E3 2015 Preview: Tom Clancy’s The Division

I didn’t expect to be so excited by Rainbow Six: Siege after attending a pre-E3 Ubisoft event yesterday.

I also didn’t think I’d be so underwhelmed by Tom Clancy’s The Division either.

After getting hands-on time with the game for the first time, I’ve a lot of nice things to say about the upcoming multiplayer RPG, but ultimately, more concerns.

In the fifteen minutes we spent in-game, my team of three was tasked to enter an area called “The Dark Zone”, an area previously used as a quarantined zone by the army. As the catastrophic, apocalypse-like events of The Division unfolded, the army was forced to evacuate the site, leaving behind a cavalcade of high-tech weapons and supplies.

Our mission during the demo was simple: enter the zone, secure the supplies and get out. Above all else, survive.

Like this, even though it’s nothing like the gameplay I experienced:

There are elements of The Division that are absolutely amazing. Hitting the Xbox One’s menu button was something I did over and over again as it brought to life the mesmerising in-game map, projecting a virtual (decimated) city above the ground I walked upon. Skills were also a delight; one of my team members frequently triggered his Pulse to identify and track other humans and NPCs exploring and attempting to survive on the server we played upon.

It didn’t take long before that skill proved useful and we encountered another group.

Scurrying across the wasteland of The Dark Zone were the same flamethrower-wielding enemies we saw in The Division last year, called Cleaners. They weren’t alone; a new faction called Rikers – sadly, not named after my favourite Starfleet Commander, but rather Rikers Island. The Rikers are former inmates who used to be locked within the former correctional facility.

Encountering the Rikers, we had two options: to ally with the gang or to mow them down and take their things. Having just seen Mad Max, it seems, my team decided to do the latter. Another teammate activated his Turret skill, spawning a sentry at his feet and then rolling to cover as it laid waste to the Rikers. I helped by adding my Seeker Bomb – a cute, Destiny’s ghost-like bomb that hunts baddies for you – to the mix, watching it roll up to survivors and blow up upon contact.

So yeah, skills are fun. So too is the game’s cover system, a “press A to stick”-like bit of functionality that lets you progress from cover to cover as you advance. I did so to get into a prime position at another group of Rikers and took careful aim…

… and that’s where it kind of got bland.

The Rikers became nothing more than simple bullet sponges, running around with level numbers and signifiers above their heads. As I moved out from cover and began to spray the group with my weapon, numbers lit up the sky in a show that, yes, I had indeed connected with my automatic. Wave after wave of Riker fell to the ground until The Division had enough; we then ran over to the glowing exclamation point for a quick “Take all” and were on our way.

Now, it could just be that we had fifteen minutes to fit The Division’s gameplay in, but I wasn’t getting any of the game’s narrative from the game itself. Rather, I got short snippets of what was supposed to be going on from a Ubisoft dev filling in the blanks beside me. I couldn’t help but feel like I was playing Ubi’s version of Destiny: run here, shoot that, we’ll explain it later. Trust us.

Moving into the next square, this is where Ubisoft had our group of three adventurers take on the two other journalist teams.

I think.

We ran into an area that had six people shooting at one another. Naturally, we just decided to shoot things too. My screen was treated with warnings of “Gone rogue” as I shot, and I was a bit surprised – there was nothing happening that was telling me I wasn’t just supposed to go killy-killy.

Anyway, we were told at that point we were to extract ourselves from the situation, and that’s when it got even crazier. Three teams of three journalists basically descended upon one another, shooting and deploying skills and ripping it up. I killed just as many people as killed me… and that was a lot. Death really didn’t mean a thing at that stage, with respawns happening about ten seconds after a death.

It was very rinse, repeat: run into the area, help your team, shoot at things, grab cover, die.

The team member who calls an extraction is the one that has to survive; if they made it to the chopper, all’s well. If they don’t, you’re back to square one. It’s a neat mechanic that might work when you’re up against NPCs, but with that many live players about, no one even got close to a copter. It was like we were playing a scripted event, but none of us had bothered to read the script.

There’s a bunch of time before we’ll get The Division, so who knows what the future we’ll bring. Rest assured, we’ll be keeping an eye on it. The game hits on 8 March on Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC.