The Division Breaks Ubisoft Sales Records

[Nazulu]

It's the Force Awakens of gaming. Give the people almost the exact same thing with a new name while looking exactly the same. A winning formula.

Ok, it's not that bad. The people that like the usual shooter have found their fill, so good for them. Well, from I've seen of The Division, I didn't really see anything new or special, just that it's competent.

Now Ubi will stuff it with micro-transactions, season pass offerings, and exclusive deals for their yearly releases.

 

[RJ 17]

This one's beyond me. I cannot for the life of me figure out what kind of boring person would enjoy this game in the sea of other, much better multiplayer titles.

Yes, all those other well executed Co-op PvE shooters with loot, like... Destiny, and... uh...

There's always the game that Destiny wishes it could be: Warframe. :3

 

[major_chaos]

There's always the game that Destiny wishes it could be: Warframe. :3

Except that Warframe lacks ya know, loot. And meaningful progression. And competent raids with worthwhile rewards. And AI. And bosses that arent' scaled up reskins of common enemies. And balance not implemented by a chimp. And for that matter is about 1000000 times more grindy on a good day than Destiny is on a bad day cuz gotta sell dat plat.
Look I have several hundred hours in WF because its a great stress ball that I can put on in the background while I listen to podcasts or audiobooks (since it also has no worthwhile audio content to miss), and Destiny blows it out of the water on almost every conceivable level post TTK.

 

[RJ 17]

There's always the game that Destiny wishes it could be: Warframe. :3

Except that Warframe lacks ya know, loot.

Sure it has loot! Delivered in pieces to build actual loot!

And meaningful progression.

Pffft, just because leveling up means absolutely nothing and someone's MR is in no way determinant of the player's quality and all progression is dependent on what mods you have doesn't mean there's no meaninful progression! :3

And competent raids with worthwhile rewards.

I haven't gone on many raids lately, so insert a mostly-joking retort here.

And AI.

Actually the latest update did improve enemy AI.

And bosses that arent' scaled up reskins of common enemies.

Odd, because most of the bosses I've faced are entirely unique. o.o

And balance not implemented by a chimp.

Pfffft, what's unbalanced about a warframe that can have permanent invincibility and one-shot everything with super-powered melee attacks? :3

And for that matter is about 1000000 times more grindy on a good day than Destiny is on a bad day cuz gotta sell dat plat.

Actually I'd say it's 50% less grindy considering that while your looking for a piece to the weapon you want to build you're also farming up plat fodder. If you get something you don't need in Destiny you're pretty much boned.

(since it also has no worthwhile audio content to miss),

Hey, the music in the Towers is frickin' awesome!

and Destiny blows it out of the water on almost every conceivable level post TTK.

Agree to disagree, from my understanding TTK was basically like a WoW expansion: it pulled back in a lot of players who just got bored with it again two months later.

Oh, and just so we're clear...

Spoiler: There's something you should probably know...

I've never played Destiny and as such all of the above opinions/comparisons that I made regarding that game are completely invalid. :3

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

There's always the game that Destiny wishes it could be: Warframe. :3

Except that Warframe lacks ya know, loot. And meaningful progression. And competent raids with worthwhile rewards. And AI. And bosses that arent' scaled up reskins of common enemies. And balance not implemented by a chimp. And for that matter is about 1000000 times more grindy on a good day than Destiny is on a bad day cuz gotta sell dat plat.
Look I have several hundred hours in WF because its a great stress ball that I can put on in the background while I listen to podcasts or audiobooks (since it also has no worthwhile audio content to miss), and Destiny blows it out of the water on almost every conceivable level post TTK.

Still, there are some things that Warframe has that Destiny doesn't.

Like an in-game way to find people to play with.

Or more frequent content updates.

I really liked Destiny, but that game is still missing features that it should've launched with.

 

[major_chaos]

Actually I'd say it's 50% less grindy considering that while your looking for a piece to the weapon you want to build you're also farming up plat fodder. If you get something you don't need in Destiny you're pretty much boned.

Don't even talk to me about less grind, I just spent like 35 T1 mobile defense keys trying to get Sayrin prime helmet with a 0% rate of acquiring anything useful. /mad

I really liked Destiny, but that game is still missing features that it should've launched with.

