Originally Posted by
Tiny_Nutz
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My thoughts on The Division 2 private beta.
This will include both positive and negative feedback so fanboys who don’t like any criticism of their favourite franchise should skip to the next post.
Now I am a huge fan of the franchise clocking in well over 1,400 hours of play time in TD1.
I am a PVP player. The PVE to be honest will always bores me as the AI is too predictable and offers little to no challenge in terms of tactics and skill. I don’t really care if AI goes from 30k toughness to 50k, they play the same and after 40 hours in the game any decent player will know how to beat the AI.
If PVE is your thing that’s ok, this is just the opinion from my PVP standpoint.
The way I play is to grind PVE to get my loot. I will play constantly until I get a top tier build. Then I will go into the DZ and play PVP hijacking every agent I come across to improve the build to max levels, never wanting to do anything PVE based again.
Things I loved about TD1 was how much skill there was involved. Clutch med kits with the talent combat medic for increased amount of health, on the move to receive less damage, having predatory on a pistal to finish players to get health over time... These things to name just a few, allowed good solo players to take on teams of 2,3 or even 4 based on your superior skill and in depth build/game knowledge.
Over the years the Devs kept on decreasing certain things to lower the skill cap. Thus making it harder for solo players to have the big skill advantage they had based on their skill.
This on top of friendly fire being introduced equaled with the 2.0 rougue system meant that a very skilled 4 man team would have to put up the ‘DZ Police’ turning up in numbers to kill you 20 vs 4.
Before 2.0 was introduced if the whole server turned up, and you had a good organised team, you could no doubt fight them officer and over again until your team ran out of med kits or ammo, forcing you to dip and move to survive the timer. Due to people accidentally going rougue and therefore ultimately they of course ended up fighting each other allowed a team to bottle them in and watch them all shoot each other before you ran through them all.
Too often after 2.0 rogue systems was introduced you would get the entire server grouped up, all emoting and waiting for players to go rougue, just so they could effectively multi group and get cheap rouge kills.
The major flaw I see in TD2 is without any real healing skills, and the time to kill being reduced so much, that the skill cap required to kill players is lower than ever!
Literally get the drop on an agent, point shoot, and they’re dead in seconds before they can really react. Solo manhunts can RIP on consoles for sure, as nobody will be able to survive or run from a squad or 4!
Also I found if a player is about 15m away, if you poked your head around a corner and let yourself get shot until your armour was destroyed, then go back into cover to heal, players will push to finish you off... Only for them to get around the corner to find you had fully healed, and then kill them easily as they were now in the bad position, maybe let them run into a grenade, or place a turret down so two guns shred them once they turned the corner. It just felt a bit cheap.
I would like either instant heals whilst moving to stop people pushing with the advantage to find they get punished when going for the finish. Or Heal over time, so that the player with the advantage pushing gets rewarded for winning the early exchange and pressing to finish the player off. Both these ways would still stop the ‘chicken dance’ and would be a massive improvement over the beta healing.
I think the DZ also needs much more frequent weather dynamics. Heavy rain might help solo players to get the drip on 2 or 3 players at an extraction for example. Bad enough for them that they have to flag before going rougue giving their element of surprise away. Maybe solo players shouldn’t have to flag to go rougue against people in groups, maybe they could simply shoot ?!
I also hated the NPC status effects or how many they have, and hated the length of time shock lasts!! Sometimes you would be shocked from nowhere, this stands you up out of cover, lasts for an eternity and you often get shredded. This on top of runners with shock batons, too many NPC’s with RC cars, and of course suicide bombers... Again Solo it is incredibly tedious getting shocked as this equates to insta death in the DZ anyway.
Obviously there were loads of bugs. Getting kicked from servers, getting stuck in walls, rougue timers not going down, sounds glitching, if in a group and killed as rougue when coming out of the checkpoint, not getting the 5 or 10 seconds you’re supposed to get when leaving the checkpoint, this equals being killed instantly by the turrets, then waiting another 30 seconds before you can get back to help your team.
However I would hope that a lot of this will have been covered by loads of our feedback and these things can be fixed before launch.
The movement is a little slow, again this with the quick ‘time to kill’ makes it easier for less skilled players to hit players narrowing the skill gap further.
Despite all of this I did enjoy a lot of what I played. Having to be more tactical when pushing, having to actually use cover is indeed a big step in the right direction over the ‘chicken dance’ in TD1.
I felt the guns were far easier to control even in TD2 vs TD1 even with top tier mods equipped. Feels good for console players to be far more accurate... Yet again though... This without hardly any healing or skills, or clutch med kits, slower player movement & time to kill being so fast, also makes it easier to kill players. Thus RIP skill gap!!!
Effectively I feel the game has been over simplified to please poor players who complained, and ultimately lets down the hardcore PVP players.
Without this I think the hardcore player base who played TD1 for years will get bored after the first 6 months or so and they will drop off onto other games.