The Open Beta of 'The Division' Is the Best Version Yet
If you haven’t had a chance to play the game yet, this weekend is the time to dive in.
Odds are you’ve heard of Ubisoft’s newest title, The Division, coming out early next month. Set in a post-apocalyptic version of New York after a virus outbreak, you play as a sleeper agent activated as a last resort. The one catch? Enemies have health bars.
Over the past few months, gamers have been testing it in the alpha and beta stages through access codes, but today you can dive into the open beta on Xbox One, PS4, and PC until servers go down on Monday, February 22.
So far, it’s looking to be the cleanest pre-release version of them all, with plenty of fixes for balancing, audio bugs, and the frustrating instances of Dark Zone hacking. Players have the opportunity to create a character via randomization, explore the Dark Zone PvP area and get their hands on a few new missions that unlock the added tech wing in their forward base of operations. They’ve also unlocked the turret ability in the technology tree, and modified for a few abilities available in previous betas. One nice added thing, too, is that they made the A.I. enemies in the game (specifically the Dark Zone) significantly tougher — which is a nice change of pace in difficulty.
The turret is an absolute workhorse.
The new mission is a welcome introduction to the technology wing, and the added daily community events are a nice touch to keep you engaged, but the new content in open beta isn’t anything to write home about. Most of the available content remains the same as in earlier testing periods and represents a very small portion of the final game.
That being said, if you haven’t had the chance to check out The Division, I highly recommend it. Essentially, The Division has worked to fix all of the issues Destiny had in the new hybrid-MMO game design upon launch, including open player vs. player combat and the lack of a large, living open world.
It’s a promising project, but we won’t truly know how much Ubisoft delivers until the launch date slated for early next month.
The Division releases on Xbox One, PS4, and PC on March 8.
