Tom Clancy's The Division: impressions from the PC build

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phil savage pc gamer http://store.steampowered.com/app/365590/

Last week, Chris posted his impressions from the Xbox One build of The Division. I, meanwhile, got to spend around four hours tinkering with the PC build—some of that time on a nifty three monitor set-up that Ubisoft had constructed to show off The Division's PC specific features.

In terms of the game itself, I share some of Chris's concerns. Whenever anyone on the trip asked what I thought of the game, I'd make a sort of wavering noise and say, "it seems… interesting." What Ubisoft Massive is doing does seem interesting, and The Division was certainly entertaining in the context of an open-world co-op shooter. But I have questions about the execution that likely won't be answered until the game is released.
I'm far more confident about the state of the PC version—although that confidence comes with the caveat that what I saw was in a controlled environment using Ubisoft's own machines. For Ubisoft Massive and co-PC developer Red Storm, a good PC release appears to be a matter of pride. "Massive and Red Storm have roots in PC development," says Magnus Jansen, creative director of The Division. "Some of us are PC gamers, so it’s just very natural for us to give love to the PC version."
I'll run over some of the PC specific features later in the post. First, here are the official system requirements:
Minimum Requirements

• Supported OS: Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only).
• Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 | AMD FX-6100, or better.
• RAM: 6GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 with 2 GB VRAM (current equivalent NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760) | AMD Radeon HD 7770 with 2 GB VRAM, or better.
• Notebook support: Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration.
• DirectX: Version 11
• Hard Drive Space: 40 GB available space.
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Dual Layer.
• Peripherals Supported: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset, optional controller.
• Multiplayer: Broadband connection with 256 kbps upstream, or faster.

Recommended Requirements

• Supported OS: Windows® 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 (64-bit versions only)
• Processor: Intel Core i7-3770 | AMD FX-8350, or better.
• RAM: 8GB
• Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 | AMD Radeon R9 290, or better.
• Notebook support: Laptop models of these desktop cards may work as long as they are on-par in terms of performance with at least the minimum configuration.
• DirectX: Version 11
• Hard Drive Space: 40 GB available space.
• Optical Drive: DVD-ROM Dual Layer.
• Peripherals Supported: Windows-compatible keyboard, mouse, headset, optional controller.
• Multiplayer: Broadband connection with 512 kbps upstream, or faster.

Today, Ubisoft has released a run-down of The Division's PC-specific features. It's an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink list, containing some genuinely nice, novel features alongside stuff that you'd expect from even the most basic of ports:

• Flexible user interface: move, scale and adjust the opacity of the HUD.
• Intuitive controls: navigate easily through the interface, inventory panels and map designed specifically to be used with a mouse or a controller.
• Full mouse & keyboard support: opt for the high precision mouse and keyboard experience and switch to a controller in the middle of any encounter without interruption.
• Text chat: team up with more agents of The Division by using the in-game text chat.
• Optimized graphic settings & customised GPU effects: adjust a vast variety of technology treats, from realistic lighting, shading, snow particles, local reflection, fog volumetric scattering, depth of field and much more…
• Multi-GPU support: unleash the graphic power of the best computer set ups for jaw-dropping graphics powered by Massive Entertainment’s game engine Snowdrop.
• Multi-screen support: play with up to three screens for the most immersive and stunning experience of The Division.
• Multi-resolutions: opt for 1080p or 4k and automatically adapt the resolution to fit multi-screen configurations with FOV correction.
• Unlocked framerate: let the most powerful computer reach the highest framerate.
• HBA0+: enjoy the most realistic shadowing, lighting algorithm and ambient occlusion.

The first thing to say is that yes, The Division is a good looking game. I've not seen the console version in action, but the PC build is crisp and rich with detail. More than that, though, what makes The Division an impressive PC release is the wealth of customisation. As hinted above, there's a wealth of graphics options available to tweak and configure, from the usual texture and shadow settings to more specific tweaks. Don't like chromatic aberration? You can turn it off.
The UI is also completely customisable, letting you resize and reposition every part of the on-screen HUD. "Not only can you do that," says Jansen, "but, if you have multiple monitors, you can decide to have all of [the UI elements] on one monitor. Especially if you’re running a triple-monitor setup it’s nice. Even if you don't—if you have a separate monitor where you put up all your stuff, and then [the primary monitor] is completely clean. Being able to change that and change the size is not something you see, and it’s very, very cool. It’s one of the things we’re extra proud of for the PC version."
It also feels right. The default keyboard configuration is sensible and intuitive, and the menus properly support mouse—to the point that you can equip gear by dragging and dropping pieces from your inventory onto the character model. In all, it's extremely promising. More and more, big publishers are letting development studios push the power available on the PC. The Division could well be that rarest of things: a proper PC version of a Ubisoft game. Now we just have to hope that the game is as worthy of attention as the options and settings underlying it.

 

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10 reasons why The Division is the PC's next big RPG matt purslow pcgamesN

You may have heard that Ubisoft have a new Tom Clancy game coming out this year called The Division. If you’ve played literally any other Tom Clancy game before, you probably have a pretty good idea on what The Division is like.
Wait, no. That’s not right at all. The Division is unlike any Tom Clancy game you’ve played before. That’s because it’s a big open-world RPG. Yeah, like those games with dragons, but this time it’s bio-terrorism instead. That may sound strange, but The Division is actually really good at being a role-playing game.
Here’s ten reasons why The Division is the next big thing in PC RPGs.

1 - It’s genuinely an RPG
Let’s get one thing straight: The Division is an RPG. And I don’t mean it’s a third-person shooter with some upgrade stats: this is a full-out, numbers-led RPG to stand in the stables next to Diablo III and Borderlands. Both you and enemies have hit points, you can increase your weapon DPS by bolting on mods, and you level up by gaining XP for kills and quest completion. It’s even got a character creator. The only way it could be any more RPG is if Chris Avellone was writing it.
“From the beginning when we set out to do an RPG,” explains creative director Magnus Jansén. “We wanted to do something where your investment and your tactics matter.”
Because it’s an RPG, The Division’s combat is nothing like the one-hit-kill firefights of other Tom Clancy games. “To honour your [weapon and skill] choices, and doing tactical combat in the RPG setting, we’ve made some concessions to the absolute reality,” says Jansén. As such, enemies must be fired upon until their HP depletes, rather than simply double-tapped in the head.
“We keep you immersed with the fact that enemies have body armour and various things to explain why some people take a lot more damage than others,” explains Jansén in regards to the more bullet sponge-y enemies.

2 - It’s not competing with the MMO crowd

MMO’s have their definition in the title: massive, multiplayer, and online. While The Division is online and multiplayer, it’s certainly not massive in terms of players. In the questing zones of its Midtown Manhattan, you’ll be with just three other co-op players at most. Head into the Dark Zone - the highly contaminated PvP area at the centre of the map - and things get busier, but not by much.
“It's not a crowded place,” reveals Jansén. “We want to keep encounters something interesting, so the Dark Zone is not crowded.”
The technical numbers behind the Dark Zone is support for about 20 - 24 players, but you’ll likely never see that many all in one area. “There are lots and lots of square miles, so we tried to fill that up with people to reach a certain density,” says Jansén. “You’ll walk a couple of blocks and you're likely to maybe see one person. If you make a lot of noise, like during an extraction, then you're likely to attract a handful of people, maybe one or two groups.”
Basically, your immersion in the world won’t be ruined by a server of 200 people teabagging corpses.

3 - It’s proper Tom Clancy

Did you know that The Division is real? Well, sort of. It’s based on Operation Dark Winter, a simulation carried out in 2001 by the American government to see how well the country would cope with a smallpox epidemic. The answer was pretty simple: we’re doomed. Society and infrastructure would collapse, leading to disaster in the streets.

That’s scary for us in real life, but it’s the perfect start to a Tom Clancy novel. Since Tom himself is no longer with us, it’s left to Ubisoft to tell the tale. For The Division, the epidemic all starts on Black Friday, with the virus being passed around on banknotes. Get it? It’s the downfall of capitalism thanks to rampant consumerism. Clever, eh?

Saving us all from anarchy are the agents of The Division themselves: men and women with access to tons and tons of military hardware, ready to shoot the heck out of those who would try and destroy America by looting the abandoned buildings of New York. Yup, this is a Clancy story alright.

4 - It’s an open world that feels real

It’s mandatory to have an open world in RPGs these days, and The Division certainly has one. It’s a close-enough 1:1 recreation of Midtown Manhattan, complete with major spots like Madison Square Garden, Times Square, and the Lincoln Tunnel. Because of the strive for accuracy, you won’t find a single copy-paste street corner in The Division. And thanks to being a place that we all recognise, it goes beyond feeling hand-crafted to being genuinely authentic.
And thanks to that Black Friday zero-hour break out, the city is covered in a light dusting of snow that breaks realistically as you tread through it. Then there’s the twinkling Christmas lights: a beautiful touch that adds some much needed colour to the otherwise concrete grey city of New York.

5 - It’s been made for PC from the start

Ubisoft Massive have been clear on the fact that The Division has a PC ‘version’, not a ‘port’. This is not a game that’s been developed by one studio and then lumped off to another studio to hammer it into shape to work on a PC; from the very start, The Division has been made to be a PC game.
“It's about considering things when you're at the inception of an idea or a feature,” explains Jansén. “The very first time a thought or idea gets into the mind of a designer, they have think not only will this work with a controller, but will this work with a mouse and keyboard? It's these things that go into all features. It's a mindset.”

6 - It’s got real PC menus

Thanks to that mindset, everything about The Division’s UI feels designed for PC. You can scale things like the minimap to your desired size, and move them around the screen. If you’re on a multi-monitor display, you can even shift much of the UI onto the screen of your choice.

Then there’s the inventory menus, that support click and drag to make equipping things far easier. You can even select multiple items by holding shift for things like scrapping many items at once. It feels like it’s making the most of the functions we have available on PC.

And of course there’s the graphics menu that’s pretty extensive. As you’d expect from all that, it’s a very pretty game.

7 - It rewards you for being bold...

The Dark Zone is a free-for-all PvP district with shades of DayZ. It’s home to the best loot, but you need to extract it via helicopter to get it out of the zone (it needs a good clean before you can use it, see). Performing an extraction is noisy, and other players will know exactly why you’re doing it. They may want to take that hot loot for themselves, and can do by going ‘rogue’.
If you see someone with loot and decide to toe the moral line, it could be worth it. “When you damage a person, you acquire 30 seconds of ‘rogue’ and you have to sweat that out,” reveals Jansén. “When you do you're home free off the hook. You have no penalty and you succeed with your evil deed. You get whatever spoils that you managed to steal from the person you killed and you're off with no penalty, no loss of anything.”

8 - … but punishes you for griefing

At first that sounds like the Dark Zone will be griefing paradise, but there’s measures to discourage anything more than the odd bit of murder. “If you're killed when you're rogue, not only do you lose whatever you had stolen and whatever you were carrying yourself, you also have a penalty to your Dark Zone XP,” explains Jansén.
See, in the Dark Zone, you have a second set of character levels which increases by gaining XP in the Dark Zone. There are containers filled with excellent loot in the area, but you need to be at a specific Dark Zone rank to unlock them. So going rogue can reduce your ability to access that loot.
That’s not the only penalty, though. “If your rogue level is high enough and you've been killing a lot, your bounty will be communicated to people in the area. Other players will see that there's a really bad person, and they will get a great reward for killing you. So you will become a very hunted person,” smiles Jansén. “And of course the penalty for you failing to survive increases the more rogue you are. I'm sure some very disturbed individuals will find that to be a challenge which they accept, but there are definitely incentives against just going on an absolute rampage.”

9 - It’s going to last a long time

The Division may not be an MMO, but Massive are thinking along those traditional lines when it comes to the end game. “We want players to take what they've invested in their character and continue playing in the open world after they hit max level and the end of the story campaign,” reveals Jansén. “There will be something to strive for: new challenges and new goals that can keep them going for a long time.”

Quite how long support for The Division continues is likely down to how successful it is. But right now, Massive “have plans for about a year” with a selection of free updates and paid-for DLC.

10 - It’s going to have PvE beyond the campaign missions

Much of that end-game content will take place in the Dark Zone. As it’s a PvP area, it’s pretty easy to gain a lot of life from there as multiplayer can't ever really ‘end’. But Massive are not expecting you to simply amuse yourself by hunting loot and going rogue.
“We do have PvE end game... it's not all Dark Zone,” teases Jansén. And that’s all he’ll say. Will PvE end game be part of the base game? Will there be PvE DLC? Who knows. But it's there, alright.

 

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How to get on The Division beta matt martin vg247

The Division’s closed beta begins next week, starting first on Xbox One on January 28. It then continues on PS4 and PC from Jan 29 to Jan 31.

That might not seem like a long time, but the good news is you’ll be able to download the beta client 48 hours before it goes live so in theory you’ll be able to start playing immediately. Just as well, the file size on PC is over 26GB.

The only guaranteed way to access the closed beta at this point is to preorder the game on either PS4, Xbox One or PC.

If you’re not willing to put your money down on the game just yet, you should follow The Division on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. All are expected to drop codes closer to the beta – some channels already have.

Also get yourself signed up on the official website and keep checking over the beta period as these tests usually scale. Once the developers are comfortable with the amount of players on the beta, Ubi may try and intentionally stress the build by adding more players. You may get a code on the very last day.

Remember that beta trials usually go a bit wonky but they can also get extended if the developer needs to work out more issues behind the scenes. This happened with the Rainbow Six: Siege beta, another Ubisoft game, which actually got extended twice. So there’s hope you may be able to play The Division past the designated times.

The Division is out March 8 on PS4, Xbox One and PC.

 

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The Division will have a "classic MMO chat system" to aid player communication ben barrett pcgamesN

After a few months of general information overload about The Division, we're starting to get the skinny on how the PC version will be defined. Today we've got creative director Magnus Jansén talking about how PC players will be able to communicate via text chat in addition to the voice systems on console. It's a standard thing, but its inclusion is part of the wider, fairly complex social systems that are built into the game.

At its core, the PC-specific communication system is the MMO chat pane you'll be used to from World of Warcraft or your particular F2P/subscription poison. But it's only available in these safe house zones within hub areas. Jansén explains:
"[The safe house is] also a social space where you can easily use your proximity voice, or on PC chat because on PC you obviously have a chat for group or local. [It's a] classic MMO chat system which you can use to hook up with strangers."
The plan is for this to help with communication on PC, make groups easier to get and build a stronger community. You'll also have access to that proximity voice chat, if you've got a mic. Meanwhile, this won't be usable elsewhere - in the Dark Zones, for example, there's less ability to talk to folks you haven't met yet. Plus, they're large areas without too many other people in them, Massive want each encounter in these PvP bits to mean something.

 

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http://www.vg247.com/2016/01/25/heres-where-to-find-the-best-vendors-in-the-division/

 

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The Division Season Pass includes three expansions and some freebies andy chalk pc gamer

Ubisoft says it has a “complete post-launch plan” for Tom Clancy's The Division, the upcoming open-world RPG/shooter, which includes free updates, new features, and a trio of “major expansions” that will make up the Season Pass.

The first expansion, Underground, “opens a new territory to players as they explore the uncharted underworld of New York City.” I'm guessing subways will be involved somehow. The second, Survival, turns the entire map into a Dark Zone—Dark Zones being the competitive PvP element of the game, which stands separate from the main campaign and has its own progression system. Finally, there's Last Stand, details of which will be announced later.

Owners of The Division Season Pass will also unlock a sawed-off shotgun sidearm and receive “exclusive” outfits and weapon skins, and get special “monthly benefits” like special content drops and events. The cost of the Season Pass wasn't revealed, but the standard edition of the game is $60/£40, while the Gold Edition, which includes the Season Pass, is $100 and apparently not available
on Steam in the UK, for some reason. Game has it for £65, though.