After playing The Division‘s closed beta, I was concerned that the finished game’s PvP Dark Zone mode would swiftly descend into a frustrating, unending search for valuable loot whilst faced with constant hostility from other players. Given that accumulated experience and progress made in the beta was transient, more players were willing to put their neck on the line and begin opening fire on others. It was a lot of fun as a result of this anarchy, but if the same attitudes had carried over into the final product, venturing into the Dark Zone for its intended purpose – obtaining high-end gear – would’ve been made much more difficult.
But now that The Division has finally been released, it’s become apparent that this mode is actually suffering from the opposite problem – there simply isn’t enough chaos in the Dark Zone. Though the game still pitches it as a dangerous and unforgiving environment, the systems Ubisoft has put in place ensures that it’s really of no benefit to anyone for this to be the case. The reward for gunning down a fellow player, becoming a Rogue Agent and then successfully waiting for the timer to tick down and that status to disappear is woefully small, and when compared with the punishment the game dishes out for dying in its PvP area, doing anything other than taking down NPCs is illogical.
The best way to currently experience the Dark Zone is to disregard actual progress in favor of playing it as you would have done in the beta, by actively competing against other players and, for lack of a better word, being a gigantic asshole. Unfortunately, very few are currently willing to take that risk, given that death can mean the loss of an incredibly high amount of XP, crucial gear and Dark Zone Keys.
This unwillingness from players to mercilessly murder their fellow man is exacerbated by the fact that all of The Division‘s end-game content is tied into the Dark Zone, with players tasked with venturing into it in order to obtain Phoenix Credits, the end-game currency used to purchase Legendary equipment and weaponry. With the penalty for death greatly increasing the higher you level up in the Dark Zone, it’s inevitable that even people such as myself who have taken it upon themselves to right the mode’s wrongs by going out of our way to hassle other players, will eventually have to fall in line if we want to actually obtain the best weapons in the game. After my time with the game’s PvE is up, if the Dark Zone remains in its current state, then chances are my days as a Rogue Agent will also have come to an end.
Also See: Why The Division is the Perfect Game for Those Disappointed by Destiny
It’s understandable why Ubisoft would want to enforce strict punishments upon those who focus upon player-killing, given the problems presented by the likes of DayZ and other such survival games. When the penalty for player-killing is minuscule, players will forego any sense of morality in favor of killing one another without so much as a second thought. Given that the Dark Zone is a more condensed area than most survival games, if players were to kill one another at will then no one would ever get anything done, so the game absolutely needed to ensure that this wouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, it currently leans far more towards punishing the player for taking a risk than rewarding them for it, minimizing interactions between human inhabitants of the Dark Zone in the process. The mode is free of that sense of tension that was prevalent in the beta, where you greeted each player you stumbled upon with suspicion. In the finished game everyone mostly minds their own business, safe in the knowledge that people aren’t likely go Rogue on them because if they do so, they’re risking undoing hours of progress.
This is a shame, because the best session I’ve had thus far in the Dark Zone was alongside a group of people who had each thrown caution to the wind, deciding to treat it as a traditional PvP multiplayer mode and spend three hours trying to off one another: I revived a guy only for me and my squadmate to shoot him down seconds later, saluting over his lifeless body in order to taunt him in the afterlife; we intercepted several extractions, making nuisances of ourselves as people desperately tried to attach their loot to the chopper; we were forced to pay for our sins as a gang of higher leveled players hunted us down and decimated us. However, after successfully going Rogue multiple times and managing to defend myself until the timer ran out, I exited the game having gone down a level and losing all of my Dark Zone Keys in the process, despite only having died a few times. This great imbalance between risk/reward essentially means that to have more fun in the Dark Zone, you have to play with the acceptance that you’re likely going to lose out on a lot of progress.
This is a shame, because the foundations for a hugely entertaining PvP mode are all there, and there is still much enjoyment that can be eked out of it, but it’s greatly hampered by a progression system that clearly doesn’t want players to spend their time killing one another in the area that is specifically designated for them to do so. While I’m more than satisfied with The Division‘s PvE component right now, I hope that when I eventually get around to its end-game content, the Dark Zone will be a more lively and suspenseful experience. Until that time, I’ll continue trying to make everyone’s PvP experience a bit more hostile. You’re welcome.
