So what happened with The Division?

Never played it but from the outside it just looks like the usual MMO treadmill without any semblance of the self determination that was sorta promised beforehand and lacked any sort of dynamic in the world as well.
If I want to farm equipment I might as well turn on Diablo 2 or 3 and have more fun going from zero to an apocalypse on two legs.
I'll give it the new DLC though that blizzard gameplay looks cool as fuck.

How to hook console casuals if you are Bungie:

Step 1) Make some decent games 20 years ago

Step 2) Make sure they know your company name

Step 3) Put that name on the box of whatever you make in the future

Step 4) Pay journos to shill your game, advertise heavily. Marketing budget should be at leas a third of the overall development budget, if not half

Step 5) Hire a current pop-culture celebrity to half ass some voice over.

Step 6) $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

That would certainly get initial sales but that wouldn't make people continually play every day… right?

Actually, nothing would surprise me at this point.

No, the skinnerbox game design gets people continually playing.

Everyone I know who plays destiny cannot explain why they enjoy it. They agree the game is a barebones mess. Even when they get bored of it and stop, as soon as a new expansion is out they jump right back on it again and play it for a few months.

the setting?

As someone that shat on it in the early beta days, this game post 1.4 is actually pretty good. They took the shit loot system and bullshit bullet sponges and revamped everything while fixing alot of bugs that I'm not aware of because I started playing after 1.4 got the game for like 12$. The systems now are in place where enemies die in a natural way in the sense that the only bullet sponges are very specific, boss-like mobs that have weak points that you need to hit for massive damage and everything else with the right setup can go down in less than a single magazine or a shot if you have my MMR setup which is going away in 1.6, fuck you for ruining alphabridge.

1.4 I believe introduced the new loot system and world levels kind of like diablo 3's system of torment levels, except its not bullshit most of the time because they didn't make mobs have a billion health. Getting to max item level is really fucking easy if you don't care about optimization but the real meat is unfortunately behind RNG to get your armor sets and weapons and hoping RNG gives you what you need. You can tweak some of the stats on items, but only one line when there's about 3-4 per item so gotta hope you get what you need. Most items have set lines, so it isn't as bad as you would think, but if you're going for that +1% increase in efficiency, you're gonna have a bad time. 1.5 introduced Survival and it was fun at first, but then it became kinda stale just due to the fact that all the items placed on the map are static and not randomized. My friend and I had this route we'd take through the south end of town and we'd clean out a really awesome cache of supplies before hitting up the end-game of survival. It's atmospheric as fuck and what the main game should have been in terms of environment, but I guess its better than nothing.

The game is alot better than it was before, PvP is still a fucking joke due to the dark zone, though apparently 1.6 is supposed to get some structured pvp of some sort going, but I don't know how the fuck that's gonna work and with how stupid the pvp meta is in the game, you're better off just waiting for an actual R6/Ghost recon game. If you get a chance to play all the new stuff, I'd recommend it but I also understand the main reasons most of Holla Forums won't: Ubishit and paying to play games.

It's like gambling addiction. I wouldn't be surprised if the shitty RNG system is based on research on how to get people addicted to gambling without them noticing it.

b-but it's biological warfare… r-right guys??? totally d-d-different!!!

Its the blizzard/winter setting i want really. Winter survival is rad as fuck but how many games do it over 'generic island/forest/nuclear brown waste'?

Is it actually decent right now? Is it worth getting on sale for PC? I like games with Christmas settings.

As much as people shit on it here TLoU has some comfy snow levels.

Also its multiplayer is what The Division's multiplayer should have been like.

A different kind of terrible and uninspired?

In what ways? It's the best TPS to come out in the last 4 years, but underrated since it was more known for it's tumblr-tier campaign and the fact that it's a console exclusive.

I've got the game on xbox one and I can easily find random people to do the daily missions and the underground dlc.
If you don't like the game you can still get a refund.

Uh…?

Trump divided them.

There's only the game and the season pass. No micro-transactions, no pay-to-win stuff.

I had hope for it and preordered it to play with my friends, then I played the beta and cancelled my preorder. It was boring and repetitive at the start, and none of the class abilities felt like they did anything.

...

You just described a bad loot system.

The Divsion is a bad game. Why would you ever think otherwise? At a basic level, the game wordfilters "gamergate" and "sjws," so good luck pretending the developers don't have some kind of agenda.

Furthermore, there was one huge issue with the gameplay loop of receiving a quest, completing a quest, and turning it in, which was only exacerbated by the glut of players at launch.
Do you see this? The game's servers hold hundreds of people and they all had to get quests from the main NPCs by using a SINGLE terminal. There were "emergent" quests you could find in the danger zones, I believe, but most new players are going to try getting quests from the people who give them rather than venturing into uncharted territory on their own. I don't know if this has been patched, but, given how much AAA games bank on opening week sales to make their money back, the damage was done.

The marketing was bizarre, too. The Division is a game where you survive in the harsh winter of a neglected urban centre by using wacky futuristic weapons and abilities like heat-seeking grenades and deployable shields, but one of the biggest ad campaigns leading up to its launch asked the players to imagine all of the REAL VIRTUAL NPCs who died in the fictional plague that overtook New York City. Embed related. As far as cinematic trailers go, it's pretty good - if heavyhanded - but the GRIMDARK MUH DEAD BABIES theme really clashes with the usual Ubishit gameplay loop of claiming towers to unlock sections of the map and using wacky guns and smartphone-controlled drones in co-op to take down the most well-equipped raiders the world has ever seen.

Oh, yeah, it has tablet integration, too. For some reason.

