Good day all,
I spent the better part of the weekend playing the beta on PC and wanted to leave my feedback. I'm sure a bunch of this has been said by others doing the same, but putting this out there just in case something hasn't been mentioned. First and foremost I want to congratulate the development teams that worked on the Division 2. Yes I know this sounds like i'm kissing butt, but my overall experience with the beta was a very positive one. I'm not saying there weren't any issues though....there were plenty which I will get into shortly. Even with all the issues I saw and heard about from friends I was still really impressed by the improvements that have been since D1.
My Rig:
i7 8700K
32 GB DDR4 Ram
Nvidia 2080 RTX
2TB 7200 RPM Hybrid drive
Xbox One Controller (used when I play)
The Positives:
I'm going to start with the positive things I noticed from the beta as there were many improvements in my opinion.
- Level design was excellent. I love NYC and how D1 looks and feels. I still prefer it to what I saw of DC in the beta. However the missions I felt were a vast improvement. The locations were interesting with lots of fantastic places to engage in fire fights. The Dark Zone was also great in its design. Cool looking areas that made for some intense fights with NPC's and other agents.
- Breakable objects. There were a bunch in D1 that helped make the gun fights look cool as paint cans and bottles threw stuff everywhere. D2 is a nice step up. Lots of glass objects, paint cans, tings that erupt in colored smoke or explosions, etc. Visually its incredible to see when the bullets start flying.
- Enemy AI. D1 was ok, but it felt like all the AI did similar things. D2 feels very different. I could tell each faction has its own AI and it made fighting each very enjoyable.
- Weapons. The weapons felt great. Each weapon type seemed to have its own very distinct feel and handling. I found myself using weapons I often ignored in D1 just because they felt so good to shoot. There was one negative I found which I'll mention below.
-Mods. This goes along with weapons a bit. The new way mods are done is certainly an improvement. Gone are the days of sucking up storage space with mod after mod or being annoyed because you wished you had a second version of a mod to use on another gun so you wouldn't have to switch it out a bunch.
- Armor system. I like the changes to the health/armor system. D1 always felt like it leaned toward using specific health skills if you wanted to progress in endgame. The choices in D2 make it feel like you can focus on whatever skills you want especially in groups. Also didn't feel like I was getting dropped nearly as fast as D1 which I liked.
Dark Zone - The smaller normalized DZ experience was far more enjoyable for me this time around. Didn't have to worry about someone in exotics rolling through cleaning everything and everyone up in their path. I had gotten so used to that in D1 that I stopped going into the DZ.
Time to Kill - I spent most of my playthrough solo and the time to kill was excellent compared to D1. Did a few missions with a partner and it still felt improved. I've heard that in the groups of 3 or 4 this is different, but can't confirm it.
Enemy Armor - I love that armor breaks off the big guys now exposing weak areas to target. A very nice touch that adds to the game and gun play.
Options - There are so so many. I love that D2 allows you to customize as much as they do when it comes to how you want the game to look, the hud system, audio, etc. The more the merrier. D1 was like this as well.
Stats & More Stats - I love the insane amount of stats on gear now. Even from the little i've seen with the beta I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of different ways to build your characters. Also its really awesome that MP match stats are tracked and its not just some win/loss or K/D ratio stats, but pretty much everything you could want. Love me some stats!
Perks - I really like the new way perks are done. Unlocking them with SHD tech or by level in the DZ. Felt good to have a little more choice in what I unlock and when. Some nice quality of life perks as well.
It's Fun - Even with all the negative issues the game is still very fun which says a lot.
The Negatives:
Now I don't know how old the beta build is. Could be a few months. Hopefully they are busy fixing all the little bugs and focusing on some of the more major issues at the same time. Below is what I noticed or was put off by during the beta.
Audio - Holy audio bugs batman. You all have some clean up to do on isle audio. Tons of different and incredibly annoying bugs like gun sounds that get stuck repeating until you fire your gun again, audio completely dropping or becoming muffled, overlapping audio in settlements, audio cutting in and out, audio disappearing when reloading or firing, etc. This is where I noticed the most bugs and they seemed to plague everyone I talked to about it even on different systems.
Performance - It's not what I expected. While I was able to get a steady 60fps at 1440p, I had to use a mix of medium/high settings and then scale the resolution (set mine to 75%) to achieve this. While the game still looked great I was disappointed that I couldn't run at 1440p with high or ultra settings or at least not have to use the dynamic resolution. DX12 rendering is still broken like it was in D1. Turing it on would drop my fps significantly. I played with the settings for at least a couple of hours trying to find the best setup for my 2080 RTX. Really hoping the final game is a bit more optimized.
