The Division’s closed beta hands-on: Ubisoft’s blockbuster is overhyped but playable

It was inevitable that Tom Clancy’s The Division from Ubisoft came down to Earth. The game has been hyped ever since Ubisoft unveiled the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2013. Now that Ubisoft has let the press and gamers play its closed beta test, I’ve had a good first look at the gameplay.

And it feels like the ambitions have been scaled back, which is a disappointment because The Division is the biggest high-end game slated for launch so far this year. With its vast simulated open world powered by a proprietary game technology, The Division was supposed to represent the very best of what a team of hundreds of developers working for five years can do. And it will set the tone for major video game releases in the $26 billion console game industry.

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The 3D graphics are pretty, but they’re not as awesome as we expected. It also has some annoying and strange design flaws, such as enemies that are effectively “bullet sponges,” meaning you have to shoot them an absurd number of times to bring them down, especially in the more difficult area known as the Dark Zone. These flaws make playing the closed beta frustrating.

On the other hand, I’m not going to tell you not to play it. The final game comes out March 8, and Ubisoft has a little time to polish it. But even without big changes, The Division could well be entertaining. It’s just that the slice that Ubisoft chose to show us from the game is really rather limited and emotionally flat. It has almost no cinematics, or movie-like cut scenes, and encounters that you run into in the open world are not staged very well at all. They seem so random, rather than scripted.

The Division is an online, open world, role-playing game set in New York City after a virus outbreak has wiped out most of the population and brought down the government. Chaos has ensued, with thugs taking over most snow-laden neighborhoods in the power vacuum. You play as an agent of the Division, a task force that comes online when the U.S. government can no longer protect citizens. The Division has to defend civilians and bring back order. The action takes place in the third person, with you directly controlling the agent’s movement and shooting.

In the closed beta, you start midway through the game. An injured soldier from the Division is trying to wake you in a helicopter. The helicopter ferries you to a safe area, and the women, who has a bloody patch over one eye, tells you how she really loves the city and wants to come to its rescue. She trained her whole life for the moment, but she can’t fight because of her injury. So she tells you to go out there into the neighborhoods and set things right. Then I had to take a long walk to the combat area. It’s not bad as far as inspiration goes, but it was a pretty boring way to start out the beta. I thought that things would get much better fast, but I was not entirely right about that.

The real gameplay experience

On the first evening of the beta, the gameplay was a little choppy, and it reminded me that this was an always-online game. But over the course of the weekend, the beta was much more playable.

The real gameplay has been exciting at times during the closed beta. When you first step into the city, everything seems empty. It’s eerie. Then you hear a gunshot in the distance, and it echoes off the buildings. One of your first tasks is to liberate a base and then allow the forces of good to occupy it. Once that’s done, you can go inside and see how much you can upgrade it. If you complete a mission to rescue an epidemiologist, you can upgrade the medical facility in your base. You earn points and loot with every mission completed. Enemies drop loot that you can pick up. You can go back to the base, restock your ammo, get better weapons, and attain special abilities.

One of the early special abilities is the capability of healing agents around you. That will make you some friends during or after a firefight. Another is a grenade that you can fire off quickly just by tapping one of your bumpers on the controller. It stays put where you fire it, and then it blows up when you tap the bumper again. That grenade proves very useful, particularly when you’re going up against high-level enemies known as elites. But even a grenade usually won’t bring down an elite.

You can go through missions alone as a single player against the A.I. enemies. Or you can initiate matchmaking and bring in co-op partners to join in the mission. That enables your team to function as a squad and take down enemies by flanking them. There’s a lot of motivation to do that because the enemies are so tough.

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Once you’ve set up in the base and leveled up some, you can enter the Dark Zone. That’s a place where there’s more contamination that threatens your health, but it has the potential for more loot and much more challenging enemies. When I first went into the Dark Zone, I was disappointed. I had to wander around for a while before I met any agents. And most of them just ran by without stopping. I ran into enemy gangs and found they were pretty deadly, as noted below. When I took out some of these enemies, particularly at landmarks in the Dark Zone, I got better loot.

You can’t use the loot you find in the Dark Zone because it is contaminated. It has to be extracted via helicopter and then decontaminated before you can use it. Once I had some loot, I moved to the extraction zones where helicopters could extract my loot. It’s easy to find these on the minimap, as you can drop a waypoint and get guided directions to the place. The first few times I went to an extraction zone, not much happened. But a few times later, I noticed that the enemies would show up and try to intercept the extraction. You have to defend the extraction zone for about 90 seconds before a rope comes down from the helicopter to pick up your loot. During that time, both non-player enemies and rogue players can attack you. It takes a few seconds to tie your loot to the rope, so that’s when you are vulnerable.

Each human player in the Dark Zone is a non-hostile threat. But if that player shoots at another human, the shooter and his or her squad is labeled “rogue.” Every player in the zone can see the location of the rogue players, and there’s no consequence for retaliating against a rogue. If you die as a rogue, then you lose more of your loot. I went rogue by accident once, and players quickly came after me and extinguished me. And when I was standing in front of a few other agents, all three of them went rogue on me and killed me on the spot. That was unsportsmanlike, and it taught me not to trust other humans. One thing the rogues love to do is to intercept your extractions and claim the loot for themselves.

Let’s talk about those graphics

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Of course, I should expect the graphics to look weaker. I’m playing the closed beta on a PlayStation 4, and not on a high-end PC. The graphics aren’t going to look as pretty as they could on much more expensive hardware. But the vast majority of people are going to have this kind of visual experience, and it’s not quite as good as originally advertised by the developers at Massive Entertainment. There are already quite a few videos comparing what the graphics look like now and what they were supposed to look like on the Snowdrop Engine, which was created special to make the game look beautiful.

