henke on 15/12/2017 at 06:51
Yeah, this thing. I think there's enough of us playing it now that it needs a thread.
[video=youtube;7oXSfUzjjV8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oXSfUzjjV8[/video]
I don't like Diablolikes and this looked like a generic cover-shooter so I wasn't expecting much from it, yet I let Malf talk me into it, and I'm kinda surprised at how much I'm enjoying it. It looks fantastic, first of all. I remember seeing the first gorgeous trailer and thinking it was the usual Ubisoft bullshots, but y'know what? It really does look that good. Secondly the world feels very open. Not every building can be entered or every rooftop scaled, but enough of them can that it lends a sense of logical realness to the world. Lastly, and most importantly, the combat is actually fun. Enemies charge you and throw grenades, which means you can't sit in one spot too long, so you do end up switching cover a lot, flanking enemies, flushing them out with grenades. If you're playing against higher-level enemies they often turn into unfun bulletsponges to fight, but as long as you stick with missions at your level, it's good stuff.
Speaking of levels, everyone please post their current level(and keep it updated, if your wouldn't mind) to facilitate better coop.
CURRENT LEVEL: 12
Since Thirith is away this weekend, let's wait a bit before doing another session. Best if everyone stays on somewhat the same level if our coop sessions are gonna be any fun. I might actually start a secondary character just to play more on my own.
Malf on 15/12/2017 at 08:52
I was playing last night on my main character. There's a new "Global Event" active for the next 4-5 days called "Strike". The main thing this adds while active is that all enemies explode on death. It's ace fun! There's all sort of mini-goals associated with this, such as killing enemies by killing their friends nearby, harder versions in missions where if you take too many shots too quickly, you explode (you don't necessarily die, but you take a wodge of damage), a goal for killing enemies with your explosion, and all sorts of fun stuff.
It actually tempted me back in to the Dark Zone last night, and man, is that fantastic. Massive have saved their best mapping efforts for this area, and there are a LOT more rooftops to clamber over, buildings to explore and sewers to delve. On top of which, the added tension of it being a PvP live area makes the game incredibly tense.
Basically, any large drops you get while in the Dark Zone are contaminated, and the only way to get them out is through helicopter extraction.
This involves finding one of the helicopter landing pads littered throughout the zone, then firing off a flare to call in the chopper. This starts a minute long countdown, during which the extraction zone may or may not get assaulted by enemy NPCs. Once it arrives, it lowers a rope for you to attach your loot to and starts another 30 second countdown.
But that's not the only worry; every other player in the zone will know an extraction has been called in and where, and this may draw in other players who also want to get gear extracted... or who may wait until the last minute, kill everyone else around the extraction zone and claim the loot for themselves!
One tactic I've found that seems to work is to wait until someone kicks off an extraction, then start one somewhere else at the same time. This seems to reduce the likelihood of other players coming to your extraction.
Of course, not everyone is going to go rogue, and none of my extractions last night got hijacked. But the tension of not knowing who is going to go rogue is sublime.
Oh, and in the Dark Zone, if players have their mics live and aren't in groups, chat audio is positional :)
Jeshibu on 15/12/2017 at 16:01
Nice! I'll have to wait til Henke and Thirith join again because I think I'm already level 14 though.
Is dark zone viable with a non-maxed character?
Malf on 15/12/2017 at 18:38
I think so, yeah. I seem to remember taking a jaunt in there pre-30. And a quick google reveals that yeah, totally doable.
henke on 15/12/2017 at 19:27
Quote Posted by Jeshibu
Nice! I'll have to wait til Henke and Thirith join again because I think I'm already level 14 though.
Great, thanks.
Malf, what level is your lower-leveled character?
Malf on 15/12/2017 at 20:18
Same as Jesh, 14.
Thirith on 18/12/2017 at 08:24
I played some with henke and (briefly) Malf yesterday, and this morning I did some solo play. It took me a while to warm to the game originally, and in this case that's almost entirely down to me starting off playing the game with a gamepad; I tend to prefer gamepad controls for third-person games, added to which I was perfectly happy with how the first-person but otherwise similar Destiny controlled on a gamepad. However, in the case of The Division, I found the difference between controller and KBAM to be night and day. It's not a game I'd binge on, but for the occasional couple of hours it's very enjoyable, doubly so with friends.
I do wish, though, that they'd take the world they've build (I'm talking primarily about visuals here, since the writing is drably mediocre at best and downright dire in cutscenes) and use it for different gameplay. The desolate, snowy cityscape calls for something with a better sense of ebb and flow, with periods of next to no combat where you're simply exploring and getting a sense of the place.
