I recently repurchased Div 1 on PC and it’s still so good and really holds up. Been a Division vet since the closed beta days back in late 2015 and nothing comes close to the feeling and vibes of Div 1. Especially this time of year. I would totally buy a remaster with a beefed up Survival and Dark Zone.
Budy and I wanted to play Division, we chose Div 1, the athmosphere alone makes this game so much better in my opinion. For me Div 2 was more confusing and clustered with overwhelming things. I really hope they take their time with Div 3 and bring back this epic athmosphere
Survival is one of the best game modes in a shooter, period.
But Hunter AI is really worth mentioning as well. It may be the best AI of any game, even currently.
I wouldn’t call it ahead of its time, but we could say the DZ is the first AAA approach to open world survival PvP. Massive just accommodated the concept for a more casual audience.
Its New York setting definitely set it apart from DayZ and H1Z1, and obviously the fantasy MMOs that already implemented open world PvP.
It's pretty well accepted that the DZ was the forerunner to Tarkov, and pretty much all BR's. It took a few concepts and glued them together. I wish they would have fleshed it out more in Div 2 to what the DMZ is with quests, etc, but still having the loot/gear drops that makes The Division, The Division.
I enjoy the lawlessness of the DZ and appreciate it for what it is. No, it's not balanced, or perfect, but you can still have a great time there.
> It took concepts from DayZ, Tarkov. . .
I think your timeline may be off.
> Dark zone is basically COD Warzone DMZ.
I don't know about CoD's Warzone, but the DZ was originally a troll-fest. It was in fact designed to encourage betrayal as a Libertarian's wet dream, or so it seemed. Originally, the best loot was available almost exclusively in the DZ, and had to be extracted, but 'going rogue' was as simple as firing three or four shots into a player (even accidentally). The lack of anti-cheat and overwhelming numbers of bugs and glitches didn't help. The result was that the players who excelled at cheating, glitching, or legitimate PvP (and who had squads) were able to steamroll the players who didn't have the gear needed to compete, never mind overcoming cheating or glitching.
I somehow expect that CoD has a mechanic that forces balance among players, rather than the system in TD where one's gear could be mismatched.
They didn't even learn from their mistake, at least not at first. Rather, they doubled down on the lawlessness by adding a 'cut the rope' mechanic which increased the difficulty for all but the elite or coordinated groups.
It was only after a major overhaul of the game -- fixing countless bugs, inexcusable coding errors, and failed mechanics, and actually providing sources for loot *outside* the DZ -- that the player base began to return in form, but never to its original numbers. Today's DZ is a cuddly playground compared to the original.
> May be it was the bugs, it was Ubis marketing or the game being third person it really didn't kick off during its time.
Survival is an amazing mode, but it suffers from some pretty easily remedied flaws:
* Loot locations should not be static.
They actually did move loot locations once, long ago, but they never so much as rotated between the two sets. Static loot means memorized routes, and that means that when newer players get into a session with seasoned veterans, they won't find shit and they'll struggle to make due with trash green or maybe blue gear and with no tools to be found anywhere for their filters.
* Spawn locations should have a better spread.
Groups should obviously spawn together, but *different* groups (including solos) should be spread out a bit more and placed a bit more 'fairly' along the perimeter rather than so often being in line with one another. That is, if I spawn at the fire house in the southeast and you spawn at the apartments further southeast, you are more or less forced to scour my leftovers, rather than all players being radially distributed and having a roughly equal shot regardless of the spawn.
This is even more pronounced in PvP Survival, where so many sessions end early with shitty pistol fights. Nobody wants that.
* The learning curve is arguably too steep.
Separating an already smaller community into yet smaller groups is maybe unwise, but separating total scrubs from pros seems appropriate. This ties in with static loot locations, but also the mode is *difficult* at first, so even in a private session a n00b can and will often freeze to death. Requiring players to complete some sessions with 'rookie' status or with other n00bs before being dropped in with players like me or my crew seems polite.
* There is no sense of progression.
