The Division 2 Review: National Treasure

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is an exceptional video game.

Often I choose to belabor a point, craft a thesis, or reflect on a metaphor that inspires me to pour forth my thoughts for a review. It is easy to become wrapped up in the emotions and memories a game can trigger in you, especially after playing it for nearly 100 hours over the course of ten days. What made the game fun or memorable or horrible? What were the points that stand out vividly like the red-hot steel of a gun’s muzzle after eviscerating a room of spice-huffing Hyenas? The Division 2 speaks for itself and does so loudly with bravado and confidence.

“It will get better with time.” This ideology, this… justification is etched into the tombstones of failed or lackluster launches of looter shooters, or games as a service, or whatever one chooses to box them into. At launch we have seen the husk of a game shoved into the limelight far too early. The absence of a meaningful endgame that fails to provide reason for players to constantly return or a paltry amount of interesting content that infests a promising core gameplay loop have plagued this genre for years. And let’s be honest, sometimes the loot just plain sucks.

Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft faced this dilemma in March 2016 when The Division first launched to a millions-large crowd ravenous for an always online loot RPG grounded in a realistic setting. But those pillars were not in place. After reaching level 30, players were left to trudge the snowy, infected streets of New York City hunting for loot with little purpose. Few buffers were in place to provide Division Agents with much else to do aside from acquire slightly stronger gear to tackle repetitive content or risk slaughter in the unbalanced Dark Zone. “It will get better with time” I heard or was assured by the developers during their frequent update livestreams. Unfortunately, Destiny had already burned me enough; fool me once, and so on.

Eventually, however, The Division became a great video game. After the questionable missteps of Destiny 2 and the fractured state of Anthem, it’s plausible that most players would feel scorned and doubt any promises made, especially after the state The Division launched in. Thankfully (and with great joy), The Division 2 does not walk a similar path from those that came before it. It does not need time to be better. Players do not have to wait for latent greatness. Right now, on this very day, when you play The Division 2, you will be met with an exceptional video game.

Capitol Wasteland

When I think of The Division‘s visual identity it is crystallized in my mind, a perfect snow globe capturing the game’s essence. Set shortly after a devastating virus known as the Green Poison was released on Black Friday, players went to ground zero to unravel the mystery. New York City was devastated. Cars littered the endless city streets and monolithic skyscrapers caged players in like rats. Enemy factions roamed, tormenting citizens and small bands of government soldiers trying to hold things together.

Society was on the brink. And yet Christmas decorations still lined the streets. When the Green Poison struck, it halted daily life. There was barely enough time to escape. Definitely no time to take down tinsel and stars off the tree. The Division painted a bleak picture of what would happen when everything fell apart. Government failed and abandoned the dead in piles of body bags on the streets. The icy needles of winter bit at those without a home and the snow obscured a flamethrower-wielding Cleaner a block away.

As Division Agents, players are meant to be a beacon of hope. These secret government agents were only to be activated when the world was near collapse to maintain the status quo of the United States government. In The Division, the job was to hold it all together and rebuild the foundations.

Six months have passed and the snow has melted. For The Division 2, Massive is delivering a new purpose to players in the most logical locale in America: Washington, D.C.

There will be a group who laments the move from New York City to D.C. and I understand. The setting was distinct and unforgettable because it had never been done before. A first glance at D.C. in the summer makes it look like any other video game city, just with a lot more trash lining the streets. Until one has sunk their teeth into The Division 2, they can’t begin to understand the impact this shift has on the game as a whole.

After the initial prologue where your Agent is summoned to D.C. after a distress call, players walk into screen at what I assume is Arlington National Cemetery in full view of the White House as the game’s logo appears. The fade to black brings us on the heels of an abandoned Christmas market, red and green decorations blanket the surroundings as two men wearing gas masks kick a dead body. Upon returning the favor, players rush to the White House’s front lawn and shoot more of these Hyenas who are attempting to lay siege. A few more bodies later, friendlies put out a fire blocking the path and your new home is unlocked.

In The Division you were constantly beating back the opposition, desperately trying to maintain a hold. Maintaining the advantage is the goal in The Division 2. There is a sense of empowerment knowing that the Base of Operations where players will purchase skills and upgrade their equipment is the same place where the President of the United States has sat upon his throne. Your Agent is referenced as the “new sheriff in town” and proceeds to stomp out the factions who attempt to cripple the blossoming pockets of new society in D.C.

There is an element to The Division 2‘s story which I’m unsure that some will be able to appreciate. First and foremost, this is not a piece of entertainment that makes forward-thinking strides about making political statements. A subset of critics are likely to call out Massive on its missed opportunity to “say something” but that is not why we are here. The story is not bogged down or elevated by speaking to a grandiose message about guns or the faults of American infrastructure or politics. But during my mostly solo romp through The Division 2‘s campaign I came upon a realization.

The near surgical and methodical process of going into enemy territory and taking out a bad guy one by one made me feel like a mythic Tom Clancy hero. Here I was, a Jack Ryan super human weighed down by a large backpack, gear riddled with RPG stats, future tech that could heal my wounds, and weapons that could melt the health off those standing in my way.

Missions in The Division 2 task players with infiltrating landmarks of varying importance around D.C. Ranging from the Lincoln Memorial to the Space Museum to the United States Capitol. The personality and vision bleeding from every corner of this game is monumentally entrancing. The near 1:1 recreation of D.C. has allowed Massive the chance to take an existing world and stuff it to the brim with style and character. Much like Fallout‘s charred remains of Halloween, the ghost of Christmas lingers in shop windows and homes. It’s a creepy reminder of what once was and what is being fought for.

While fighting in the remnants of these known locations, players may get the feeling of retaking society and climbing back to the top of the food chain. Missions are designed to instill a sense of holding ground and exerting force and ask little more in a narrative sense. I can understand glazed eyes when listening to the radio banter about the purpose of fighting in a recreation of Vietnam or trying to stop a militarized group from collecting enough components from the Space Museum to build a working missile. It’s fair, especially when this type of game will eventually ask players to repeat these missions constantly during the endgame grind.

Open and Alive

The Division 2‘s best storytelling is done in its less direct world building. Audio logs and collectibles fill in a large gap of “lore” which makes the overarching narrative more meaningful. But it’s D.C. itself which breathes life into the game. For the genre, America’s capital is one of the most brilliantly realized spaces that becomes more breathtaking and profound the longer players live in it. Ubisoft games are known for the open worlds with content as far as the eye can see and The Division 2 nearly rivals the best a series like Assassin’s Creed has given.

New York City was a setpiece on itself but it was a lonely and often drab space. D.C. has rain and fog and sun. It has civilians walking the streets to collect supplies to maintain key control points throughout the city. There are numerous animals foraging for meals. Thousands of lootable objects and areas. People to help and enemies to conquer dot the map. In such a relatively small space in comparison to other games, Massive loaded the game with countless somethings to do.

Building D.C. back towards something of normalcy is the crux for many of the non-shooting and looting gameplay. Early on, players are tasked with speaking to Odessa, the leader of a friendly settlement called the Theater. Odessa asks players to help out a fellow Agent and rescue her daughter. Beating this mission then unlocks new side missions, new projects, and new activities that will both reward the player and bolster the efforts of the Theater to be a safer and more prosperous society.

One of the first of these missions asks players to find high-powered batteries in the basement of an old tech company. As I was walking on the floors of this abandoned building, I noticed my footprints being left in the dust. Such simple touches echo through the game and make you appreciate what’s being achieved even more. As a note, some of the side missions in The Division 2 are lengthier than the main missions from the original game. But after getting those batteries, players will unlock an upgrade for the Theater and also be rewarded with experience points and a blueprint to craft a weapon attachment.

Look, I realize this is a very “videogamey” kind of thing. Completing a mission unlocks a visual reward–the Theater gets an upgrade that I can see when I visit but makes no real difference–and feeds into my gameplay loop. Personally, though, I find these small activities to be rewarding in their simplicity. Like in any open world game there is a sweet satisfaction towards clearing a map of icons and knowing that at the end of the day, I can walk back to a settlement and see the effort a group of designers went into creating a cool looking player space.

Despite the fascinating ways in which Massive implements existing space for their missions, only a handful of times do the mechanics of a fight or a mission go beyond “kill everything in sight.” But I found that the variety of tasks throughout the entirety of the game don’t get old because the gameplay itself is so rewarding. And it’s that reward feedback in The Division 2 which is a crucial reason why this game gets so much right.

In the quest to sweep across D.C. like a guardian angel, players can engage in hostage rescues, silence propaganda broadcasts by enemy factions, or take over and restock control points. These smaller tasks reward a chunk of experience and a piece of gear. Control points are the highlight of these, asking players to fight a defending wave of enemies and a boss, then fight an attacking wave. Upon completion, a supply room opens up containing numerous boxes of various loot and consumables. As time passes, these friendly-owned control points will require either food, water, or components to remain sustainable. NPC groups will graze through the map and players can actually go along and protect them from opposition. The lines both enemy and friendly group take to and from these points is visible on the map, giving players a great amount of agency when deciding how to engage. Of course, players can just run around to different collection points to gather the materials and hand deliver them to a control point. Doing so will grant an XP reward and a buff that increases the range lootable objects are detected. This allows the player to be more efficient in gathering supplies for a control point, which in turn creates its own gameplay loop.

