Tom Clancy’s The Division is one of the most anticipated titles of the year and Ubisoft is now eagerly providing new, juicy details about the game.
Answering the most popular questions on the official Ubisoft blog, new details on loot, experience, skills, talents, and customization were given:
Loot
There are essentially two categories of loot: weapons and equipped gear. You can equip a primary weapon, a secondary weapon and a pistol, and the weapons in these sub-categories all have individual stats designed to complement different play styles, like accuracy, range, and stability.
Mods grant additional perks to your weapons that improve some of its characteristics, like accuracy, giving extra life to weapons that might not seem all that useful initially.
The equipped gear category is where you’ll find things like body armor, gloves, packs, knee pads, holsters and – perhaps most importantly – air filters and gas masks.
There are also varying tiers of loot that are all color coded to designate their quality. White-colored gear is common, greens are a little less common, blues are rare, etc.
Experience
All weapons and equipped gear are gated by level, so if you’re at level six and you find a level-eight assault rifle, you can’t use that weapon until you level up. That only happens if you gain experience, and there are numerous ways to do that. Obviously, killing enemies grants experience (and this seems like the best way to gain experience in the Dark Zone, which has a separate leveling system and gear), but so does discovering previously unexplored parts of the city or giving ordinary citizens spare items you might have in your inventory (they might even give you a piece of clothing to equip in exchange).
Talents
Talents are passive abilities, divided into the same categories as skills, and they offer things like a reduction to recoil while in cover, or an increased chance that a status effect leveled at one enemy will spread to multiple nearby targets.
Customization
The Division offers a lot of customization. Skills, talents, perks and other such abilities are designed to let you examine them and decide which ones benefit your playstyle or are most effective in any given situation. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s a lot of cosmetic customization; at the beginning of the game, you can customize some of the physical traits of your agent, but throughout the game, you’ll find gear that lets you change the appearance of your jacket, pants, headwear, eyewear, and more.
In an interview with VG247, Ubisoft Massive’s Magnus Jensen revealed the level cap and endgame content:
One of the cool things we do is that once you hit the max level – level 30 – suddenly the whole Dark Zone repopulates with all-new content and challenges suitable to that level… And now the entire Dark Zone, instead of being segmented where you explore further and further north, the whole Dark Zone is repopulated completely for you to tackle openly again.
Jensen, this time in an interview with GameSpot, discussed the game’s delays, saying that it was “just about the amount of stuff we had to do, as well as trying to do it right.”
He then went on to talk about micro-transactions within the game, and how they had been considered:
[A level-skip] was under consideration, but it never made it into the game. So there won’t be any microtransactions like that. No shortcuts.
In case you missed it, we posted news on when The Division‘s closed beta begins, and the dates it will run through.
