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jp's The Division 2 (PS4)

[April 28, 2023 06:47:34 PM]

I think I've played something like 10 hours of this. I spent most of my time advancing the story and then doing side missions in one of the city districts.

It's a really fun game! It took me a while to wrap my head around the aiming controls/feel, importance of cover, and so on (too many Destiny-years to undo). But, once I felt comfortable with the game I was able to relax and enjoy the experience.

The game is, like Destiny, a sort-of-MMO shooter - there's lots of social elements (that I did not really explore), but also what seems like a long-grind (levels) that also has an equipment/gear grind attached. Weapons drop with different stats and quality, there are tiers for rarity, items can have special boosts and stuff. All of this is neat - I changed weapons around as new ones dropped just to see how they felt to shoot and so on - but it's also pretty standard.

What I enjoyed most was the progression that exists in the city - it really makes you feel like you're helping to make a difference as you complete side quests, collect resources and donate them, and so on. It's the main reason I didn't mainline as much of the campaign as I could - I wanted to experience the broader parts of the game as well.

That being said, as I played and mentally compared to Destiny I had an insight - this might be unfair and/or incorrect, since after all, I did not complete the campaign or play significant parts of it BUT...after a while I realized that the combat scenarios while fun and interesting were become very familiar... Sure, enemies might have different weapons, more health, or even "special things" like shields BUT, because the game is rooted in (near-now) reality there are lots of things it cannot do. The game isn't fantastic/fantasy the way destiny is - so it's constrained by it's near-now realism. So, the design team doesn't really have opportunities to experiment with crazy opponents that do weird nonsense that is still interesting (like the fallen that split into two enemies in destiny, enemies that fly around, weird weapons that have fantastical effects, etc.). In this sense, for me, this game could not achieve that variety of setting, gameplay and gunplay that Destiny has.

Now, I could be wrong - maybe mechanically it's all there - just dressed different (drones that fly! lasers! dream/nightmare sequences), but I don't think so. Enemies are always the same and there aren't that many interesting gameplay differences between them. EXCEPT, maybe there will be in the weapons? Destiny enemies are always the same in each of their attacks - they don't benefit from the variety of weapons players can equip (pvp is different, obviously), so perhaps The Division 2 gets at that variation with equipped weaponry?

Another thing I was impressed by was the game's onboarding. Destiny currently feels like a mess - it's hard to tell someone completely new to the game where to start, what to do, etc. And here, I felt like I could figure out what to do - what doing a certain activity would result in for me in terms of the game's progression and so on. Most of the map was blocked off for me - which helps with the onboarding for sure - and perhaps it makes more sense because the campaign seems much more central to the overall experience? Destiny having multiple campaign DLC stuff taking place at the same time doesn't help matters either...

Oh, the UI for the game was also really good - a bit small at times for me, but I was surprised by how readable and easy-to-figure out things were. This is in contrast to one of the Ghost Recon games (Wildlands?) I played which was going fine until the game opened up and then... well, that's when I bailed.