In the original gameplay trailer from 2013, the game featured car tires and windows that you could shoot out. You can’t do that now. The imagery just seems a little fuzzier, and less realistic. The humans also don’t behave like you expect them to.

Now I know how hard it is to simulate an entire city and all of its intricate details. The engine supports procedurally generated environments. And some of the results are cool. You can see snowflakes coming down, and the weather is different every time that you log into the game. The lighting changes throughout the day. There’s decay everywhere you look, with bodies covered by bags and trash in the streets. In places such as the Dark Zone, a free-for-all area where non-player enemies mingle amid human multiplayer friends or foes, the augmented reality map and its direction finders work great. So you don’t have to get lost in the chaotic streets.

But the believable parts of the graphics fall apart further once human beings enter the picture.

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The dumbest bullet sponge design ever

The A.I. enemies are pretty dumb in this game, but they wind up killing you an awful lot. As noted, it can take an entire clip of 30 bullets to bring down an enemy. That even applies to enemies that you are shooting in the head multiple times. I groaned with disbelief when a thug with a baseball bat charged at me. I shot him a few times and he didn’t go down. I shot him some more. And some more. Then he actually ran up to me and took me down with two swings of his baseball bat.

The problem with the bullet sponge enemies is that they can take you don’t with two or three shots. It’s like they have two inches of body armor and I have none, when it should be the other way around. Sure, there are a lot of games with bullet sponges. But Ubisoft was trying to create the ultimate realistic open-world shooter, and this completely destroys the realism. Indeed, we’re talking about street hooligans as enemies, not supersoldiers from the future. When you hit one of the enemies, some damage numbers appear above them. That’s just plain stupid in a game as realistic as this one.

I’m trying to understand why the creators came up with such a bad design. I suspect it went something like this. They created a game with ultrarealistic simulations, but the game consoles and PCs weren’t as powerful as advertised. So the team had to scale things back. One of the things that went by the wayside was having a ton of enemies in a scene at the same time. Now the number of enemies is more limited. If you make them easy to kill, then the game will be too easy. The answer? Turn them into bullet sponges so a squad of four enemies is powerful enough to take on a squad of humans.

The other reason may be that you lose the point of the leveling system. Players start at a low level and then rank up with more experience. If it is too easy to kill all the enemies when you are at a lower level, then you don’t really need to put in all that time to level up. of course, there are a lot of capabilities in the beta that are locked. I can only hope they can reduce the effects of the bullet sponge design.

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You’ll see players adapting to the bullet sponges in different ways. I noticed that most of the other players had picked up sniper rifles. These are able to take down. But that sort of ruins the realism. I saw a pack of players together. All of them had sniper rifles, and I was the only one without one. In a real squad, it would be the other way around. That tells you how the sniper rifle is valuable, and the assault rifle is somewhat useless. And that imbalance is happening because of the bad design.

Missions are underwhelming, but the Dark Zone has promise

Outside of the Dark Zone, you can also team up with players at the entry points for missions, such as a raid to get medical supplies. I performed the first mission on my own, and I was able to take the enemies out without too much trouble. But when I went on a hostage rescue mission, it was laughable. I took out four enemies, then found a key. I opened the door to the hostage room. The first guy walked out and didn’t even thank me. Then second guy thanked me profusely. There was absolutely no emotion in that hostage rescue at all. I got my points, collected some loot, and moved on. That was very disappointing.

But as I said, the presence of real human players in The Dark Zone makes the multiplayer gameplay potentially very exciting. When you go into the Dark Zone, you can team up pretty easily with other players. Because the Dark Zone has player-versus-player combat, teaming up is a tense affair. You can run into other agents of The Division, but you are never sure if they are friend or foe. You can use the controller to send gestures to them to indicate you are a friendly. You can wave, clap, or do jumping jacks. Even after I did this, I got shot by a non-hostile who suddenly went rogue on me.

One of the cool things is that when you die in the zone, you may drop your loot. Then your death spot shows up on the minimap. When you respawn, you can rush back to the spot to see if you can recover your loot. I did this a number of times. But when the squad of humans went rogue on me in an extraction zone on top of a parking garage, I had a hard time getting my loot back. I charged back to the place where the rogues killed me, but they were still there. They were still extracting their loot, one helicopter and one package at a time. So they were making themselves into a centralized target for every non-hostile agent to attack.

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But the parking garage is easily defended if you have four allies, as the rogues had. So they kept killing the agents that came into the extraction zone. I tried tossing my grenades at them, but they were pretty tough to kill. So I just concentrated on getting one of them. Eventually, the good guys won and wiped out the rogues. But that moment of gameplay showed me the great potential of what this game could be when millions of people are playing it.

It’s not a great shooter so far

Ultimately, I have the same problem with The Division that I had with Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and with Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Siege. It’s just not a great shooter. It plays a little like Gears of War, where you have to move from cover to cover to survive. I learned that the hard way during combat. But the quality of the close combat isn’t as good. With third-person shooters, it’s always very difficult to capture the action when the combat is really close. In this one, I couldn’t even hit enemies that were about two feet away from me, and so I fell victim to the baseball bat many times.

I had to adapt and deal with that silliness. I stayed further back and used more cover. I found I could pick off some of the enemies from a distance. And I made sure never to get stuck in a crossfire. But this is not really the kind of gameplay that I expected from a game that pledged to be so realistic in its portrayal of post-apocalypse New York. So far, it has none of the narrative drama of The Last of Us, and it has none of the sharp shooter mechanics of third-person shooter games such as Gears of War or first-person shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops III.

I’m really hoping that the beginning of the game is outstanding and full of drama. Because Ubisoft managed to show us a middle part of the game in the closed beta that just wasn’t anywhere near as fun as I hoped it would be.