I’m feeling like crap this morning so I am probably going to be fairly brief as far as blog posts go. Granted I just said that in the least brief way I could possibly muster… so who knows. I played a little Division 2 last night and quite honestly it didn’t grab me. Of the looty shooty games that were on the market I will say that Division was probably the one that I had the most on again off again relationship with. Destiny I knew from the first moment I played it that I loved it. Warframe I knew from the first moment I played it that I largely disliked it. Division… I was never quite certain of. There were aspects that I liked and aspects that I didn’t like… namely I was never a huge fan of their particular brand of hide behind shit and aim your tiny cursor at someones head. It felt way more tactical and less visceral than a Destiny where everything is first person gun play. I found it fine when I was trying to keep track of three targets, but stressed when I was attempting to hide from a dozen targets all bearing down on me. The movement never felt fluid enough to compensate for the need to constantly be ducking myself behind something. Also my target personal target acquisition skills seemed to be incompatible with zeroing in on a tiny area of motion fast enough to get in a shot before I also took a lot of damage in the process.
If anything… all of these things seem to be worsened experience wise for me in the sequel. The world is more cluttered and there is just more things that you have to reconcile in your field of view… and given that I spend most of my time playing on a 15.4 inch laptop screen… tracking tiny areas of motion is a challenge. From what I can tell Division 2 is much like Destiny 2… where it is mostly the same game just rendered in much higher fidelity. However just like the first game I am not entirely certain if that is a game that I actually want to play. The whole military fantasy thing is not really my jam anymore, so that is an initial strike. Third person shooters are less of my thing than first person shooters… so that is another strike. Lastly I am finding that I just don’t enjoy the run from cover to cover sort of gameplay and much prefer to run around guns a blazing… and Division is a game that actively and brutally punishes you for that. However as this genre broadens I feel less of a need to try and keep up with all of them. I play Destiny and Anthem… and apparently not Division and Warframe.
That is not to say that I won’t spend more time during the weekend giving it an opportunity to infect me with its madness. This is just a post saying that more or less its the same game that I remember… and that I took two years to hit level cap in. I know there are a bunch of my friends who are super amped about it and I am not really going to bash the gameplay experience. It is good at the thing it is doing and I think it is probably better at the thing it is doing than the first game was. I just find myself questioning if I like the thing that it is trying to do. It is perfectly reasonable to think that a game is actually pretty good, but that it isn’t a game that you enjoy. Division 2 is without a doubt a worthy successor to Division… but I found myself just wanting to play more Anthem.