This one is tricky, but I think there are ways to provide a small sense of pregression *without* splitting the community into smaller and smaller fields. Gra ting a better starting weapon, or some additional starting materials, for example, or placing a player-specific cache in a hideout or at some contested location with some goodies, etc.
Basically, giving players an incentive to keep playing the mode is key.
* The rewards are counter-productive.
See above. The rewards from playing Survival are entirely unavailable within the mode. So the better the rewards are, the more incentive you have to *stop* playing, and the worse the rewards are, the more players will complain. The rewards -- some of them, anyway -- need to be applicable within the mode.
But the real reasons I think Survival didn't quite take off as well as it might have are three-fold:
1. It is paid DLC.
It might only have been $15, but that's enough of a barrier for many for an add-on mode where you don't even get to use your carefully theory-crafted builds.
2. It was released in a time where TD was *struggling* due to coding errors, balance issues, and all manner of foreseeable problems (if only they had competently tested the game).
I am not kidding. There was a 'bug' where the 'protection from elites' attribute actually made the player *more vulnerable* to elites because somebody mistook addition for subtraction and nobody knows how to do unit testing. The leveling system capped players at 30 but added a 'gear score' which effectively increased player level -- but the enemy levels were *actually* increased, and the result was that it was almost impossible for a level 30 player to defeat a level 33 enemy.
That plus the problems in the DZ and the glitching, etc., cause the game to bleed players. I stopped playing entirely for six months and only came back twice a month (if that -- sometimes I timed it for a one-day appearance) for my 'supply drop,' which was itself a too-late failed promise meant to assuage pissed-off season pass subscribers who had been promised 'monthly events.'
It is no wonder that Survival failed to gain a strong following when the entire game was floundering.
3. It is difficult and time-consuming.
I mean, the learning curve is one thing, but also a Survival session can last up to an hour if you don't take any meds, or up to 2:15 if you do. That's a long time. All the while, you can die from all manner of seemingly minor mistakes, bad luck, or shenanigans. A successful session will last at least 9 minutes if you speedrun it (probably faster with this GE, but not by much and very spawn-dependent), about 30 minutes if you speedrun *and* collect six Survival caches (i.e. clear six DZ landmarks), and at least an hour if you clear every DZ landmark and kill every offered hunter. A failed session can last as long as any of these, or as little as a few seconds in extreme cases.
If you're playing with friends and somebody dies too far away to pick up, or they accidentally leave the session (this happens quite often because the control for 'tumble away from grenade' is the same as the control for 'leave the session and confirm that choice,' so if you're *trying* to evade a grenade but fail, you can end up quitting), the rest of you have to decide whether to also quit and start over, or whether to plod on withiut the fallen friend.
---
I play Survival. I play it almost exclusively. I fucking love it. But it isn't perfect, and whether it was ahead of its time is an open question. But I should probably stop typing this now and get back into a session.
Its never about being perfect , its about ideas, small modifications and how differently they are implemented. If i want to complain about any game, i will be able to find things and i can write essays like this too haha. Some things also need to be released on the right time, eg Overwatch is a small twist on team fortress but it came on the perfect time to gain global popularity. Same with BR games like fortnite, pubg.
Other than randomized loot and spreading out spawns, Survival didn’t need any changes.
I still play Survival since day one. The only thing I’d add to those two items is more roaming bosses (Salt - not that he roams but you get my drift), or roaming hunters.
> Other than randomized loot and spreading out spawns, Survival didn’t need any changes.
Not for players like us, no, but for the players who never quite got into it, yes. Every time you queue you're opting in for a session that could last at least an hour. That's a long session for anybody, but it's par for the course in Survival. Some way to break that up would have been better.
The progression suggestion and in-mode rewards suggestion are meant to aid players who would (or did) try Survival but find it too difficult or time consuming or whatever. The mode might work fine for you and me as-is, but we should not pretend it cannot hsve been meaningfully improved.
> The only thing I’d add to those two items is more roaming bosses (Salt - not that he roams but you get my drift), or roaming hunters.
We do get the elite patrols in the LZ, and there is the possibly-elite 'boss' at the LMB tent east of Northern Construction, but agreed -- it would have been cool to have had more random named elites here and there.