The Loot is on Fire

Massive spent months and years making up for the stumbles in The Division. It does not have to do the same for the sequel.

The Division 2 does what I did not think was possible: get it right (mostly) out of the gate. This begins and ends with the reward structure in the game. Do players constantly feel rewarded for playing? If the answer is no, then something is wrong. Not only is The Division 2 constantly rewarding players, it is constantly teaching them.

By the time Destiny 2 entered my life I was well aware of the utter garbage most pre-max level loot was. If a gun or piece of armor did not provide a boost it was scrapped, no matter the stats. I think that is why I eventually grew disinterested in Bungie’s choices to gear. Stats only felt like they mattered up to a point and even at endgame, I was not min-maxing.

As gear begins to drop in The Division 2 players will see that pieces come equipped with various stats and talents. Guns may come with baked-in increased ammo capacity or reduced reload times. Items like gloves and backpacks grant bonuses to skills, armor, or health. At first, you want to equip the strongest weapons that suit your playstyle and the items that provide the best defensive boosts.

Then gear begins to drop in brand sets. When players equip one piece of a brand set they may get a bonus like “skill cooldown reduction” or “bonus damage to elite enemies.” Once a second piece and third piece from those brand sets are equipped, those bonuses are also added. What Massive is teaching players is that brands exist and can alter how they may want to tune an Agent.

For the first half of the leveling process, brand set bonuses aren’t crucial to survival because most players will likely focus on boosting their three core abilities. But then more specialized gear begins to drop and players need to add another layer onto the loot system. A rifle may be found that grants more critical damage but only if the player has so many points invested in weapon bonuses. If you want to take advantage of that rifle, you may have to reconfigure your gear.

The build diversity is quite astounding in The Division 2 but rarely feels overwhelming because the game has coached you over the course of 30 levels on what to expect of gear. Of course, that begins to change when players start receiving the best purple and yellow loot, which are stacked with talents and bonuses that constantly tempt to be tested out.

It would be disastrous to make any attempt at creating specialized loadouts for an Agent if loot was scarce but that is not a problem here. In yet another area where Massive righted the ship, The Division 2 is often too generous with loot (yeah right, who am I kidding?). Players should not be afraid of selling or dismantling gear because more will eventually be found. Every activity is a loot reward and if you don’t like what’s dropped then guess what? There’s multiple avenues to take.

Players can often donate specific pieces of gear or crafting materials to settlements for “projects” that reward blueprints or bounties. Dismantling loot means that the scrap you get can be used to possibly craft something else or fuel another upgrade. This swirl of options becomes the endless loop that players can feed into to rarely ever feel like their time is being wasted or that they aren’t working towards more power.

I can’t express how enchanting and intelligent this decision is. In Anthem and Destiny I likely have hundreds of pieces of crafting material that I will never use because those games either don’t have a way to make them valuable or took until a big expansion to make them have value. Even the crafting bench in The Division 2 levels up with players and the weapon attachments made from it are permanent and leveled as well. It’s like the team at Massive recognized some of the fundamental issues with the genre as a whole and worked their damnedest to stomp them out. There is a near tactile feel to running around D.C. and completing any task just to be rewarded in one way or another, no matter how small.

What this amounts to is a game that doesn’t feel like it will steal your time with no rhyme or reason. You may be happy to log into The Division 2 even for just an hour to complete a mission or continue the progress on a commendation. One of my close friends stuck with The Division long after most of us had abandoned it and that game didn’t have nearly this amount of internalized rewards in place. I would be baffled if any but the most hardcore or disinterested did not feel a wave of dopamine come over them after a particularly juicy loot drop.

Tactical Espionage Action

The Divsion 2 shares the same name and same general gameplay style as its predecessor but some fundamental changes have altered the flow of combat. The most drastic of these is health. Healing is no longer instantaneous and players also must be concerned with armor. When receiving damage, a white bar representing armor will slowly be chipped away. As more damage is taken, health begins to go down until eventually your Agent is six feet under.

Armor packs act like medkits in The Division but take a few seconds to fully apply. A player’s armor can be restored and their health can still be low. Player health is now a rarer currency that can’t be casually wasted. Trying to apply armor when not in cover is likely a death sentence. On top of that, players who go down, are revived, and go down again shortly after are rendered unconscious–as in you will take even longer to be revived by an ally or you will be forced to respawn when solo. This means the strategy of throwing a revive box into open combat and getting back up and down like in The Division is not possible.

Health also becomes more precious because enemies are much more lethal here. A few shots from a red, purple, or yellow enemy will shave off chunks of armor. In essence, The Division 2 is a much harder game but also more rewarding. The game truly feels like it embraces the Tom Clancy moniker of previous titles like Rainbow 6 and Ghost Recon. Players must be thoughtful with where they place themselves behind cover, who to shoot, and when to shoot.

Unlike some, it has never bothered me that the universe of The Division possesses enemies that are capable of absorbing several bullets before dying. This is an RPG and it wouldn’t be fun if everything dropped with one hit. Because of the grounded nature of this world, there are limits. While this realism damages the potential for frequent ridiculous boss fights, the tendency for enemies to become “bullet sponges” has been toned down.

The Division 2 throws in several red bar enemies who go down quickly along with those who have their own pieces of armor that must be shot off. The volume of enemies is higher but their variety also makes better and more interesting standoffs. Enemy snipers will always torment from afar. Engineers should always be killed off because their turrets or saw blade robot monster cars will die with them. Melee grunts should always be dispatched as soon as possible because their strikes will often one- or two-shot armor.

Finding yourself in an arena of bad guys can be intimidating but also thrilling. The Division 2 begs for a tactical mind. Enemy AI has been amped up and they will frequently flank or try to flush you out of cover with grenades. It’s maddening how smart they are but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I cleared so many encounters by myself with my heart racing at frequent near-death moments. Better yet, these fights truly test the kind of Agent you have built.

Right now, the universal “good” combo of weapons is a sniper rifle and LMG. The high damage of a sniper can pick off most people from afar while the LMG’s high magazine is good at most distances and especially a godsend when blind-firing at someone who is flanking. While I do believe that guns will get a balance pass over time, endgame equipment has made me aware of how vital talents are to increasing the effectiveness of varying weapon types. I can see the benefits of a shotgun and sub-machine gun with their close range damage in mind.

Rounding out your Agent are eight deployable skills. Four of them are carried over from The Division while the rest are new. The turret and drone are obvious favorites because they act as a tiny companion that will automatically target enemies or focus on ones that you mark. Each skill has three different variations and many of them come with either a way to heal the player or damage an enemy. Whenever I play solo the Reviver Hive is a mainstay because it instantly brings me back to life when I go down.

Skills are a bit different to control in The Division 2 because many of them require more attention from the player and are less fire-and-forget. In busy gunfights, it’s not easy to manage something like a sniper turret or throw a seeker mine right in the path of enemies before they run away. Other skills, like the pulse feel almost worthless in their range unless a mod is equipped. Though mods can greatly enhance a skill’s effectiveness, most require too much skill power to be used until the endgame.

While The Division 2‘s combat does have its quirks, the end result is a game that feels more rewarding when the bodies have dropped. I know there will be a player base that somewhat loathes the direction Massive has taken this game. But I chalk much of it up to growing pains. When I first had my hands on The Division 2 months ago, I died several times because I forgot I wasn’t Barney Badass decked out in the best weapons and gear sets. But with just enough patience, its easy to see that this is mechanically one of the best third-person shooters on the market. The punch of guns and the sensory rewards of nailing a kill or desperately sniping the last target are unforgettable.

What Remains

Before touching on The Division 2‘s true endgame, it’s important to recognize the steps made in the PvP arena. In its current iteration, the Dark Zone is introduced in a friendlier, less frustrating way. Split into three distinct parts of D.C., the Dark Zones are first shown through story missions that act as mini tours into extraction points and safe houses with no interference from other players.

The Dark Zone is also safer for beginners because loot is now normalized. A player just starting out will not instantly be decimated by someone playing for a few hundred hours decked out in the best gear. It takes the sting out of death, making skill a bit more important than sheer numbers.

The player cap has been lowered to 12, which I feel may be a little small even if the Zones themselves are smaller. Going Rogue is more layered now as players can loot the bodies of other downed agents or activate a small loop to access the Thieves’ Den, which contains a unique vendor. As a lowly Rogue agent, others may attack you but it is not on the same level as being Disavowed where you actively kill other Agents. Manhunts are tense as ever in concept but with less players on a server, they can be easier to live through. Leveling up in the Dark Zone is more meaningful because players can now activate perks that can make certain Rogue actions easier or allow more loot to be carried, incentivizing you not to die too often as your PvP also has its own level ranks.