People who still play Destiny at this point are probably clinically addicted to it. Bungie has stated in no uncertain terms they use behavioural psychology to make players compelled to continue playing. Everything from the timing of gameplay loops (get your daily quests done, goy! if you aren't, then you're permanently behind!) to the visual design (either every screen or almost every screen in the game has a horizontal bar across it which fills up when you shoot things and/or complete objectives). There's a guy who used to show up to the hobby events at one of the universities in my city. He's a smart guy: good at the tabletop games we play, PhD student in a real STEM field, you name it. Active, too, so I know his brain isn't being choked by fat or other hormones.

When Destiny was about 6 months old, he mentioned he had picked it up for his XBone and played it a lot. I asked him how much, and he told me he'd probably put about 550 hours into it, and still loved playing it. Anyone can fall for this stuff.

Playerbase is almost dead.
Don't bother.

The game has been scrapped and redesigned a couple of times and it shows. It is not cohesive. The Division is simply a bad game. The DLCs add nothing except useless game modes like Survival.

It was shit fam, it really was but you need to look at current patch and not the shit that failed at launched which was a fucking lot, don't get me wrong. This game was the biggest fucking pile at launch.
Everything you've just mentioned has been fixed/changed for the better. And if you're gonna get butthurt that you can't insult people on the internet with specific words, you need to expand your vocab.

Jesus fuck, i'm starting to sound like a shill, but you faggots need to read up on current happenings on games before you spout bullshit. Game has had an upward player trend since the 1.4 patch came out. Not nearly initial launch numbers, but it's getting there. I expect another surge when 1.6 comes out.

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As someone who bought the season pass (It was my first ubisoft game, so sue me)

It had the ubisoft problems I heard about (buggy, sloppy coding, memory leaks, design flaws, client side pvp hacks) along with the usual new MMO issues (nothing to do at max level but endless grind or pvp, weapon imbalances etc, tuning issues)

So while everything looked lovely, you could see behind the curtain they were scrambling because they probably had this rushed out in a late beta build, because the marketing had already started.

Slowly they ended up addressing game issues one by one, and now, the game is in a functional state, whether you like the 3rd person cover shooter with some gear whoring and bullet sponges is up to taste though. And like most online games, playing alone isnt really the point of the game.

This is the Division OP, this should answer all your questions.

Game was okish on release, but then they made it a trolling/griefing simulator because there is almost no downsides to going rogue unless you extremely suck at it, when you can't tell if somebody has gone rogue until they're almost fucking you and have 5 shotgun blasts in your ass

Coupled with all of said griefers aimbotting in the dark zone it was a trolling paradise and everyone bailed

After MONTHS they removed most of the aimbots (And only gave the griefers a week suspension for using them) and "Made the game better" by making the enemies take on average 4x more bullets to kill and 10x harder to grind for loot and also hurt you 2x more

And said "expansion" for the division is a H1Z1 clone where you can only see five fucking feet in front of you and are always freezing to death and dying from some mystery illness caused by a cut

Oh and said survival sim you don't get to use any of the gear or skills you earned through the game, making the whole leveling system pointless. I guess that, what, 4th helicopter crash you've been in has made you retarded for a few days at a time

Game is being abandoned anyways because Tom Clancy african simulator is soon which is just the division but with wide open deserts

This game wouldn't be so bad if enemies were not such bullet sponges

Yeah the first few weeks were like that since they never thought multiple people might want to turn in a quest at the same time lol

And I just looked it up, The Last Stand is just 8 vs 8 deathmatch and nothing else

Fuck I regret giving Jewbisoft my money

It was a DLC, Survival was the name iirc. It's like a survival game but one that's actually finished and has polish one it. If it was released as it's own game I'd play it, but since it's part of The Division I won't touch.

But yeah The Division still has it's playerbase and the game has gotten mildly better from what I've seen but you can only polish a turd so much.

I never said anything about the bullshit that censorship is, but if you're singling out two words that the faggots don't wanna hear that you can't use, increase your vocab.

I bought it for 20$, since I like looty shooty games and gun autism, but fuck me, I would've bought it sooner if I knew what kind of absolute anal annihilation reddit was in about you killing someone in the Dark Zone.

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Played a free weekend maybe a month ago or more.
Sure it's feels like a treadmill, but god damn the movement and the shooting feel amazing.
I'd venture to say it's the best third person shooter on the market.
I'm probably going to buy it once it's on sale again.

Just got it since it was on sale. I probably should have listened to that other user, because the game isnt bad, but I'm feeling sleepy playing it. I wonder if it was just meant to be another open world third person shooter with the RPG elements slapped on at the last second to compete with Destiny or Borderlands. At least it runs good and looks nice even on the medium to low settings.

To be fair I have quite a few friends who play it on the regular, so that might also be a reason why I'm considering buying it.

Well it certainly aint a bad game, if you had fun with your friends you may as well grab it.

Have you tried the dark zone yet? That shit becomes really fun if you git gud or play with a group. It's as if you got every one of those shitty open world early access survival games, but removed the shit part by bringing in your own gear, instead of finding a fork, while the other guys all find AKs.

Hit the nail on the head as to why mustard race shitposters will never like it.

I'm only an hour in, I dont know when that part will come up.

It's shit mostly because of the god awful controls.

The dark zone is sortof the endgame area, it's PVP enabled and best done at max gearlevel, or level 14, since that's the top limit of the halfway bracket. Anyways, you can kill other players and steal the shit they've looted while in the dark zone from them. A decent chunk of the fun comes from how asspained people get when you sneak up on them, dump a mag in their face then steal their shit.