And it stinks like a butt.
When it comes to creating open world experiences, Ubisoft may just be the most inconsistently competent of any company I have ever had the displeasure of playing their games. They put out The Division 2 in a bad state and between this game and Breakpoint it ruined Ubisoft financially. And they fixed it, eventually. But you’d think the folks at Ubisoft would have the “this is what we did wrong” lesson list stapled to each employee’s forehead so they don’t get it wrong again.
They got it wrong again.
When The Division 2 launched it suffered from two major problems: Loot sucks and enemies were bullet sponges compared to the Division player who was mostly made out of crepe paper and polio-stricken kittens. Ubisoft eventually fixed that and the game became great. Warlords of New York reverses that inexplicably alongside an update that was supposed to overhaul the system and make it even better. What a joke.
Here’s the thing about games: There is difficulty and then there is bullcrap. A difficult game uses its mechanics to make you strategize. A bullcrap game throws those mechanics out the window and basically requires you to luck your way through. The Division 2 teetered into bullcrap mode.
Let’s talk about Warlords of New York which despite my anger is actually a great storytelling experience. You head back to New York to finally take down Aaron Keener, the guy who got away at the end of Division 1 and who you saw at the end of the Coney Island DLC for Division 2 last month. The gameplay is a bit like Far Cry 5 in that you track down each of the four generals who are also ex-Division agents, kill each one individually and then go after Keener.
There is a lot of story about how The Division sucks, amazingly the number of agents that go rogue isn’t just because they are mustache twirling Bond villains in disguise. That being said, I hated the boss battles in Warlords of New York and they’ve only gotten worse since then.
I think the thing that pisses me off most in The Division 2 is the laziness of the enemy design. Here’s how it works: Take a character and load them up with impenetrable armor, the kind you need hundreds upon hundreds of bullets in order to break. Give that enemy a flamethrower that can hit you from ridiculously long distances, one that breaks your character, causes damage over time, stops them from moving, and can virtually knock you out in mere seconds, and give that character AI that just lumbers around following you blindly. Throw it into an arena where there are constantly refreshing groups of foes coming to shoot at you from all sides and voila: You’ve got The Division 2.
Enemies have too much armor, do too much damage, and the character is too much of a wimp to put up with it. The AI is competent enough to know that many purple-tier enemies can just bum rush you, and it loses all semblance of strategy when you’re in a game that formulates your health around the idea of being in a cover shooter and then removes that cover at every single freaking opportunity.
It isn’t fun to go into an area and have not just attacks but get spammed with high-tier enemies rushing you with impenetrable shields forcing you to leave cover while basic-tier enemies will shoot you from half a mile away with pinpoint accuracy and cut you down in seconds, throw molotovs and grenades from across the map with expert accuracy, getting tazed in normal encounters and not being able to move for so long, getting set on fire and just watching as your health goes down and there’s nothing you can do about it because there’s like 25+ enemies on the map and the second you move you are dead.
It doesn’t make any sense in a fudging Tom Clancy game. Enemies in Warlords of New York and the new expansion have invulnerability states. INVULNERABILITY STATES IN A TOM CLANCY GAME. Why oh why does Aaron Keener who has seemingly no enormous source of armor on him take a thousand bullets in order to kill?
Oh and you’re fighting a lot more Division agents who in addition to being bullet sponges and just hiding forever behind cover, heal their armor multiple times. I think my one open world target healed himself three times. Three times cutting down the bullet sponge armor of an enemy that can inexplicably kill me in just a small handful of hits.
It’s not fun. Let me repeat that: It’s. Not. Fun. Getting killed because while I was dealing with a half a dozen automatic weapon wielding purple tier enemies with too much damn health, the game spawns in an armor-clad mid-boss who requires 500+ smg rounds in order to break his armor, who just runs at me with a giant sledgehammer that can kill me in two hits, will immediately destroy any turret I put down, and can sprint almost as fast as I can, gets me killed the second he forces me out of my hiding spot because the AI in this game can shoot the nipple off of a fly at 1,000 yards and all six of those purple enemies immediately target me. That isn’t fun.
It is so frustrating to have the game regress this badly after Ubisoft fixed things.
I finished Warlords of New York and today I finished the first week’s bounty target: Neptune, which mostly comprised of capturing control points, doing missions, and taking down bounties until I got to Neptune. I had to fight Neptune twice because Neptune showed up in the middle of me fighting a stupid armor guy with a flamethrower who managed to set my character on fire through concrete because The Division 2 sucks when it comes to collision detection for enemies.
They can shoot through pretty much anything the game wants them to. I died because I got set on fire and then also tazed through the concrete which held me in place just long enough to burn to death from full health and full armor. It is nonsense.
The second time I went up against Neptune the locale had changed to a spot by a bridge which I used as cover. It’s a good thing I did because Neptune this time was accompanied by a yellow-tier sniper dog…thing. It’s a quadruped mounted sniper bot, but it can kill you in one hit most of the time and it’s armored too so you have to potshot the thing with hundreds of bullets just so you can kill it and hope the game doesn’t let it score a cheap kill on you. Oh and Neptune is there with his bombs and stuff, plus a bunch of other enemies and all in a place that had it not been for the bridge would have virtually no cover.
Why? Just why? Is it malice or does Ubisoft really not play their own games? Maybe The Division 2 needs another financial collapse and a large portion of the user base quitting in order for the folks at Massive and Ubisoft to get the point. Again.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
MMO Fallout 