The Division – Everything We Know So Far
What is The Division?
It’s a lot of things, actually. It’s a third-person, cover-based shooter; it’s an RPG with loot; it’s a seamless multiplayer experience that encourages cooperative play, but lets you play solo, too. It’s a PvP-enabled game with an interesting twist that can put you in some morally questionable situations.
What do you do in the game?
One of your many goals is to make your own character stronger so that he or she can tackle more difficult situations. The Division’s character progression occurs through a couple of different paths:
Loot
There are essentially two categories of loot: weapons and equipped gear. You can equip a primary weapon, a secondary weapon and a pistol, and the weapons in these sub-categories all have individual stats designed to complement different play styles, like accuracy, range, and stability. Whatever you decide to go with ultimately affects your damage per second , which you can view in the Inventory menu. But what’s particularly cool about these weapons is that you can also mod them. Mods grant additional perks to your weapons that improve some of its characteristics, like accuracy, giving extra life to weapons that might not seem all that useful initially.
The equipped gear category is where you’ll find things like body armor, gloves, packs, knee pads, holsters and – perhaps most importantly – air filters and gas masks. This gear affects your defensive and passive abilities, and can also benefit from mods. We’re singling out the masks because they can grant you access to previously inaccessible areas in The Division’s PvP-enabled Dark Zone that are heavily contaminated. Of course, that’s also where some great loot could be hiding, so it’s important to pay close attention to individual pieces of gear.
There are also varying tiers of loot that are all color coded to designate their quality. White-colored gear is common, greens are a little less common, blues are rare, etc.
Experience
All weapons and equipped gear are gated by level, so if you’re at level six and you find a level-eight assault rifle, you can’t use that weapon until you level up. That only happens if you gain experience, and there are numerous ways to do that. Obviously, killing enemies grants experience (and this seems like the best way to gain experience in the Dark Zone, which has a separate leveling system and gear), but so does discovering previously unexplored parts of the city or giving ordinary citizens spare items you might have in your inventory (they might even give you a piece of clothing to equip in exchange).
The bulk of your experience outside of the Dark Zone comes from completing missions. In our play session, these came in two forms – smaller, skirmish-like events that spring up as you explore New York City, and missions that are tied to your Base of Operations.
What’s the Base of Operations?
One of the first things our squad does after grouping up in one of The Division’s safe zones social areas that let you interact with other agents, as well as buy gear and weapons – is make our way into the depths of city, towards the base. As we arrive, we find the Joint Task Force NPC soldiers outside, defending it against some rioters. After a brief firefight, we’re victorious. The JTF thanks us for helping them, and we make our way inside.
It’s here we discover that the base is in pretty bad shape, but there’s an opportunity to turn things around by finding the right people to get the base’s three wings – medical, security, and tech – up and running. Exploring the base opens up an initial set of missions that involve tracking these individuals down in different parts of the city, where they may be trapped by enemy forces.
Each rescue is connected to a different wing, and has to be completed before you can start it up and begin purchasing upgrades. For example, our squad decided to retrieve Dr. Jessica Kandel from an under-siege Madison Square Garden first so we could start up the medical wing. Once we did, its upgrade menu became accessible, allowing us to purchase the “clinic” upgrade. Each wing has its own currency used for upgrades, which you can earn through wing-specific missions. In the case of the medical wing, for example, every upgrade requires medical supplies.
Upgrading the wings represents more than just a physical manifestation of your progress in The Division. It also lets you produce new skills for your agent, as well as skill mods, talents, and perks. Purchasing the “clinic” upgrade grants the First Aid skill, which lets you heal yourself and other agents. Along with that comes a perk that extends the amount of med kits you can carry by one.
So what are these skills you’re talking about?
Skills are found within the abilities section of your menu. Each skill is placed into one of three columns to match the wing of the Base of Operations that unlocks them. Medical skills like First Aid are obviously much more support-oriented, since many revolve around healing, but they also include the Pulse skill, which lets you scan for nearby enemies while simultaneously giving you and your squadmates a bonus to critical hit chance and critical hit damage for its duration. Meanwhile, Tech skills grant access to fun types of weaponry, including turrets and Seeker mines, to name a few. Finally, the Security skills are all defense-oriented, focusing on things like portable cover and ballistic shields.
Again, each of these skills carries modifications you can unlock by purchasing additional upgrades. These modifications make the skill in question more specialized, so you can effectively tailor the skill to the way you play The Division.
You also mentioned talents.
That’s not a question, but yes! Talents are passive abilities, divided into the same categories as skills, and they offer things like a reduction to recoil while in cover, or an increased chance that a status effect leveled at one enemy will spread to multiple nearby targets.
So, there’s a lot of customization?
Yes, The Division offers a lot of customization. Skills, talents, perks and other such abilities are designed to let you examine them and decide which ones benefit your playstyle or are most effective in any given situation. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a lot of cosmetic customization; at the beginning of the game, you can customize some of the physical traits of your agent, but throughout the game, you’ll find gear that lets you change the appearance of your jacket, pants, headwear, eyewear, and more.
What’s the Dark Zone?
The Dark Zone is the PvP-enabled area populated with enemies and other players. The reason it’s PvP-enabled and not strictly labeled as a PvP zone is pretty simple: you ultimately make the choice whether to engage in PvP or not. As you probably have seen by now, most squads in the Dark Zone are there because they want to get some of the better loot in the game. At any given time, other players can either help them get that loot, or they can try to take it from them. Choosing the latter means that you’ve gone rogue, and will be designated as such to other agents – who are then free to kill you without going rogue themselves.
Wandering through the Dark Zone is an incredibly intense experience. When you come across another squad of agents, there’s a moment where you wonder if they’re going to turn on you, or if you should turn on them before they get the chance to steal from you. On top of that, even the normal enemies we came across seemed much stronger than those outside the Dark Zone, making the decision to engage or avoid much more important.
What are some of the story missions like?
Our squad played a couple of the main story missions, like the aforementioned rescue of Dr. Kandel to unlock the security wing. But we played some others, including one that has you fighting your way through a tunnel, only to be forced to go on the defensive and engage in a pretty large firefight against waves of enemies and a pesky (and very strong) sniper who you might call the “boss” of that particular mission. We also played a late-game mission that had our squad infiltrating an event center to take down an absolutely brutal gang leader. In every single one of those instances, communicating and using some kind of tactical strategy were immensely beneficial.
In fact, in the sniper mission, two of the three people in our squad ended up serving as a diversion to the sniper and most of the enemies, so that the other person could flank the sniper and take them out point-blank with several shotgun blasts. Previously, we’d just tried to brute-force our way up the middle, using the cars as cover, but it just didn’t work out well for us.
When can I play The Division?
The Division doesn’t arrive until March 8, but if you’re itching to jump in, you’ll get an early chance to explore Manhattan’s pandemic-ravaged streets starting January 28, when the closed beta goes live. Xbox One owners will get the first crack at the beta, with 24-hour early access, while PS4 and PC players can begin on January 29.
Beginning on Manhattan’s Chelsea Pier, the beta will take you through early story-driven missions that establish your foothold in New York. You’ll team up with other agents to battle for loot and outwit other agents in the PvP-enabled Dark Zone.
Go eat a bag of baby dikks, my nikka... 
Solo campaign gonna be trash... 
