• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

The Division Beta Thread: Make Manhattan Great Again

Status
Not open for further replies.

LiK

Member
Bungie comes across as a group of people who have never played loot games before to me. I shook my head so much during my time with Destiny. I loved the game, but I did not love some of the design decisions.

Hopefully Massive know what they're doing...

yep, Bungie rekt their own game. hoping Massive does a better job post release.
 

th4tguy

Member
Wife and I had fun with the Beta. She likes it way more than Destiny. Says it's more fun to explore. This definitely pushed the game to buy status for us.
 
yep, Bungie rekt their own game. hoping Massive does a better job post release.

I was actually shocked in the last few weeks of playing Destiny how stale it got. After I got NTTE I gave up playing it because there was nothing left to do. Since then anything released seems to be pretty poor. Deej is the wrong person to have doing that community job. He isn't very clear with people and it takes Bungie months to do stuff, and when they do it feels half assed. Big changes needed for the second one.
 

Raide

Member
Bungie comes across as a group of people who have never played loot games before to me. I shook my head so much during my time with Destiny. I loved the game, but I did not love some of the design decisions.

Hopefully Massive know what they're doing...

It was clear pretty early on that Bungie had no idea what they were doing. It was not until they visited Blizzard did they have their "Oh shit yeah, we have no idea what we are doing!" moment.

Hoping Massive have done their homework!
 
Bungie comes across as a group of people who have never played loot games before to me. I shook my head so much during my time with Destiny. I loved the game, but I did not love some of the design decisions.

Hopefully Massive know what they're doing...

Fully agree. A lot of their design decisions were mind boggling when it came to progression and loot systems. I already think The Division does a better job with handling these things, but the question that remains is the breadth of content.
 

Kyoufu

Member
It was clear pretty early on that Bungie had no idea what they were doing. It was not until they visited Blizzard did they have their "Oh shit yeah, we have no idea what we are doing!" moment.

Hoping Massive have done their homework!

The sad part is that they still learned nothing from their meeting with the Diablo 3 team.

The loot in King's Fall is so bad. Year 1 raid loot was amazing and yet they fudged it up in Year 2.
 

Raide

Member
The Division New Faction "LAST MAN BATTALION"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y9YKavBqp0

That radio was indeed really cool in the Darkzone.

I was thinking of what could be a fun use of the radio. Occasionally the radio tunes into players speaking in teamchat. Maybe time it to going Rogue, hiding in the safe house and then hearing your name get mentioned. :D


The sad part is that they still learned nothing from their meeting with the Diablo 3 team.

The loot in King's Fall is so bad. Year 1 raid loot was amazing and yet they fudged it up in Year 2.


That is sad. I have not played it in ages because I was so pissed off at having to throw money at Bungie just to get some actual content but that's another thread altogether.
 
It was clear pretty early on that Bungie had no idea what they were doing. It was not until they visited Blizzard did they have their "Oh shit yeah, we have no idea what we are doing!" moment.

Hoping Massive have done their homework!

And then took none of the advise that was given to them from the Diablo team. The takeaway message was supposed to be "RNG sucks" and Bungie went with RNG upon RNG raid loot. It's what killed the game for me and my group. We could only take getting legs for the 5th time and each time getting progressively worse in terms of stat rolls.
 

Raide

Member
And then took none of the advise that was given to them from the Diablo team. The takeaway message was supposed to be "RNG sucks" and Bungie went with RNG upon RNG raid loot. It's what killed the game for me and my group. We could only take getting legs for the 5th time and each time getting progressively worse in terms of stat rolls.

Damn, they really did learn nothing. I remember hearing about the visit and thought it would be a turning point. Especially considering how good Diablo 3 is now.

Hoping for a Massive The Division devblog on loot etc.
 

Tecnniqe

Banned
I'm thinking of going Gold.

Just need that last little nudge from Ubi.

18qfjij3z87m3gif.gif


WCS Steam refund :p
 

spannicus

Member
So the thugs and rikers are 2 different factions?
In the video it shows the thugs with hoods and the rikers as the bald guy. I thought the hooded guys were the rikers.
 
