I played the beta for 9+ hours, most of that time was playing the single player missions and side missions. I spent 1-2 hours in the Dark Zone area of the game. Did I have fun playing the beta? Yes, I had fun playing the single player story missions and learning about the story but as I state down below, things did get repetitive. Did I have fun playing in the Dark Zone? No, no I did not, read down below for more about that too.
Here are my pros, ok's and cons of the beta:
PROS
- First and foremost, there are no radio towers! Yay Ubisoft, thank you!
- The environment looks really good, not as good as the E3 2013 trailer that wow'd us all, but that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone these days. Side-note: I have an old graphics card so don't go by what I say, watch the videos on YouTube of others playing the game on better computers.
- You can have two primary weapons, along with a secondary and grenades. There are a lot of weapons to choose from and that is good. You'll definitely need all the weapons you can get as enemies take a lot of bullets to put down (see con below about this).
- Pro-tip: Make sure not to have two of the same weapon type for both of your primary weapon slots, meaning do not have two assault rifles, two battle rifles, etc as the extra bullets/clips you have on you will get used by both primary weapons.
- Guns have a learning curve, meaning they have recoil that you'll need to learn how to control, to be good with them.
- No crashes and not much lag at all (both single player and Dark Zone for me). I have an old PC by today's standards and I was using Uplay and I still had no problems.
- The story interests me and the beta made me want to find out how Manhattan got to the way it looks in the game. It makes me wonder, is the whole world like this or just Manhattan?
- Dynamic weather and the snow looks cool.
OK's
- The cover-to-cover system feels ok (it doesn't bother me but I can see how it may bother other PC gamers). The cover system feels a lot like it was copy-pasted straight out of Watch Dogs (on PC).
- When you're standing on something above the ground (a box/crate, car, etc), you can't fall off the edges. You have to press a button to go down. This may be a good or bad thing.
- I actually like the UI, it seems new and fresh but I have heard others say the UI was too crowded.
CONS
- The enemy AI is bad/dumb. What do I mean by that? Enemies will at times do dumb things and get themselves killed, such as run right at you with a baseball bat as you shoot them dead. Also, enemies do not use cover effectively.
- All of the enemies (the bad guys on the streets, not the cleaners group) look the same (their player models). Is this because the beta is just in a smaller area of the map so you're facing off against one group of rioters?
- To me, the gameplay feels eerily similar to Watch Dogs, with the camera behind the player, the running and combat, although the shooting is better in The Division. I even went back to Watch Dogs on PC to test this and it does feel similar.
- Maybe because it's a beta and they didn't allow much to be accessible, but it felt like I was doing the same thing over and over (go here, kill bad guys, go back to base and re-stock and clean up my inventory, go back out and run to a location, kill more bad guys and go back to base if I needed to, repeat this over and over). It got repetitive real quick for me. Will the full retail game also be like this?
- As many others have said, the enemies are bullet sponges, as in they take a lot of bullets to put down. If you run into a group of enemies by yourself, get ready to possibly change to your second primary weapon to finish them off. I do like games where enemies take a few shots to kill and are not like Battlefield Hardline, where the time-to-kill is way too short, but The Division's time-to-kill is crazy long. Others may like this though.
- Apparently a lot of the bad guys are named "Alex" as after I've taken out one enemy, another enemy shouts that I've killed Alex. I've actually heard this line twice when going against a group of four enemies.
- Running too close to civilians will have them say something similar to "Don't point that [my weapon] at me" even when I am not aiming or looking in their direction.
- The Dark Zone doesn't have many AI enemies. Is this the developers trying to force player vs player battles?
- There is basically no way to stealth kill enemies. If you get too close they'll alert everyone about your presence.
Dark Zone
Do not play in the Dark Zone (DZ) solo. You definitely need friends/squadmates to watch your back when in the DZ. When playing solo in the DZ you will most likely get killed by random people (other solo players or squads). Even if you have not picked up any DZ items, people will kill you for no reason. This happened to me countless times during the 1-2 hours of my time in the DZ.
I see some people on YouTube are crying about the consequences of going rogue in the DZ. Well there's an easy solution to your problem, don't be an asshole and go rogue, it's as simple as that.
Conclusion
I won't be pre-ordering this game or buying it at release as it's not for me but I'm sure some others will love it and have fun in it. Good luck to you. I am interested in the single-player story so I may pick it up when the price goes down to $20 or lower, then get it to play the story.
If you played the beta, what do you think about it? If you haven't played the beta but have seen footage on YouTube or read about it, what are your thoughts about the game?
One final note, I'm not sure how anyone can say "The Division is one of the best games I’ve played in a long time" by just playing the beta, unless you're getting the game for free from Ubisoft and want to kiss some ass, or you're getting paid by Ubisoft and you want to kiss some ass. Don't trust YouTubers.
The two images in this post are from the The Division site.