Game Review - Tom Clancy's The Division 2

Game Review: Tom Clancy's The Division 2 by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft

History will remember
Washington D.C. is on the brink of collapse. Lawlessness and instability threaten our society, and rumours of a coup in the Capitol are only amplifying the chaos. All active Division agents are desperately needed to save the city before it's too late
In Tom Clancy’s The Division®2, the fate of the free world is on the line.
Lead a team of elite agents into a post-pandemic Washington DC to restore order and prevent the collapse of the city.

The Division 2 is of course a sequel to The Division, released 2016 and today still a decent looter-shooter. When version 2 of something comes out, we all hope it will have all kinds of improvements. Sadly, The Division 2 does just one and a half things right and everything else wrong. It is still a decently playable looter shooter, but if you are coming from The Division, just about everything will be in some way worse.

If you never saw The Division, then it will probably be okay. For solo players, combat will feel like a vast improvement because of the one thing that really made solo play irritating, which was the bullet sponge bosses that just walked up to you and shot you in the face, and until the late game you had to cheese them to win.

This part is mostly the same:

• Most fights feel identical. You take cover and shoot the enemy.
• In the instanced locations, you clear the enemies, advance until another wave of enemies are triggered, then usually you have to run away immediately or they will just flank you and shoot you or have bullet-sponge enemies or bosses walk to your location and flush you out.
• This really feels unsatisfying since the technique to make the fight "exciting" is to have the invisible trigger really close to where the enemy will suddenly just materialize and rush you. If you don't move right away you usually end up having to do the long tedious encounter from the very start once they kill you.

Here are the key things The Division 2 did right:

• Bosses are more reasonable.
• While they have a lot of health, it feels like they have way less than what they had in Division 1.
• Bosses will take cover. They don't just ignore cover and rush up to you knowing that they have enough health to survive everything.
• They hit hard but not stupidly hard, so you can sort of exchange fire with them.
• Broader variety of skills.
• Although a lot of skills are generally rubbish, compared to others which have more general utility, there is a wide variety, and it can make team play much more interesting.
• For solo players, however, generally you will just need one or two and the others are highly situational.

Here's where The Division inexplicably screwed up:

• Zones feel boring.
• Missions are much less template compared to The Division, and that is a good thing. But where The Division tried to give a variety of mission types, The Division 2's new missions are basically extermination missions, though in a variety of locations.
• It doesn't feel like there are zones.
• In The Division, each zone had a small crew in each safehouse, and a different person running comms while you are on a mission in that zone. The curious personalities were interesting in their own right, and by having them each zone gave the game the opportunity to refresh your experience each time you unlocked a safehouse / zone.
• In The Division 2, that's all gone. Safehouses are empty and you get the same person running comms. Typically they just tell you more enemies are on the way, which your ISAC AI generally already tells you. All the flavour of a zone is gone.
• Story missions end up taking you to the same location but with different enemies -- this happens when the Black Tusk invade the map and basically take over the whole map. And somehow it still feels like the same fight even with different enemies.
• The story is lousy.
• When you first start, there'll be a few cutscenes, and you might get the impression that they have put a lot of effort into how they tell a story. But this is entirely deceptive.
• For example, you get a talk about needing to rescue someone's daughter. It feels like that's the start of a story arc. Except it's not. After that you just get voiceovers for just about every mission, even main story missions.
• The "story" seems to be about restoring the SHD network, but there are in fact very few missions about it and the most relevant piece of information about why it went down outside of Washington is in an optional collectible ECHO.
• You end up running around pacifying the hostiles in Washington. As soon as you do so, all your work is immediately undone with the introduction of World Tier 1 and the new Black Tusk enemies.
• The Division 1 had a stronger story arc despite more open world freedom. You could do anything in any order and piece together various aspects of the backstory of the Dollar Flu. And it all headed in the direction of finding a cure.
• The world feels more open but it is actually not.
• The most guidance you got in The Division 1 about how to proceed was getting the Base of Operations started. After that, you could basically do what you wanted in the order you wanted. If you followed the Main Quests you got more resources faster than doing the side quests, and got more amenities in the Base of Operations going. You choose what to unlock.
• In The Division 2, there's potentially lots to do, but you are handicapping yourself by stopping to do them.
• Key game systems like Recalibration and the various services of the staff you can recruit are locked behind certain Main Story quests. You can get a tutorial about something because it's apparently level appropriate, but actually not available until you do the appropriate Main Story quests.
• So in fact, the freedom of the open world works against you the player. You beeline the main quest to unlock things or you are just wasting time.
• Even World Tiers are locked behind finishing all the main story quests. Until then it appears that you are just stuck at level 30 and the range of gear available. All your effort is basically going nowhere in terms of character advancement such as gearing and specializations.
• End game gearing undermines all your efforts.
• In The Division 1, once you reached maximum level, gear starts to show a score instead, and as you play, you steadily got improvements.
• In The Division 2, once you unlock World Tiers, you are supposed to get better gear, but generally you do not.
• Many low-gear-score purple items are in fact far superior to higher-gear-score gold items (see picture below)
• You will throw away a lot of gear because they are the "wrong" type: not gold tier (so you cannot earn Expertise using it), not the correct set you are using, or still inferior to what you have. You can spend a lot of time playing and even ascending a couple of World Tiers and still get no real upgrades to your loadout.
• Meanwhile, you can somehow complete the main missions at a gear score over 100 points less than the World Tier. Is it luck, skill, or the irrelevance of gear score?
• Alternatively, you can ignore the gear chase and just follow the main story.
• When you complete certain main story missions, your World Tier automatically increases with no way to go back down. You will probably be theoretically under-geared now and expected to just craft a new set of stuff for yourself, completely wiping all the work you put in previously to assemble a set of gear that works well.
• Even if you don't think gear score matters a lot, you might as well collect items with a higher gear score. Once again, not beelining the main story simply wastes your time, undermining the apparent open world freedom.
• Events are locked behind paywalls and long quest chains.
• For example, for the Nexus Apparel Event, "While Apparent Event is live, you can collect Apparel Event keys by leveling up your Keener's Watch or purchase them to open Apparel event caches." The Keener's Watch requires not only the Warlords expansion, but completing that expansion quest chain. Which is long enough even with using the level 30 boost to skip the entire Washington area and go straight to the expansion.