Agent Requests - My number one most annoying things about D2. The stupid agent requests for help. Now don't get me wrong it's cool that the game can notify you this way. However it happens so often and uses the same voice as the mission call outs (enemies incoming, enemies requesting backup, etc) that its just a pure annoyance at that point. Please please......PLEASE! put in an option to disable this, mute it or allow it to only trigger when the requests are coming from friends. Otherwise it significantly degrades the experience.
Weapons - So I know I had this as a positive and in the majority of cases it is, but I did run into some issues with sniper rifles. I love sniper rifles. Always used them in D1 and they feel really good in D2. The issue seems to be with latency or hit boxes or both. I was having trouble getting headshots on people especially if they were moving. I had them (or so I though) dead to rights in the crosshairs only to fire and miss completely. It happened enough that I assumed there was some bullet travel time so I tried to adjust for it only to hit just in front of the moving target. It was literally hit or miss with all the sniper rifles I tried including the specialization which makes me sad.
Connection Issues - I don't think anyone is surprise by these sadly. Such a common place with betas and launches. I was getting the Delta-03 error every 20 or so mins when I first started playing. I opened up some ports on my router and that seemed to help although its hard to say as D2 beta had been up for 24hrs before I did that so some of the issues might have been corrected on the back end in between my first time playing and second. I hope you all can have a fairly smooth launch.
Dark Zone Balance - Like weapons I have positives and negatives with the Dark Zone. My overall is positive however I did notice that if you go in solo than there is little to no chance of you walking away from a 1v2 or above. Unless the other agents are complete idiots its incredibly easy to over a solo player. Maybe this was intended? I swear I read something about the match making trying to put solo's with other solo's or smaller 2 person groups, but I could be mistaken. That's a start to correcting the issue. I'm wondering is giving solo players a slight stat boost over grouped players would help. The more in your group the less of a boost you get with 4 people getting no boost and 3 people getting minimal. I'm not saying an unfair boost of any sort, but enough of one that a solo player can face off again groups and if they play it very smart than they might be able to have a chance at victory or at least escape. Same would go for 2 vs 4. It's an extremely delicate thing as you wouldn't want solo players just running together stomping on groups. Just a thought, but who knows maybe its ok where it is. I still had fun.
Skirmish - I played a few rounds of this. It was my least favorite part of the beta. Felt incredibly unbalanced. Not sure if its not normalized or if the boost mechanic is just that broken. I was facing off against guys with my level 7 green vest that had just shy of 1000 armor. Looking at some of the guys I was going up against that were steamrolling us repeadily....their armor was showing 27.5k armor. Now I don't know if that was because of the boost mechanic or because its not normalizing gear for skirmish. Made for a very one sided and not fun experience. Would make more sense to give the boost to a team if and only if they are losing by a certain amount (like by 10) to give them a chance to make a come back. Also if its not normalized, why not? Why not do like the DZ and have normalized and non-normalized matches (unranked and ranked basically)?
Inventory & UI - To me the inventory felt very sluggish and the UI felt jumbled. I was hoping for something I could quickly jump in, swap a weapon and back to shooting even during the heat of it. This was not my experience. The whole thing felt sluggish to me and wasn't very clear right off. Mind you I was using an Xbox One controller to navigate, but even destruction of junk would take a bit longer than I recall D1 taking. To me it felt like there were several steps that could be removed to help streamline the UI/Inventory system.
Random bugs - I noticed a bunch of little random bugs. Things like enemies at control points getting stuck behind close doors so you would have to log out or fast travel somewhere to reset it. Random pedestrians T posed in the middle of the street that you could walk through like ghosts. Melee enemies running at you sideways. Other enemies sliding across the floor or bugging out and stretching every which way when hey died as well as falling through surfaces, getting stuck and having to fast travel to fix it. None of these were very frequent, but they did all happen over the few days of play I did.
Dark Areas - This subject came up among several of my friends while playing. At night or indoors when there are unlit or barely lit areas it was incredibly hard to see. Mind you I was playing on an OLED TV so the dark areas were incredibly dark. I cranked my brightness up with contrast up half way so things weren't washed out. Night time wasn't an issue, but unlit indoor areas where close to pitch black which was annoying. My friends weren't running on OLED and they were having a difficult time seeing at night as well. Could just be settings on their screens need adjustment idk. Figured I'd mention it here though.
Deploying Skills - Compared to D1 using your skills felt very sluggish. Throwing a turret out was difficult to do during combat so I found that most of the time I would make sure to throw it at the start cause it would be difficult to do mid fight. That was never the case with D1.
Head Glitching - Was an issue in D1 and is still an issue in D2. Still very annoying especially when certain player know how to take advantage of it. Can be very frustrating.
Yes my negative list is larger than my positive list. A bunch of it is bugs or annoyances that didn't really take away from the overall fun I had with the game. The beta showed me that even with that list of negatives the shear potential of D2 is awesome. Hopefully many of the issues will be solved by launch. Either way I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on the final product. Well done!
P.S. - Don't screw up the raids!!!!!!