My thoughts on your Post. (Gaming)

by TheeChaos , Thursday, March 10, 2016, 10:33 (3184 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

I caved and bought the Division yesterday. Thanks to a perfect storm of events (late evening nap + sick daughter who wouldn't sleep for more than 20 minutes at a time) I ended up playing the game from about 1am-5am, so I'm starting to get a feel for how it all works. Some initial thoughts jump out to me (mix of positive and negative):

I hope your daughter gets to feeling better!!

* No story is better than a really bad story

Destiny has taken plenty of knocks for its lack of story or character development, and rightfully so. While the Division clearly makes an effort to establish characters with motive and personality, and have you develop a relationship with them, I've already found myself wishing the game had a Destiny-like void in that department. The writing in the Division is that bad. I'm talking worst of the worst, overblown dialog that flipflops between painfully cliche and utter nonsense. Making things worse is the fact that the player character never says a word, never reacts to anything these idiots are rambling on about. I've already begun skipping cutscenes because what little info they communicate about the plot just isn't worth sitting through the horrible dialog and voice acting.

The Story does suck. "There is a virus, people die, you are secret division man going into new york" is about all the backstory you get. The intels/collectibles offer alot of insight as to what is actually going on and the Echoes are a pretty cool feature to learn about smaller events that happened. I came to a food truck in the street that had an echo. There was food and dead people all around. After playing the echo and hearing the voices and seeing the gangs come and attack, pretty cool IMO. Plus it kind of has a sandlike reaction when you walk through them =]

* This game NEEDS to be played with other people, which they make easy to do

Missions start and end seamlessly; the squad is never broken up or warped to different parts of the map. Missions end in such a way that you just leave the area and are back into the main patrol spaces.
Overall, I found it to be a smoother and more well thought out co-op experience than Destiny. You can matchmake to do any activity you like, then leave the group or keep playing with them without ever "bouncing back to orbit" or any similar breaks in gameplay.

THIS! SO MUCH. I love how you integrated New York is. You fight through relatively long ( at least on hard) missions up into buildings and down into subways, but once you are done you are free to explore. Some of your Shorter missions force you to walk out the way you came in. The longer missions usually have a shortcut back to the streets to get you back into the fight without loading screens or mission selection.