Each week, one of the Dark Zones will also become Occupied, meaning that the hardest enemies will be out in full force and gear is no longer normalized. The rewards are better but the risk is higher as you cannot see if other players have gone Rogue or not. A brief journey into an occupied Dark Zone resulted in me being slaughtered by Black Tusk soldiers and skirting away from any Agent I saw.

The strict PvP Conquest mode that has team deathmatch and zone control lobbies is actually quite fun. It proves that the interplay between weapons and skills is what separates The Division from the pack. And it’s here that both Massive and Red Storm Entertainment have shown their aptitude for designing multiplayer maps. The three Dark Zones and Conflict maps feel oriented around engaging with other players and take what’s best about lines of sight and combat pockets and puts them into a third-person shooter structure.

Of course, The Division 2 has proved to allow players to create some stellar builds, almost absurdly so. One-shot sniper rifle builds are emerging as a dominant force in PvP zones and may be currently a bit too destructive towards the game meta. Though I enjoy a faster time to kill in most PvP scenarios, The Division 2 isn’t necessarily the best arena for that. Players are meant to feel empowered by their builds and how they’ve worked on skills and talents. When all of those are negated by a couple bullets, it can be disheartening. Again, the game is in its infancy and some of the cheesiest ways to harass players aren’t here (or at least I haven’t experienced them) and I expect further balance to arrive in the weeks and months to come.

What this leaves us with is The Division 2‘s endgame, a hard talking point when the game was first revealed at E3 2018. Massive was well aware that The Division‘s endgame was flawed, not only being quite bland but pretty aimless.

There are few games that feel as graciously rewarding from beginning to “end” as The Division 2. At the end of the story, players are tasked with taking out three strongholds, each governed by an enemy faction. At level 30, the final of the three opens up and upon victory the player walks out of it and shoots a flare into the air as the words “World Tier 1 activating in…” pop up. I got chills.

After thirty seconds pass a cutscene plays and shows an enemy faction called the Black Tusks (who have been hinted at through collectibles) invading D.C. The Black Tusks have now taken over chunks of the map and have altered the balance of power. Enemy factions are now spread across the map in different configurations, control points must be taken over again, and settlements become under siege and can’t be fast traveled to.

Meanwhile, the Black Tusks freely roam the map and constitute the game’s ultimate challenge. Black Tusk forces have a lot of money which means they have drones, they have robot dogs, turrets on wheels, and the ability to hurt you… bad. It is such a brilliant move to wait until the end to introduce another faction (though I could have gone for one more just to topple the four in The Division). That feeling of taking back D.C. from the initial campaign is now dialed up to 11 as players must play through old story maps with new narrative and a configuration of Black Tusk enemies.

To assist players in standing against this new foe are Specializations. Players can select an area-of-effect grenade launcher, a slow-firing crossbow that inflicts status effects, or a powerful sniper rifle. Each Specialization comes with their own skill tree where players spend unlock points to become even stronger and unlock an additional variation on one of the skills.

Rather than simply asking players to get more powerful loot, The Division 2 branches out yet again to help players further stylize how they engage with the content. Though it may sting for players to start climbing the loot chain again, there is reason to begin gearing towards making individual Specializations more effective. Loot now drops at a gear score rather than a level. To move past World Tier 1, one Black Tusk stronghold must be beaten and a gear score threshold needs to be met. This process continues until World Tier 4 where the game grows significantly more challenging over time.

Currently, World Tier 5 is unavailable and the final stronghold in an unseen area, Tidal Basin, has not been revealed. The 8-player raid has only been teased and Ubisoft has made it a known quantity that free updates will be coming in the form of story missions and new specializations. But that doesn’t even hint at the secrets already in the game, where players can quest for exotics or elusive masks from the most difficult challenges. Or what about the clan system with deep functionality that provides rewards for completing challenges and leveling up? Don’t forget that 52 unique bosses that roam around each representing a card from the deck. Oh, and daily and weekly challenges and bounties.

The High Bar

The Division 2 is a triumph of its genre. Massive Entertainment has defied all logic and made a game that paves the way for what players should expect from a long-running product. I can knock the game for some annoying audio bugs, minor crashes, and frequent pop-in. But never did those things detract from my experience. I could rave about the spectacular and moody soundtrack by Ola Strandh that is among my favorites in a game. It would all do little in comparison to actually playing.

In The Division 2 your time is always rewarded. You are welcomed back with open arms to try new things and take on harder challenges. This is a game that will continue to grow but currently stands on its own two feet not just out of sheer competency but because of thoughtful, intelligent decisions made by a team that understands what players want from a game they prefer not to put down. The Division 2 is more than a sequel, it is a new, high bar of quality in a genre where those things should be commonplace.