Tom Clancy’s The Division beta testing results

By Tanner Banks
2/10/2016, 12:00 p.m.
Tweet to: @SirJamtrousers

He’s pacing, he checks the corner for any hostiles. He’s ready for anything. He waits, and waits… and waits, for someone, anyone to run by… Tom Clancy’s The Division has been getting a large amount of hype from the gaming community, and with the success of Rainbow Six: Siege, The Division has its work cut out for it as a follow up by Ubisoft. Developed by the Sweden-based Ubisoft Massive, The Division is being touted as an online, open-world, role-playing shooter. As of February 2nd, the alpha and closed beta tests are finished, with the open beta set to release February 18th for the Xbox One and the next day for PC and PS4. With the open beta about to begin and the release date (March 8th) less than a month away, how has it looked so far?

Recently, I had the chance to interview Tony “Xythazar” Reno, a long-time gamer, and small-time streamer on Twitch (check him out he streams at Twitch.tv/Xythazar), who took part in The Division‘s closed beta, as well as the alpha. Tony was able to get the beta by pre-ordering and was lucky enough to be selected for the Alpha testing as well. For a review of The Division, I wanted to get a regular gamer’s opinion on the game with no ties to the industry outside of his love for games.

Due to the NDA that he had to sign, some of the comments that he mentioned during the interview about the alpha cannot be shared publicly. However, he did say that the game definitely felt like it was an alpha build. Alpha builds in other games tend to have stiff controls, little game content beyond a few key testing missions, little polish on visuals, and a large amount of bugs.

With his beta results, he mentioned that the gameplay was more discussable. As for the beta, he mentioned that it was a “pretty big improvement” over the alpha. Learning more about the game, he was able to discuss the story and gameplay. Taking place in a post-viral outbreak New York, your job as a special agent of the Division is to help reestablish order to the city. Several missions involved random encounters with rioters that needed dispatching. Several missions involved retaking parts of the city. And side missions were taking out encampments in certain buildings of the city to try to upgrade your home base in three key areas: Medical, Security, and Tech.

Increasing these parts of your base will help upgrade trees for your character in Medical, Security, and Tech. In Tony’s experience with the beta, he was only able to upgrade the Medical section of his perks, unlike other Youtubers who had fully unlocked characters from the developers. From looking at other players’ experiences like Total Biscuit’s they had similar instances. As for the map itself, Tony wasn’t able to go far away from his base, but he mentioned that the game may be cross-platform when playing. Hopefully there will be more on this later.

One aspect of the game has been especially scrutinized and hyped up for The Division, and that was the Darkzone. For Tony, the Darkzones are “a PvP-style area, where it’s the same style of open map, but it’s PvP instead of just PvE.” The loot mechanic for the Darkzone requires calling in a very visible and very loud helicopter that will leave you vulnerable for several minutes. When discussing the risk/reward balance, Tony mentioned that it needed some minor tweaks.

Outside of the Darkzone, the player interactions were “slim to none.” He told about how his experience with the matchmaking:

“In the beta, I actually tried the matchmaking engine and got matched up with like, three different teams, and each one didn’t really communicate and just wandered around the same room for 10 minutes. They didn’t really do anything. It was kinda like one of those things where the community didn’t seem really responsive outside of the home bases where people were just doing emotes and stuff. The players were just dicking around more than anything.”

As for the beta’s presentation, Tony had only great things to say:

“For the most part, the game looked beautiful. A lot of detail went to character animations and details. The environment especially was phenomenal, even with the beta. With a nice display, the scenery and the graphics really pop… Some of the small details were incomplete or looked over… but will probably be fixed later.”

When suggesting improvements, the big thing he wanted addressed was the lack of content:

“Honestly with the beta, what I saw was a lack of things to do after a while. Most of the enemies spawned in certain locations and they were the same activity over and over. After a while you, ran out of activities, and things to kill, and things to make.”

Popular YouTuber Jackfrags echoed Tony’s sentiments about the lacking content in the beta, “One of the biggest concerns I have here though is late game content… Will there be enough content there to keep players engaged and interested?”

Despite the harsh sounding criticisms about The Division, Tony had a good time playing the game. “Overall, it was a pretty good game. I found a lot of tiny little things I really liked. Like some of the NPC’s I found spoke fluent Chinese.” When I asked how he knew that, he revealed that he actually took Chinese beforehand and knew what they were saying.

From interviewing Mr. Reno, The Division has a lot going for it, but needs to show more of it. If Ubisoft is just playing coy with the amount of content, and is able to produce a game capable of providing more than just a few weeks of game time, they’ll have back-to-back hits between this and R6: Siege. Hopefully, that means the days of Assassin’s Creed: Unity are behind Ubisoft.