Malf on 18/12/2017 at 09:41
That's all there Thirith, I think you may need to just play a bit more. Most combat can be avoided in the main PvE areas and there's plenty of nooks and crannies to explore.
Also, have you seen any Echoes yet? They're cool little slices of time, holographically reconstructed. Kinda like "ghosts" in the Shock games. Most are just standalone vignettes, but some have minor interactions available and lead you on to other places of interest.
Mind you, I can't claim that the writing ever gets massively compelling, and the premise remains uncomfortable throughout. But there's definitely some good exploration of the mentality of atrocity, especially when regarding the Cleaner faction. There's some downright chilling audio logs associated with them.
I sunk some time in to the new West Side Pier content last night, and was delighted to find that it's more than simply a series of horde modes. There's a whole area to explore with new phone logs and an interesting dynamic mission structure, where events flare up on a regular basis. I as very impressed, especially given that this is free content. Difficulty-wise, it's somewhere between the normal play area and the Dark Zone. There's no active PvP like in the DZ, but it's nice to have a high-end area somewhere between the two.
It's also nice that you're fighting all the factions at once, with Rioters, Cleaners, Rikers and LMB all mixed in together. To be honest, the game needs some of that, as the faction segregation in the main play area can get a little tedious, and the LMB alone can be a bit of a pain in the ass to fight at top level. This is especially true in missions and the Underground, where the difficulty spike between Rikers and LMB is noticeable and uncomfortable. So peppering LMB troops in with the others adds some spice, while not being overwhelmingly difficult.
I also had a go at one of the horde modes, and it was pretty fun! I'm not sure it's something I'll play regularly, but it's nice to have some further variety in the game.
And a little thing, but one that made me appreciate just how incredible the graphics are in this game:
I spotted what I thought was a sign on a building while exploring last night, and gave it a shot to see if the light would break (as so many neon signs do in The Division). This one didn't pop or fizzle at all, and on getting closer, I realised it wasn't a sign but one of those convex mirrors. My brain initially just wrote it off assuming it would be a flat, static texture. But as I wandered past it, I noticed movement in the mirror, so I wandered back and forth in front of it. This game has working convex mirrors. That's pretty mind-blowing from a technical perspective, and something I can't recall having seen in a game before.
It's a shame you guys are probably going to miss out on the Global Event that's happening at the moment, as its made a lot of content that's usually quite hard a lot easier thanks to exploding enemies damaging their buddies. I'll be sad to see it go, as it's been very fun, if wildly unrealistic. Then again, the game doesn't really pride itself on realism, a fact that becomes apparent when you start exploring the Talent tree.
Edit: I also took some screengrabs while in the Dark Zone, which I'll upload once I find out where Uplay squirrels them away. The easiest way to describe the DZ is that it's The Division... amplified. Those little slices of horror you occasionally come across in the main area are exaggerated to shocking levels in the DZ.
Thirith on 18/12/2017 at 10:11
Quote Posted by Malf
That's all there Thirith, I think you may need to just play a bit more. Most combat can be avoided in the main PvE areas and there's plenty of nooks and crannies to explore.
Also, have you seen any Echoes yet? They're cool little slices of time, holographically reconstructed. Kinda like "ghosts" in the Shock games. Most are just standalone vignettes, but some have minor interactions available and lead you on to other places of interest.
I think we saw one of the echoes when we played just after I got back from my holidays, but none since. I can imagine that there are cool nooks and crannies; in general I think that the Ubisoft games tend to do really well with incidental details and worldbuilding. It's just a shame that they're consistently much weaker when it comes to overall worldbuilding, which is often clunky and hamfisted, and that their game designs make it all too easy to develop a kind of tunnel vision where you're always on the way to the next map marker and you practically need to ignore the game itself in order to enjoy the gorgeous worlds. (It was an eye opener for me to play
Assassin's Creed Syndicate and make myself walk everywhere until I'm familiar with the surroundings, rather than just run all the time. It changed Victorian London from an OCD-nightmare map with icons into a real, astonishingly atmospheric place.)
Malf on 18/12/2017 at 10:21
To be honest, while it initially seems to be an exercise in clearing icons from the map, it's a lot less important here than in other Ubi games.
It's very much a loot-grinder mind you, but with significantly better gun combat than Borderlands and Shadow Warrior.
I hope you guys persist with it, as I'm very keen to try some of the high-end activities in a group.