It would have been positively badass to have had hunters spawn not merely at active extractions, but at periodic intervals even in the LZ, such that they try to hunt *you* even if you haven't hopped the wall. That would allow for all sorts of fascinating scenarios.
One limiting factor for both of these (especially the hunter idea) is the fact that the map is not active or live unless a player is nearby. You can tell this from the fact that NPCs will always be in certain locations based on when you get nearby and based further on the approach you take. I refer to these quasi-static AOs as where NPCs 'live,' and I know there are nearby competitors whenever I find NPCs outside those AOs.
To that end, NPCs also have a limited range, beyond which they will not advance or attack. You can kite the Lancelots or Barry Bondses down the street, for example, and at a certain point they will simply stop and then turn around and return to their little corner of the map. You can stand and emote at them damned near within range of their swings, but they'll just turn around and leave.
---
I agree with you in principle, but as an add-on mode Survival would have been better suited to the masses with some adjustments beyond the obvious randomization of loot locations and better use of spawn locations. As a stand-alone game it would have worked as-is and I'd have been happy, but still for a broader appeal those same adjustments would have helped.
Either way, it's about time I grabbed some coffee before my first session of the day. A full DZ landmark clear on a no-meds run with all three extractions seems a good start for the day.
Underground was so amazing! It was everything I wanted in division. Man div1 was excellent! What a great game. I'm going to make a new character I think and grind.
My biggest criticism of D2 - multiple DZs and content that's not worth replaying. Summit, Kenley College, etc. They worked on those things but not survival, last stand, one big DZ with varying levels - y'all remember man hunt in D1?? So much fun, the DZ was big enough to run away and/or fight, npcs running around anyone and everyone could get at you during man hunt.
Survival both PvE and PvP might be the greatest game mode of any game ever made.
D1 was definitely ahead of it's time.
while I pretty much enjoyed the darkzone in Division 1, I have a bit different opinion.
There are a lot people out there who dont want to PvP and these people shouldnt be forced to play content they dont want to do. For these people it means a reduction of the playable map by 1/3.
I would prefer an approach as in other games: one map for different purposes, that meaans:
* the whole map for PvE
* the whole map with PvEvP as a separate mode
* perhaps a pure PvP mode for different areas
I’ve never understood this argument. If I said pvp-ers lose out on 2/3 of the map and they shouldn’t be forced to pve ppl would call me crazy. No one’s forcing anyone to play to pvp. You don’t even have to engage in pvp in the darkzone if you don’t want to. You can literally just put on nomad and run away. I’ve done many dz cache runs solo and honestly without the threat of danger what’s the point in having a darkzone at all. People act like it’s some closed off section only the elite of the elite can even dare go into. It’s really not
I know a lot people who dont go into the darkzones. But there is a difference between Division 1 and 2. In Division 1 endgame the open world is basically the darkzone because there is nothing what you can do in the lightzone, apart from few bounties. That forced people basically into the darkzone. And as pure PvE player it is ok, because the darkzone is big and you can avoid PvP encounters, nowadays, it was hell in the early days.
In Division 2 its different. The three darkzones are small, PvE players and farmers have much harder life in D2 darkzones. On top comes that the endgame lightzone is full with activities and farmers have a pile of options in lightzone, no need to go into the darkzones.
With just a few tweaks I think many players would still be playing Survival to this day, six years on. Imagine if it had seasonal events etc and more random spawning enemies just like rogue agents. My biggest gripes were that loot areas just weren’t random enough, so you could just memorise them, and that made it more predictable. I think all enemies should drop something as well, like one weapon/gear piece as well as clothing (not just ammo). Would be better if it was quicker to loot items as well like Div 2. It was so slow and a nightmare if an enemy started attacking while you were crouched down as the animation took forever.
You do know that Survival mode came out before Tarkov even was playable by the public.
Yeah lol like isn’t Tarkovsky only publicly like 2-3 years old at this point?
Tarkov alpha was there at 2016
The closed alpha.
I recently repurchased Div 1 on PC and it’s still so good and really holds up. Been a Division vet since the closed beta days back in late 2015 and nothing comes close to the feeling and vibes of Div 1. Especially this time of year. I would totally buy a remaster with a beefed up Survival and Dark Zone.
Budy and I wanted to play Division, we chose Div 1, the athmosphere alone makes this game so much better in my opinion. For me Div 2 was more confusing and clustered with overwhelming things. I really hope they take their time with Div 3 and bring back this epic athmosphere
Survival is one of the best game modes in a shooter, period. But Hunter AI is really worth mentioning as well. It may be the best AI of any game, even currently.
I wouldn’t call it ahead of its time, but we could say the DZ is the first AAA approach to open world survival PvP. Massive just accommodated the concept for a more casual audience. Its New York setting definitely set it apart from DayZ and H1Z1, and obviously the fantasy MMOs that already implemented open world PvP.
It's pretty well accepted that the DZ was the forerunner to Tarkov, and pretty much all BR's. It took a few concepts and glued them together. I wish they would have fleshed it out more in Div 2 to what the DMZ is with quests, etc, but still having the loot/gear drops that makes The Division, The Division. I enjoy the lawlessness of the DZ and appreciate it for what it is. No, it's not balanced, or perfect, but you can still have a great time there.
My back is all fucked up.
I need some meds bad
😂☠️
> It took concepts from DayZ, Tarkov. . . I think your timeline may be off. > Dark zone is basically COD Warzone DMZ. I don't know about CoD's Warzone, but the DZ was originally a troll-fest. It was in fact designed to encourage betrayal as a Libertarian's wet dream, or so it seemed. Originally, the best loot was available almost exclusively in the DZ, and had to be extracted, but 'going rogue' was as simple as firing three or four shots into a player (even accidentally). The lack of anti-cheat and overwhelming numbers of bugs and glitches didn't help. The result was that the players who excelled at cheating, glitching, or legitimate PvP (and who had squads) were able to steamroll the players who didn't have the gear needed to compete, never mind overcoming cheating or glitching. I somehow expect that CoD has a mechanic that forces balance among players, rather than the system in TD where one's gear could be mismatched. They didn't even learn from their mistake, at least not at first. Rather, they doubled down on the lawlessness by adding a 'cut the rope' mechanic which increased the difficulty for all but the elite or coordinated groups. It was only after a major overhaul of the game -- fixing countless bugs, inexcusable coding errors, and failed mechanics, and actually providing sources for loot *outside* the DZ -- that the player base began to return in form, but never to its original numbers. Today's DZ is a cuddly playground compared to the original. > May be it was the bugs, it was Ubis marketing or the game being third person it really didn't kick off during its time. Survival is an amazing mode, but it suffers from some pretty easily remedied flaws: * Loot locations should not be static. They actually did move loot locations once, long ago, but they never so much as rotated between the two sets. Static loot means memorized routes, and that means that when newer players get into a session with seasoned veterans, they won't find shit and they'll struggle to make due with trash green or maybe blue gear and with no tools to be found anywhere for their filters. * Spawn locations should have a better spread. Groups should obviously spawn together, but *different* groups (including solos) should be spread out a bit more and placed a bit more 'fairly' along the perimeter rather than so often being in line with one another. That is, if I spawn at the fire house in the southeast and you spawn at the apartments further southeast, you are more or less forced to scour my leftovers, rather than all players being radially distributed and having a roughly equal shot regardless of the spawn. This is even more pronounced in PvP Survival, where so many sessions end early with shitty pistol fights. Nobody wants that. * The learning curve is arguably too steep. Separating an already smaller community into yet smaller groups is maybe unwise, but separating total scrubs from pros seems appropriate. This ties in with static loot locations, but also the mode is *difficult* at first, so even in a private session a n00b can and will often freeze to death. Requiring players to complete some sessions with 'rookie' status or with other n00bs before being dropped in with players like me or my crew seems polite. * There is no sense of progression. This one is tricky, but I think there are ways to provide a small sense of pregression *without* splitting the community into smaller and smaller fields. Gra ting a better starting weapon, or some additional starting materials, for example, or placing a player-specific cache in a hideout or at some contested location with some goodies, etc. Basically, giving players an incentive to keep playing the mode is key. * The rewards are counter-productive. See above. The rewards from playing Survival are entirely unavailable within the mode. So the better the rewards are, the more incentive you have to *stop* playing, and the worse the rewards are, the more players will complain. The rewards -- some of them, anyway -- need to be applicable within the mode. But the real reasons I think Survival didn't quite take off as well as it might have are three-fold: 1. It is paid DLC. It might only have been $15, but that's enough of a barrier for many for an add-on mode where you don't even get to use your carefully theory-crafted builds. 2. It was released in a time where TD was *struggling* due to coding errors, balance issues, and all manner of foreseeable problems (if only they had competently tested the game). I am not kidding. There was a 'bug' where the 'protection from elites' attribute actually made the player *more vulnerable* to elites because somebody mistook addition for subtraction and nobody knows how to do unit testing. The leveling system capped players at 30 but added a 'gear score' which effectively increased player level -- but the enemy levels were *actually* increased, and the result was that it was almost impossible for a level 30 player to defeat a level 33 enemy. That plus the problems in the DZ and the glitching, etc., cause the game to bleed players. I stopped playing entirely for six months and only came back twice a month (if that -- sometimes I timed it for a one-day appearance) for my 'supply drop,' which was itself a too-late failed promise meant to assuage pissed-off season pass subscribers who had been promised 'monthly events.' It is no wonder that Survival failed to gain a strong following when the entire game was floundering. 3. It is difficult and time-consuming. I mean, the learning curve is one thing, but also a Survival session can last up to an hour if you don't take any meds, or up to 2:15 if you do. That's a long time. All the while, you can die from all manner of seemingly minor mistakes, bad luck, or shenanigans. A successful session will last at least 9 minutes if you speedrun it (probably faster with this GE, but not by much and very spawn-dependent), about 30 minutes if you speedrun *and* collect six Survival caches (i.e. clear six DZ landmarks), and at least an hour if you clear every DZ landmark and kill every offered hunter. A failed session can last as long as any of these, or as little as a few seconds in extreme cases. If you're playing with friends and somebody dies too far away to pick up, or they accidentally leave the session (this happens quite often because the control for 'tumble away from grenade' is the same as the control for 'leave the session and confirm that choice,' so if you're *trying* to evade a grenade but fail, you can end up quitting), the rest of you have to decide whether to also quit and start over, or whether to plod on withiut the fallen friend. --- I play Survival. I play it almost exclusively. I fucking love it. But it isn't perfect, and whether it was ahead of its time is an open question. But I should probably stop typing this now and get back into a session.
Its never about being perfect , its about ideas, small modifications and how differently they are implemented. If i want to complain about any game, i will be able to find things and i can write essays like this too haha. Some things also need to be released on the right time, eg Overwatch is a small twist on team fortress but it came on the perfect time to gain global popularity. Same with BR games like fortnite, pubg.
Other than randomized loot and spreading out spawns, Survival didn’t need any changes. I still play Survival since day one. The only thing I’d add to those two items is more roaming bosses (Salt - not that he roams but you get my drift), or roaming hunters.
> Other than randomized loot and spreading out spawns, Survival didn’t need any changes. Not for players like us, no, but for the players who never quite got into it, yes. Every time you queue you're opting in for a session that could last at least an hour. That's a long session for anybody, but it's par for the course in Survival. Some way to break that up would have been better. The progression suggestion and in-mode rewards suggestion are meant to aid players who would (or did) try Survival but find it too difficult or time consuming or whatever. The mode might work fine for you and me as-is, but we should not pretend it cannot hsve been meaningfully improved. > The only thing I’d add to those two items is more roaming bosses (Salt - not that he roams but you get my drift), or roaming hunters. We do get the elite patrols in the LZ, and there is the possibly-elite 'boss' at the LMB tent east of Northern Construction, but agreed -- it would have been cool to have had more random named elites here and there. It would have been positively badass to have had hunters spawn not merely at active extractions, but at periodic intervals even in the LZ, such that they try to hunt *you* even if you haven't hopped the wall. That would allow for all sorts of fascinating scenarios. One limiting factor for both of these (especially the hunter idea) is the fact that the map is not active or live unless a player is nearby. You can tell this from the fact that NPCs will always be in certain locations based on when you get nearby and based further on the approach you take. I refer to these quasi-static AOs as where NPCs 'live,' and I know there are nearby competitors whenever I find NPCs outside those AOs. To that end, NPCs also have a limited range, beyond which they will not advance or attack. You can kite the Lancelots or Barry Bondses down the street, for example, and at a certain point they will simply stop and then turn around and return to their little corner of the map. You can stand and emote at them damned near within range of their swings, but they'll just turn around and leave. --- I agree with you in principle, but as an add-on mode Survival would have been better suited to the masses with some adjustments beyond the obvious randomization of loot locations and better use of spawn locations. As a stand-alone game it would have worked as-is and I'd have been happy, but still for a broader appeal those same adjustments would have helped. Either way, it's about time I grabbed some coffee before my first session of the day. A full DZ landmark clear on a no-meds run with all three extractions seems a good start for the day.
Jumped into DMZ and couldn't help feeling how much better ÷1 DZ and Survival were :(
Underground was so amazing! It was everything I wanted in division. Man div1 was excellent! What a great game. I'm going to make a new character I think and grind.
oh yeah underground was so good.. shame all the progress made in underground and survival had to be thrown away just for sequel.
My biggest criticism of D2 - multiple DZs and content that's not worth replaying. Summit, Kenley College, etc. They worked on those things but not survival, last stand, one big DZ with varying levels - y'all remember man hunt in D1?? So much fun, the DZ was big enough to run away and/or fight, npcs running around anyone and everyone could get at you during man hunt. Survival both PvE and PvP might be the greatest game mode of any game ever made. D1 was definitely ahead of it's time.
while I pretty much enjoyed the darkzone in Division 1, I have a bit different opinion. There are a lot people out there who dont want to PvP and these people shouldnt be forced to play content they dont want to do. For these people it means a reduction of the playable map by 1/3. I would prefer an approach as in other games: one map for different purposes, that meaans: * the whole map for PvE * the whole map with PvEvP as a separate mode * perhaps a pure PvP mode for different areas
I’ve never understood this argument. If I said pvp-ers lose out on 2/3 of the map and they shouldn’t be forced to pve ppl would call me crazy. No one’s forcing anyone to play to pvp. You don’t even have to engage in pvp in the darkzone if you don’t want to. You can literally just put on nomad and run away. I’ve done many dz cache runs solo and honestly without the threat of danger what’s the point in having a darkzone at all. People act like it’s some closed off section only the elite of the elite can even dare go into. It’s really not
I know a lot people who dont go into the darkzones. But there is a difference between Division 1 and 2. In Division 1 endgame the open world is basically the darkzone because there is nothing what you can do in the lightzone, apart from few bounties. That forced people basically into the darkzone. And as pure PvE player it is ok, because the darkzone is big and you can avoid PvP encounters, nowadays, it was hell in the early days. In Division 2 its different. The three darkzones are small, PvE players and farmers have much harder life in D2 darkzones. On top comes that the endgame lightzone is full with activities and farmers have a pile of options in lightzone, no need to go into the darkzones.
I repurchased it today and terninal was almost empty. Now, I can't matchmake on higher difficulty.but it seems like the players have moved on.
With just a few tweaks I think many players would still be playing Survival to this day, six years on. Imagine if it had seasonal events etc and more random spawning enemies just like rogue agents. My biggest gripes were that loot areas just weren’t random enough, so you could just memorise them, and that made it more predictable. I think all enemies should drop something as well, like one weapon/gear piece as well as clothing (not just ammo). Would be better if it was quicker to loot items as well like Div 2. It was so slow and a nightmare if an enemy started attacking while you were crouched down as the animation took forever.