I totally agree, I never meant to sound like Destiny was perfect, and it does say something that I haven't played in months.

 

[RJ 17]

Actually I'd say it's 50% less grindy considering that while your looking for a piece to the weapon you want to build you're also farming up plat fodder. If you get something you don't need in Destiny you're pretty much boned.

Don't even talk to me about less grind, I just spent like 35 T1 mobile defense keys trying to get Sayrin prime helmet with a 0% rate of acquiring anything useful. /mad

But what about all the forma and ducat fodder you got?

Hardest piece for me to get was the Saryn Prime Chassis, so it was T3 Survival C rotation that I needed to farm. Finally got it the other day, and she'll actually be done building tonight. The rest of the pieces I actually got relatively easily.

Now if only I could get those god damn Volt Prime Systems that have been eluding me for so long...BUT! Like I said: plenty of forma and ducat fodder! Nothing in the game is worthless, even the 10 million Oberon parts that I've found! PURPLE CREDITS!!!!!!

 

[shrekfan246]

(And now I feel like an edgy tryhard for bashing on a popular new game. I'm sure I can blame that on Ubisoft somehow.)

No, no, I think you have a point.

I haven't played the game myself, but all of the beta and post-release gameplay I've seen of it just looks so bland and uninspired. Sure, it's not Ubisoft: The Game this time around, but they've just replaced that with Post-Apocalypse Third-Person Shooter: The Game. People call things like Gears of War "generic", but The Division appears to be the literal definition of generic, because it can't even be inventive enough to have non-human enemies or weapons (gotta shoehorn that Tom Clancy name in somehow, after all).

 

[lacktheknack]

record number of ubisoft customers wait in virtual line because ubisoft does not understand how to program npcs to talk to more than one player at a time, bringing back fond memories of runescape circa 2001

"don't cut"

This is literally the funniest thing I've seen all year.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

I guess it's that Borderlands loot online thing that these people seem to herd towards. The Beta felt like that's all the game will be, for ever and ever and ever, until you decide to put down the controller, stop wistfully staring at those green and red numbers in the vain hope that the level [insert floating number here]'s will taste dirt fractionally faster than before; they do not rule your life...not anymore.
And New York, the least inspired of locations with added grey, just in case you were starting to get mildly excited. Do the cover of tall, grey skyscrapers make an easier job of rendering then? Because it never strikes me as an artistic choice for games.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Weird... I went over to Gamespot and looked at the user review score. 8.8 or some crap like that, with a bunch of people giving it a 9 or a 10. The hell?

EDIT: Went over to Metacritic too. The PS4 version of the game holds a user review score of 7.2 and the PC version, a score of 6.2

... Is Ubisoft bribing certain random people to post BS review scores?

 

[EternallyBored]

I guess it's that Borderlands loot online thing that these people seem to herd towards. The Beta felt like that's all the game will be, for ever and ever and ever, until you decide to put down the controller, stop wistfully staring at those green and red numbers in the vain hope that the level [insert floating number here]'s will taste dirt fractionally faster than before; they do not rule your life...not anymore.
And New York, the least inspired of locations with added grey, just in case you were starting to get mildly excited. Do the cover of tall, grey skyscrapers make an easier job of rendering then? Because it never strikes me as an artistic choice for games.

The other stuff is fair enough, but I'll defend the game's map design. Their portrayal of New York City is quite beautiful in my opinion. Yeah there's the grey buildings and white snow, but setting the disaster around Black Friday means the whole city is decorated for Christmas, and the lighting engine and snow effects make for some of the most atmospheric open world settings I've ever seen, with twinkling multicolored lights shining through a dense snowstorm. Colorful advertisements are everywhere, and the blues, greens, and oranges of the hastily set up hazmat and JTF gear create a harsh contrast with the usual city colors.

The object density is also incredibly high, with a ton of interesting objects strewn around the street, and a high variety of NPCs interacting with each other: people taking pictures from second story windows or yelling at you or other NPCs on the streets, dogs wandering around and eating trash or confronting NPCs to try and steal their food, NPCs breaking into cars or digging through garbage, even just running along and seeing a rat fight a crow for scraps of food.

