The audience attending Ubisoft's E3 press conference learned a few valuable lessons from Tom Clancy's The Division today. Despite being awash in some pre-scripted game chatter from the players, we saw just how south a mission can go when you turn guns on newly acquired allies out of greed. They also learned that having Christmas lights up during the apocalypse is considered in poor taste.
In the cruel wasteland of the Dark Zone, alliances are formed and abolished in a single instant. You can scour the city with your pack for loot, come upon some neutral soldiers, and team up with them to battle a greater enemy. But if they see your nice, shiny swag, they might just blast you to bits the first chance they get.
Check out the footage from the conference here:
Comeback Trailer
Dark Zone Trailer
This is the most comprehensive gameplay we've gotten from The Division since its E3 2013 announcement. Baddies have health bars and numbers fly out of them when you pump them full of lead, akin to Borderlands or Destiny. Search the ruined city for upgrades and loot, then extract. Getting wasted before you extract means everything you've gotten so far is fair game for any other greedy hunters, so you and your team need to watch themselves.
Two different enemies debuted here today: Rikers, and the Cleaners. The Rikers are inmates from Riker Island Jail who broke out during the chaos and now patrol the streets looking to waste anybody who isn't them. They roam in packs and behave kinda like idiots, taking selfies of themselves in post-apocalyptic New York City like they're the world's last tourists. The Cleaners are a shadowy organization looking to "clean up" the Dark Zone. Wielding flamethrowers and donning hazmat suits, they seek to purify the Zone of all contagion. They're tough customers, and will trash all but the most well equipped agents.
It's cool to finally have a release date for The Division. March 8 2016 might seem like a long way away, but this game could be well worth the wait.