BIS = Best In Slot, for e.g. best possible chest armor for build you are doing

Also some vendor weapons being a lot better than anything from Iron Banner or King's Fall raid is Bungie's incompetence more than anything else, imo.

The King's Fall raid machine gun is about the only thing I have kept sans the raid boots for my characters. Not only are the weapons not very good but they are just as ugly as the raid armor drops as well. Hideous stuff. Infuse, infuse, infuse...

I am really looking forward to The Division's release. Really like everything about it from the audio /visual, weapon mods, tactical play, unique take on PvPvE, customization of characters appearance, etc.
 

Raide

Member
So the thugs and rikers are 2 different factions?
In the video it shows the thugs with hoods and the rikers as the bald guy. I thought the hooded guys were the rikers.

I think the Rioters (Looters) are just basic thugs. The video shows Rioters, Rikers, Cleaners and LMB as listed. I am sure they will have more factions down the line.

Maybe there will be a breakdown of what make up each faction.
 

spannicus

Member
Rikers are the escaped prisoners. Think we havent seen them yet.

I think the Rioters (Looters) are just basic thugs. The video shows Rioters, Rikers, Cleaners and LMB as listed. I am sure they will have more factions down the line.

Maybe there will be a breakdown of what make up each faction.
Thanks! Was looking at a few old videos, and it seems like they changed a few outfits or maybe we will see them in the final version.
 
I'm a bit late, but I thought I'd post my beta impressions.

Overall, the game looked good and had decent controls. It felt a lot like a Watchdogs MMO.

I reckon it'll be a decent game for a fair amount of hours, but it seems like it'll get very boring for people wanting to spend "MMO" amounts of time on it.

The main problems are the enemies and the setting.

Dude in a hoodie with a rifle/pistol/bat got repetitive after about 5 hours in the beta. Guy with a flamethrower adds some variety, but it's not enough. Certainly if the game is going to last 50 hours or more.
I hope we get some more interesting enemies, and stuff like body armour with weak spots, because otherwise every mission is just going to be getting into cover and sniping.
Maybe all the skills could make it more interesting.

Perhaps the worst thing is the setting. NYC is a great city, but not for a modern military game. We've basically got a map that looks like a square grid, with every street filled with generic chest-height cover clutter and lined with multistory buildings that we mostly can't enter. Once you've seen one street you've seen them all. It's hard to think of a city with less variety than mid-town NYC.
In terms of landmarks, we've got Times Square, the Empire State and the Flatiron Building. For a cover based shooter, the latter two might as well be any multistory office building, since you've not got any real verticality in your movement (cf. games like Prototype or even Lego Marvel, where being able to climb/jump makes skyscrapers more interesting/impressive).
No Central Park. No Bridges. No Statue of Liberty. No Washington Park. No Battery Park. No Ground Zero. Not even that building from Ghostbusters.
That scenery is going to get really tedious. The snow and post-apocalyptic clutter means that areas like Chinatown are going to look practically identical to anywhere else, save for a few neon signs having Chinese characters replacing English.
Worse is that traversal is really boring. Run and mantle for hundreds of meters between objectives, since fast ravel points are about a kilometer apart.

I'm not a huge Destiny fan and I complained about the lack of content and variety there. But Destiny had 4 very different looking planets,4 very different enemy types, and the Sparrow made traversing the environment fun and fast.

The Dark Zone is interesting, but I doubt its long term appeal. As people get organised, the metagame is going to drive away casual and at least one of the PVE, PK, anti-PK player groups that are required for it to be fun.

I'm not cancelling my pre-order, but I think this is most likely to be a game I complete and sell on (or that I never complete and that sits on the backlog shelf of shame with several other Ubisoft-style open world games), rather than a long-term thing.

To end on a positive note, the matchmaking seems much better than Destiny. With the classless RPG skill system, it could make for some really fun mission planning. Proximity chat could also make things fun in the Dark Zone if they somehow balance it right.
 