There's also a lot of environmental storytelling similar to the Bethesda Fallout games, you can see the remnants of rooftop camps or where a checkpoint or camp was overrun, or being able to tell exactly which gang is inhabiting an area by things like graffiti or environmental scenes like cops being strung up on lightposts in the prison gang controlled zones.

Say what you will about the game, but the city is actually really well constructed, and just wandering around in it without even fighting anything can be loads of fun.

 

[Hawk eye1466]

I'm actually pretty surprised, though I shouldn't be I remember when the e3 demo came out and all of my friends wouldn't stop making me watch the trailer and gushing about how the doors and windows moved from getting shot at. I didn't care that much and totally forgot about it until the open beta weekend when I tried it and only enjoyed the experience when some of my friends were online.

It wasn't fun single player and even with people it was not a game I could imagine myself playing a lot. But I guess everyone was still thrilled from that first trailer and just bought it right away.

 

[MiskWisk]

record number of ubisoft customers wait in virtual line because ubisoft does not understand how to program npcs to talk to more than one player at a time, bringing back fond memories of runescape circa 2001

"don't cut"

Huh, guess we know which country bought the most copies. Only us Brits could successfully queue like that!

 

[MiskWisk]

Double post, please ignore.

 

[MCerberus]

Weird... I went over to Gamespot and looked at the user review score. 8.8 or some crap like that, with a bunch of people giving it a 9 or a 10. The hell?

EDIT: Went over to Metacritic too. The PS4 version of the game holds a user review score of 7.2 and the PC version, a score of 6.2

... Is Ubisoft bribing certain random people to post BS review scores?

No, it's that user reviews consist entirely of raving lunatics whose opinions can be immediately disregarded among all instances on both sides of the argument

 

[babinro]

But how...

No really, how? You need PS+ to play this game and it's a bore to watch. Almost every comment section of video on The Division is filled with negative comments about the game.

Oh well, who cares. Not gonna buy it.

Also, are we really gonna consider it a new IP? It is a Tom Clancy game.

This game came out of nowhere to me.

I have no clue how it generated so much hype to receive the sales it did. Clearly whoever marketed this game deserves a raise. Sometimes you can just force it like with Destiny but the Division had nothing which made it stand out.

Maybe I'm just underestimating the fandom of this IP though. I've done that before when it came to The Witcher. I knew The Witcher 2 had a popular somewhat niche fanbase but I never expected the Witcher 3 to release with Grant Theft Auto 5 and Diablo 3 levels of must have hype.

As for the game itself? Haven't played it. The only Tom Clancy game I've played was Splinter Cell on gamecube and I got bored of that one within an hour. It wasn't my genre of game at the time and I got it for free with a purchase of another game I wanted.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

To me it seems to be a blast to play with good friends and voice usage, but solo or with randoms? Dull as dishwater.

record number of ubisoft customers wait in virtual line because ubisoft does not understand how to program npcs to talk to more than one player at a time, bringing back fond memories of runescape circa 2001

"don't cut"

All of a sudden I understand why the base is instanced.

 

[EternallyBored]

To me it seems to be a blast to play with good friends and voice usage, but solo or with randoms? Dull as dishwater.

record number of ubisoft customers wait in virtual line because ubisoft does not understand how to program npcs to talk to more than one player at a time, bringing back fond memories of runescape circa 2001

"don't cut"

All of a sudden I understand why the base is instanced.

To be fair, they hotfixed this within 48 hours of launch, and that initial safehouse was the only place it occured. But yes, this is likely why the base of operations is instanced, that, and it changes depending on how many upgrades you have, so there isn't any point in having people visit your BoO as the place is just a center for resources and vendors right now.

 

[Ambitiousmould]

You know what, I actually bought this game. Partly because I like most TC games (Siege was a pile of shit though. It's basically just Call of Battlefield: Home Invasion, not anything like anything Tom Clancy games should be or usually are) but mainly because I wanted a co-op decent co-op shooter, and this is exactly that. It might not be anything groundbreaking but it is damn competent.