Review – Tom Clancy’s The Division

April 27, 2016

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The world wants to know, will hackers and cheaters ultimately be the winners of Ubisofts’ new epic game, The Division?

I have been an avid gamer since my father brought home a Commodore 64 from his retail computer store. Even years before console platforms, my adventures spanned PC games of wizards, warriors, and mazes with german soldiers. Years later, real time strategy, first person shooters and immense environments battling soldiers is where I spent most of my free time. Today a new undertaking is the massive multiplayer online third person shooter, The Division from Ubisoft, but I just want to quit.

A devastating pandemic sweeps through New York City, and one by one, basic services fail. In only days, without food or water, society collapses into chaos. The Division, a classified unit of self-supported tactical agents, is activated. Leading seemingly ordinary lives among us, Division agents are trained to operate independently in order to save society. When society falls, their mission begins.

The storyline is reminiscent of Tom Clancy’s style, the player is an undercover government agent that when activated must reclaim the city from an elaborate planned epidemic leaving the population in chaos. Mainly, it is a third person cover based shooter with many goals, gathering loot and equipment, encouraging cooperative play to overcome missions, and surviving the Dark Zone.

The Division’s closed and open beta’s were released on all three platforms.I, along with 6.4 million gamers explored the PVE pandemic New York City. Upon first look from the Beta release, the game has in fact been diminished by Ubisoft engineers from the original graphics aspirations. While I was initially impressed with the environment Ubisoft developed, it is another failure of promises by game developers.

The Snowdrop engine created by Massive, focused on global illumination, environment destruction, and visual effects of advanced particles. As this game has been in development for literally years, graphics footage of Tom Clancy’s The Division has been under great scrutiny, but this did not distract me that much from purchasing the game.

Yet what I feel the game struggles with is the increasing number of developer glitches, problems with season pass expansions, and consistent loss of connection to servers. Ubisofts’ own Code of Conduct claims no responsibility for the actions or comments made by users in the various areas of the game. Also with forbidden conduct, the following is listed:

Exploitation of any new or known issues or bugs is forbidden and may result in account suspension or revocation.
Any attempt to edit, corrupt or change game or server code is strictly prohibited.
Any such behavior will result in the immediate cancellation of the account, and may even give rise to personal liability and/or penal penalties. Use of third-party hacking, cheating or botting clients is strictly prohibited.

With online multiplayer games, hackers can access and alter game code unchecked by developers, taking advantage by cheating. Ubisoft has assured the gaming community That they will “act a lot more strongly towards players who use exploits.” While there is still hope with weekly updates that Ubisoft will correct its flaws with The Division, it remains to be seen if this is heading for a catastrophe.

When a game has this many difficulties, there is nothing any purchaser can do after 30 days. The problem lies with the continuing exploits and other hacks that emerge during this period and thereafter. Reports state Ubisoft generated more than $ 330 million worldwide in revenue its first week. If Ubisoft cannot fix all the exploits and ban all the cheaters, there is no recourse for the straight and narrow gamers.

Recently a YouTube subscriber video, now changed from public to private viewing, showed an unidentified PC player using a client side application that directly modified local memory locations to provide the player infinite health, extremely high rate of damage per shot, and the ability to shoot through walls.