Only thing i missed from fast travel in the beta. If the group leader uses it. It needs to take the others with them.
That is probably a very prickly thornbush because what if members of your group are in the Dark Zone but the leader isn't? Could it be used as a way to scum yourself out of the Dark Zone?
 

Raide

Member
That is probably a very prickly thornbush because what if members of your group are in the Dark Zone but the leader isn't? Could it be used as a way to scum yourself out of the Dark Zone?

They would need to out of combat modifier so people cannot just peace out whenever they like. I saw a few videos of people using the map boundaries to fast travel to the safe house. I am sure that won't be a thing in the full version.
 
They would need to out of combat modifier so people cannot just peace out whenever they like. I saw a few videos of people using the map boundaries to fast travel to the safe house. I am sure that won't be a thing in the full version.

You already can't enter anywhere that requires a loading screen during combat and the out of bounds thing only surpersedes it because it was a quick and dirty solution to corral the players for the Beta.

The actual borders during the live game will most likely be physical walls and water.
 

spyder_ur

Member
Bungie comes across as a group of people who have never played loot games before to me. I shook my head so much during my time with Destiny. I loved the game, but I did not love some of the design decisions.

Hopefully Massive know what they're doing...

It was clear pretty early on that Bungie had no idea what they were doing. It was not until they visited Blizzard did they have their "Oh shit yeah, we have no idea what we are doing!" moment.

Hoping Massive have done their homework!

Honestly this is one of my biggest hang ups with the game and reasons my optimism is strongly tempered, apart from the wholly mediocre shooting and movement.

Bungie's issues with Destiny are mostly all related to endgame activities and loot (drop rates, power levels, scaling, etc.). Quite simply I have no reason to have confidence those issues will be any better here, based on anything I've read or watched or what I saw in the beta. In fact I'm even slightly more concerned.

At least in Destiny most of the sought-after loot was fun to use and application and benefit was tangible. Am I really going to be driven to acquire another slightly better military assault rifle, or a slightly better gas mask? The loot in the beta was so uncreative and standard; I'm worried that the world the game has created won't allow them to go outside of those parameters in either loot or encounter design.

I don't think it's an issue of learning lessons or simply trying; managing a living game of this scope is really difficult. Maybe they'll really nail those aspects of the game. Unfortunately, we won't really know the answer till days, weeks or months after the game releases. Like I said - tempered optimism.
 

Z3M0G

Member
I'm a bit late, but I thought I'd post my beta impressions.

Overall, the game looked good and had decent controls. It felt a lot like a Watchdogs MMO.

I reckon it'll be a decent game for a fair amount of hours, but it seems like it'll get very boring for people wanting to spend "MMO" amounts of time on it.

The main problems are the enemies and the setting.

Dude in a hoodie with a rifle/pistol/bat got repetitive after about 5 hours in the beta. Guy with a flamethrower adds some variety, but it's not enough. Certainly if the game is going to last 50 hours or more.
I hope we get some more interesting enemies, and stuff like body armour with weak spots, because otherwise every mission is just going to be getting into cover and sniping.
Maybe all the skills could make it more interesting.

Perhaps the worst thing is the setting. NYC is a great city, but not for a modern military game. We've basically got a map that looks like a square grid, with every street filled with generic chest-height cover clutter and lined with multistory buildings that we mostly can't enter. Once you've seen one street you've seen them all. It's hard to think of a city with less variety than mid-town NYC.
In terms of landmarks, we've got Times Square, the Empire State and the Flatiron Building. For a cover based shooter, the latter two might as well be any multistory office building, since you've not got any real verticality in your movement (cf. games like Prototype or even Lego Marvel, where being able to climb/jump makes skyscrapers more interesting/impressive).
No Central Park. No Bridges. No Statue of Liberty. No Washington Park. No Battery Park. No Ground Zero. Not even that building from Ghostbusters.
That scenery is going to get really tedious. The snow and post-apocalyptic clutter means that areas like Chinatown are going to look practically identical to anywhere else, save for a few neon signs having Chinese characters replacing English.
Worse is that traversal is really boring. Run and mantle for hundreds of meters between objectives, since fast ravel points are about a kilometer apart.

