming for the means to be a better farmer. If the new rogue system makes PvP less obnoxious, it’s also difficult to think of this as a “social experiment” when so many ways of misbehaving are preordained, baked into the very design. Massive might have done better to move the needle the other way, preserving the atmosphere of threat while finding other ways (such as much smaller headcounts per session, or cycling respawns) to stave off undue camping and griefing.
The Division 2 needs that breath of toxic air provided by Dark Zones, if it isn’t to be just another vat of content waiting to be sucked dry. Sadly, if the Dark Zones have multiplied they also feel like they’ve slipped back into the fabric of the game’s open world, becoming more subservient to its rhythms. Still, perhaps the game will break out of that kill-gatherupgrade cycle with its raids, which are designed for up to eight players. These are “totally different to what we did in the first game”, Evans says, not least because, as with Destiny’s best raids, they don’t hinge on enemy numbers, character level or quality of equipment. “I can say that it’s something we’ve been working on for a long time. It’s not at the level of a mission, where it’s just about upping the intensity – we want this to be something that even players who own the best gear have to jump in and really discover.”
Dark Zones are a lot safer this time thanks to a reworking of how PvP is triggered