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The Division Beta Thread: Make Manhattan Great Again

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D

deoee

Member
bjaelke said:
The beta should be available under "free games" assuming you're looking for the PC version.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's just right above my golden pre-order

VEA4czM.jpg
 
D

deoee

Member
Is there any way to get a video file of the complete Agent Origins video?

I need to download it and get it on my phone to watch on my way home :)
 
B

berserk_ftw

Member
So does anyone know if this game will have stuff to buy with the uplay points in the store to use ingame? Like in AssCreed games? As I still have quite some points :D
 
C

Cabbagehead

Member
http://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ta-and-the-future-there-may-be-some-surprises





Could there be such a thing as a gritty real-world RPG?

Well, whatever the answer, it turns out that a gritty real-world RPG was always the aim with this title. “Not many people know this, but when Ubisoft purchased [Swedish studio] Massive Entertainment, their first mandate was, can you create an RPG from Tom Clancy?” says Julian Gerighty, associate creative director on The Division. “Mechanically, they wanted a role-playing game but thematically, it had to fit into the Tom Clancy universe.

Most of the action, as far as we currently know, takes place in a chunk of Manhattan from Central Park down to Union Square. When asked if we’ll see anything else – Ellis Island? The Bronx? – Gerighty demures: “This is what we wanted to focus on - there may be some surprises.”

A related challenge, it seems, is to get players to understand the mechanics of combat in an RPG game. In a traditional shooter, you get a couple of bullets on target and the enemy goes down, but in a role-playing shooter (and Destiny is an example here), you need to get multiple hits, wearing down the target’s defence stats. Gerighty says: “Shooting enemies multiple times, it’s rarely been a problem for people playing the game, but when people are watching it’s kind of jarring at first. But this is the game that we’ve made. The french phrase is ‘à tout prix’ [at all costs] – it’s the approach that we’ve taken. We’ll try and minimise [multiple shot kills] of course, but it’s something people will get used to and will become part of the experience.”

"In the alpha and beta, the area of the Dark Zone was very small, it was a little bit more dense in terms of encounters than I expect the final version to be. We won’t have all the spawn camping issues that we had in the beta because it’s a much wider space.”

He is also keen to point out that there’s going to be more to the Dark Zone than an anarchic and formless battle for loot. As in Destiny’s Crucible, it is going to be a place with a calendar of events and activities. “This isn’t the company line, so I don’t know if this is going to be frowned on,” says Gerighty. “But for me, the Dark Zone is the jewel in our game, this is almost a social experiment. We’re definitely going to keep supporting it with events and special, very precise calendar moments and things like that. It’s going to be part of a continued push, post-launch.”

“This is one of the big challenges,” says Gerighty. “How can you create fun gameplay with different character and movement archetypes in a real-world setting? So we have several factions and within those are several archetypes from the sniper to the grenade guy to the shield rusher. We’ve tried to create gameplay diversity within each faction. We’ve done a great job so far but we can push it even further.”

How much further? "Would I be happy with flying dragons? Absolutely,” says Gerighty – and it seems fairly obvious he’s joking. However, the real-world military alternative to some sort of powerful flying beast could be a helicopter attack maybe? “We’ve done a lot of things we haven’t shown yet that are cool with different types of exotic enemies, bosses, things like that,” is all he’ll say.

So how about loot? Finding interesting new weapons and gear is going to be super important for the longevity of the game – as we’ve seen on Destiny. In the beta, people were picking up knee pads, jackets and basic weapons. There has to be more to this. There has to be rare, even unique stuff out there? “That’s a big part of the end game logic,” says Gerighty. “The Dark Zone is all about that special stuff that you can’t get outside. But there are unique elements located outside of the Dark Zone: they’re not necessarily more powerful - they’re just unique.”

Now the end game has crept into the conversation there’s the obvious subject of multi-party raids. Players are easily able to get into small co-op groups of four people – you can matchmake in safe houses in the Dark Zone as well as call in friends when starting missions. But how about larger quests which will require several groups working together – the likes of Destiny’s Vault of Glass or King’s Fall. “I’d love that to happen,” is all Gerighty will say.

Given the huge amount of stuff still to be revealed, and the differing reactions to the beta, what did the four-day test actually show? “It was genuinely back-end testing of the stability of the servers, that was the number one goal,” says Gerighty. “Obviously there are different goals from the publisher side, from marketing, but for [the development team], we managed three times the amount of concurrency than we were aiming for. It looked good, it was stable, there was very little queuing. There were issues we picked up on; another purpose of a beta is, okay, what are people going to find and exploit? All of those things were part of the experience. It’s been really useful for us. You never know how something experimental like the Dark Zone is going to work.”

Throughout the interview Gerighty keeps pressing home the point that there’s so much yet to find out – both for players and for the development team. Although the beta taught us a lot, this is only the beginning of the process. “The game director has been balancing the game for the past four months,” he says. “We’re making sure at the highest level – level 30 - a team of four players, if they do the events, if they’re specced out like this, how’s it going to play, how will it feel? I think the building blocks are fundamentally sound, but I don’t think we’ll stop balancing it – even post-launch. It’s something we’re going to have to keep an eye on and make sure that it makes sense and it’s fun at every single level and scaling point.”

Surely this is something the team must have learned from looking across at Destiny? “I’ve played a fair amount of Destiny - I like it very much,” says Gerighty. “The thing I thought was brave was not being attached to how the game launched, and being able to evolve. It’s not a lesson we’ve necessarily taken on, but it’s very modern, it’s the way the industry is going. The last game I worked on, the Crew, that’s changed massively since its launch".

“I’m so excited by this brave new world - but daunted as well. You used to launch a game then go on holiday for a few weeks, now it never stops.”
Click to expand...

















i'm so ready.
 
H

Helznicht

Member
I wonder how scaling will work in the DZ? I know the DZ changing once you hit 30, but up till then.

Is the DZ split up into sections getting harder and harder (like zones outside the DZ)? Or does the entire DZ scale to to the player (or I should say when you enter, you get put into an appropriate level DZ server.

If the latter, how will groups be handled? What level of the DZ are we in if our group is made up of level 5's and level 25's
 
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