I'm not a huge Destiny fan and I complained about the lack of content and variety there. But Destiny had 4 very different looking planets,4 very different enemy types, and the Sparrow made traversing the environment fun and fast.

The Dark Zone is interesting, but I doubt its long term appeal. As people get organised, the metagame is going to drive away casual and at least one of the PVE, PK, anti-PK player groups that are required for it to be fun.

I'm not cancelling my pre-order, but I think this is most likely to be a game I complete and sell on (or that I never complete and that sits on the backlog shelf of shame with several other Ubisoft-style open world games), rather than a long-term thing.

To end on a positive note, the matchmaking seems much better than Destiny. With the classless RPG skill system, it could make for some really fun mission planning. Proximity chat could also make things fun in the Dark Zone if they somehow balance it right.

I'm excited to get the game and play more, but I have the very same concerns about the game... I need to rely 100% on my map to know where I am, because everything looks the same, and that is boring. In Destiny, you can't even look at a map... yet you can know exactly where you are because every location stands out. Eventually you will learn your way around. You can not learn your way around in this game by just looking around you.

And I spent most of my time in the beta running down very long, VERY EMPTY streets... does it use "zone instances" like Destiny does? Finding something to kill is incredibly frustrating in this game (so far)... I had a buddy watching me over share play and it must have took me 10 minutes to find an enemy to shoot, to show him how that looked. He got bored of watching me run down empty street after empty street and went back to his own game. I probably didn't help sell a copy of this game that day...

You know what would be the perfect vehicle for this game, a bicycle, it would be awesome lol

Um... YES! Pulling one out of your backpack would be silly... but I'd love to be able to pick up a random one on the side of the street, ride it where I want to go, then just drop it... game can randomly spawn them around you, say... one located on each street.
 

Tawpgun

Member
Hope so, hopefully there will also,be vehicle's like,tanks and such. Would love to blow those up.
PMC faction video that was posted had the safehouse radio dude talk about them having tanks. And also rolling vehicles down the street with loudspeakers yelling propaganda
 

Kyoufu

Member

I understand your concerns. The setting does hamper the game in many areas but we don't know how exciting loot will be in the endgame until we get there ourselves. If you remember, the Destiny Alpha/Beta were full of generic loot too. In fact the entire 1-19 levels of the game were filled with boring, generic and unexciting loot. It was only until we hit 20 and that were able to use the Legendary/Exotics which had special perks to them.

So, while I totally understand your concerns and scepticism I think it's still best to wait and see how it all plays out at max level.
 
At least in Destiny most of the sought-after loot was fun to use and application and benefit was tangible. Am I really going to be driven to acquire another slightly better military assault rifle, or a slightly better gas mask? The loot in the beta was so uncreative and standard; I'm worried that the world the game has created won't allow them to go outside of those parameters in either loot or encounter design.
If the Caduceus and the Cassidy are anything to go by, the higher-end weapons and gear will cause some serious shit to go down.

The Caduceus has a Talent that whenever you kill an Enemy, you get rid of any Debuffs currently on you. That means you can go from being on fire to not being on fire simply by getting a kill, which will probably make or break higher-level story missions and the Dark Zone by being able to remove Debuffs from yourself in a strategic manner.

The Cassidy has a Talent that whenever you kill an Enemy, you have an 11.5%(That chance is too damn high) to instantly reload your gun, which might lead to insane chaining of kills through a constantly refilling mag.

The Cassidy in particular seems straight out of Borderlands, albeit toned down.
 

DirtyLarry

Member
I'm thinking of going Gold.

Just need that last little nudge from Ubi.
Do we know how much the Season Pass will be on its own? Because unless it is over $40, the only benefit I see of going Gold is to get the National Guard content. I do not get that many Season Passes but generally I feel like they are usually like $30. Or have they gone up in price?

EDIT - Nevermind, I just did a quick Amazon search, and it seems like Season Passes are now as high as $50. So it looks like one would save $10 doing the Gold Edition. I may consider it myself now.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom