Revisiting The Division 2
It might be a bit insensitive given the current situation that we have all found ourselves in but this madness has given me a lot of unexpected free time and the desire to consume all things dystopian. After a week of quarantine and seeing people come to blows for cans of soup and toilet paper, rather than playing something that would help take my mind off of our current pandemic — something like Animal Crossing for example — I have found myself diving even more into this grimey future that may await us. That’s what brought me back to The Division 2. Released well over a year ago, The Division 2 is a game that I bought immediately having loved the first game but that I ultimately bounced off of rather quickly. Whether another game caught my attention or I fell victim to the game’s intense difficulty, it never resonated with me like its predecessor. But then, this last Saturday as I was out and about trying to stock up on Uncrustables and other essentials, I saw this man in the chip aisle wearing a gas mask, gloves and making no effort to hide the fact that he had a pistol on his hip. Perhaps the craziest part of this is that I don’t think that I even batted an eye at what I was seeing. I grabbed a box of Goldfish — that giant pack in the large milk carton-like packaging — and threw it into my cart. From that moment on, the desire to play Division 2 was intense.
Say what you want about Ubisoft but I really dig the style of their world’s. They’re ofte
Like a lot of Ubisoft titles, the first Division game is one that got better as it received updates. Having learned from their mistakes, you would think that Division 2 was ready to be a hit from the get-go, but it wasn’t. Division 2 was plagued by bottlenecking, microtransactions and, ultimately, not enough content. As into it as I wanted to be, I wasn’t getting the drops that I needed to keep my interest up. A lot has changed with that game in the last year.
Hopping back in after a year off, I’m progressing further and having more fun with Division 2 now than I did at any other point. I don’t know that I’m playing it any differently, but I do think that picking the turret and drone as my abilities were a big help (I had previously been using the tracking mine and the scanner). Since I play solo, those two abilities have done wonders since they’re essentially AI squadmates. It also helps to finally get a weapon that you feel comfortable with and that can kill fools dead rather quickly.
If you’re like me and you’re trying to find a way to kill the time during these lockdowns, Division 2 is worth revisiting. The improvements to the game have really helped it out quite a bit, and our current pandemic gives it a certain relevancy that you wouldn’t expect. While it sucks that it takes a year-plus of updates for a game to get to where it needs to be, that does appear to be Ubisoft’s calling card at this point.
