Hands-on impressions from New York City’s most godforsaken zone (no, not the discount rack at Macy’s...)
Deep in the heart of The Division’s plague-ravaged imagining of Manhattan, just north of Times Square, lies an area dubbed ‘The Dark Zone’. If the Big Apple’s gone rotten, then this fenced-off area is its rancid core – the area where the pandemic first took hold, and where concentrations of the virus are at its highest. According to the game’s fiction, before society crumbled, the Dark Zone was quarantined off in a futile attempt to contain the virus’ spread.
Evidentially the developers saw the same potential in the Dark Zone, because this is where the player vs player (PvP) section of the action is quarantined away from the wider MMO trappings of the rest of the game. Clamber over one of the barriers to seamlessly transition into the Dark Zone and you’re spoiling for a fight – but also firmly on the fast track toward finding yourself some of the rarest and most powerful loot that New York has to offer. Needless to say, we hopped over the divide mere minutes into our hands-on demo with the game at E3.
Before we do the play-by-play on our adventures deep Beyond The Wall, we need to get the obligatory next-gen gushing out of our system. They say New York is a city best visited during winter, and The Division agrees; this is a visually rich game that finds beauty in a city gripped at the height of both crisis and winter. Its streets pull the trick of appearing both dense and desolate in the same breath, and the frost crackles beneath your feet so convincingly you’ll start gritting your living room carpet. The fidelity is doubly impressive when you consider the game’s scale (the entirety of Manhattan, loaded in a New York minute), and really adds something to a game where you’re never sure what’s lying round the next corner.
Paranoia levels reach fever pitch once you’re inside the Dark Zone, where intrepid explorers break away from the main storyline in search of highend weapons and gear that can’t be found anywhere else in the game. (The storyline reason is that they were left behind by the military after they had to hastily evacuate the zone when the crisis escalated.) Once in, you’re placed in a team of three, and at the same time there are two other teams of three prowling the area, also in search of loot. It’s a matter of when, not if, your paths cross – but what happens when you do will depend as much on circumstance as it does your natural benevolence.
Before entering the zone, it’s prudent to evaluate your loadout. The guns are standard fare. It’s advisable to take a mix of long-range and closequarter weapons into the fray, as The Division is a cover-based shooter that is big on tactical positioning. Engagements usually begin with factions taking potshots from afar, before segueing into shotgun territory as players move tactically around the map, attempting to outflank each other unseen. The special skills are where team tactics shine. You get to take two of these into the action, one for each bumper button, and they all come in infinite supply, although usage is limited by a cooldown timer. Choices present in the demo include a movable turret, a sticky bomb fired from your primary weapon, a seeker mine that shadows your movements and hunts out targets, and pulse, which serves as a mini-radar, highlighting nearby enemies. The latter might not be the sexy option, but it’s arguably the most useful. With liberal use of pulse, our team has a momentously successful first run, ambushing unsuspecting AI grunts, looting their corpses, and then locating the high-end loot.
Unfortunately, this is the easy part. Since this loot has been loitering in the Dark Zone for so long, it can’t be opened until it’s been decontaminated, which can’t be done until you’ve battled your way to a landing zone and called in a chopper for extraction. So our squad strap their radioactive bounty to their backpacks and march to the nearest extraction point.
First time round, we get lucky. Another team beats us to the clearing, but they’re sidetracked by a team of AI bandits, allowing us to sneak unnoticed through the battlefield and call for a copter – even then, it’s a tense minute and a half before it arrives. Second time isn’t a charm. We arrive on the scene first, but a bungled co-ordinated sniping attempt raises the ire of another group of AI baddies – flamethrowerwielding jerks known as Cleaners, led by an Elite Cleaner, a bagel-tough piece of work with a health bar the size of Brooklyn Bridge. They’re a formidable outfit, but the flammable tanks strapped to their backs are a noted weak point, as we discover when another human team arrives and chooses to join forces with us, shooting the unsuspecting Cleaners in their combustible backs. Score!
From there, teams have to make the decision to join forces, sharing the spoils, or go rogue, turning on each other in an attempt to steal the other’s spoils. This time it ends with us on the losing end as our ranks are spread too thinly during the fight with the Cleaners, making it easier for the other team to pick us off one by one.
With no level-capping (although you have to be reasonably high level to enter), it’s smart to quarantine PvP from the rest of the game. As servers populate, the Dark Zone is likely to become the domain of the highest ranked players – where only the most organized, lethal and selfish walk away with the richest of military prizes. Alex Dale