'The Division' Underground DLC Review: The Dark Below

'The Division' Underground DLC Review: The Dark Below

Yesterday, The Division released its first paid DLC for Xbox One and PC, while the largest portion of its playerbase on PS4 will have to wait a month for the release of Underground, thanks to Microsoft’s timed exclusivity deal. After learning my lesson with Destiny, I became part of the problem by ensuring I started playing The Division on Xbox from the beginning, and therefore I’ve been able to play Underground quite a bit over the course of the past day, in between dodging Delta login errors.

I find Underground to be pretty unique, as DLC goes. In most games, you might expect some new story missions and multiplayer maps from a paid expansion, but The Division is not your typical game. Rather, Underground centers around an entirely new type of activity, a new strain of PvE farming that allows the game in inch ever closer to going full on Diablo 3. And that’s potentially a very good thing.

After one (extremely) brief mission that has you cleaning up the aftermath of a bombing, you receive some intel that there’s some shady stuff going on underneath the streets of the city as gangs try to regroup now that you’ve mostly cleared them off the surface. You return home to find your Base of Operations has expanded with two new sections, one a new place to buy and craft gear, the other the central hub for Underground Operations, probably the most interesting type of content that’s been introduced to The Division since launch, even more intriguing than the free additions of Incursions and High Value Targets (HVTs).

To use the Diablo 3 term, Underground Operations are essentially Greater Rifts, randomized, customizable missions, that are actually even more in-depth than their D3 counterparts. You can choose their difficulty (ranging from cakewalk “Normal” to suicidal “Heroic”), their length (one to three sections) and additional modifiers that will make them more challenging, like not having radar, or giving enemies special ammo.

The point of doing any of this is for XP. Alongside your base rank (which at this point, is likely to maxed at level 30) and your Dark Zone rank, you now have Underground rank. Like the others, you can rank up the lower levels quickly. A normal, one-segment, unmodified run will get you 500 XP, the bare minimum. But increase the challenge, and you’ll rank up fast. A “Hard” mission will get you 750 XP, and a modifier will add another 75 XP. Put two modifiers on, and that’s 75 more XP, plus an additional 75 XP bonus for doing more than one mod a time. Keep going, and multi-segment, high difficulty, ultra-modified missions can net you thousands of XP in one go, but you will be creating for yourself some of the hardest content in the game.

Ranking up will let you buy items from a new special vendor, like you see in the Dark Zone, but more pressingly, each rank gets you a coveted Underground cache, that will contain one of the top two tiers of gear in the game, either 240 or 268 Gearscore for armor, or 204 or 229 for weapons. I believe the higher GS you are, the more likely you are to land a max GS item.

As for my character, I found him a bit underpowered when I logged in, thanks to recent nerfs to my exact build, a Striker/SMG combo. The first two bonuses of the Striker set have been nerfed, and so has SMG damage a bit. But, for someone who wasn’t already maxed liked me,Underground proved very rewarding, very quickly. I jumped my Gearscore about 15-20 levels in just a few hours, having found a full 240 set of new BLIND armor, and an assault rifle so overpowered (the G36) that Massive already has plans to nerf it. Finding fresh power, at least initially, was not a problem.

As for the missions themselves, I was very curious to see how The Division would handle procedurally generated content. One of the key selling points of the game is how rich and detailed the map design was, and while I like a lot about Diablo, randomly generating a dark cave or crypt in that game seems a little less complex than what The Division has to do with Underground, mixing and matching pieces that fit into coherent areas for third person shooter gameplay.

Massive has done a really good job with this aspect of the content. After a few hours, you will start to see the same pieces and rooms over and over again, but the way they’re combined usually feels pretty seamless, and for randomly generated encounters, it’s pretty impressive. Also varied are the objectives, which are things you’ve already come across in the game, just sprinkled throughout these levels. One instance may have you defending generators or JTF officers. Others may have you hunting down lieutenants. All of them will spring a boss on you at some point.

The timing of these instances vary wildly. For one segment, you’re told to expect a mission to take under 15 minutes. When I was playing solo, it seemed like some of the missions (generator defense) took closer to twenty, but weirdly when I was given a twenty minute timer in a different mission to hunt down a specific boss, that took under four minutes. And obviously which type of enemies you encounter is a factor as well. The LMB, for instance, are just straight up better equipped to make your life hell than Rioters, so that plays into it as well. But I don’t think thereneeds to be a consistent average time here, and though a few missions seemed to drag a bit with unnecessary filler segments, I don’t really have a problem with the way the system works.

One thing I know people will want to know is if finally, this is a good way to farm for solo players. I’ve always been a proponent of better options for solo players in this game and many others (don’t get me started on Destiny’s lack of endgame matchmaking), and I had heard good things aboutUnderground, in terms of it being balanced for true solo play.

But it isn’t. Not really.

The problem, once again, is a complete lack of checkpoints or “second chances” for solo players. If you die in an instance, since there is no one to revive you, you are warped back to base. You do not get XP for the attempt, you do not get XP for any enemies you’ve killed along the way. You get nothing. You have utterly wasted your time.

“Not dying” seems like easy enough advice, but the problem in procedurally generated maps with random enemy encounters is that you can’t really learn anything, predict anything. As a solo player, all it takes is one shotgunner spawning out of a door behind you to end your entire instance, no questions asked. And upping the difficulty, and turning on a modifier like no minimap/enemy indicators? There’s no way you won’t die from sheer bad luck periodically.

Once again, soloing difficult (and therefore rewarding) content here is something that is for players who are A) extremely good at the game B) have extremely good gear or C) both. In other words, probably not 90% of the playerbase. And that’s fine. I love watching videos of people soloing Incursions with pistols or 1v8 Rogue hunting, but for the average person that just wants to farm by themselves? This is really not the greatest activity for that, and just like we saw with HVTs, eventually you just hit a wall with the difficulty as a solo player.

But while you can solo many of these missions, it is almost never efficient to. The risk of dying once and losing the last 10-20 minutes is significant, and you will die and be very angry about it. Grouping up, once again, is the logical choice so there are 1-3 other people to save your bacon, and even as enemies increase in numbers, you will probably burn through them fast as a group anyway. The most useful rewards come from Underground caches, so you want to get as much XP as possible, as quickly as possible. That means group play is your best bet. Even as Mr. Solo, I soon gave up that dream and realized that the activity was just plain better in every way as a group. So while it might be a good activity overall, to answer that question, no, I don’t really think this is a better solo activity than HVTs or challenge missions or anything other endgame content the game has to offer. All the usual problems still remain.

I will say my grouping experience was good. Maybe it’s just day one and the people playing are The Division faithful who are super excited about new content, but I was never kicked from a group before or during a mission. I never wiped in a group. It was fast, fun and rewarding. Far from the nightmare of trying to get a proper Incursion or DZ group together through randomized matchmaking, so far, it’s the best experience with random players I’ve had in the game. In this sense, it is a good solo activity, given how easy it is to match and run missions. Just…not if you want to actually play by yourself.

My only critique of the matchmaking system is that while you can specify what type of game you’re looking for (what difficultly, yes/no modifiers) the group leader is in charge of creating the mission. I played many games where we requested Hard, but the leader flipped the switch to Challenging and everyone promptly got massacred, or I showed up and there were two modifiers running when I didn’t want to be bothered with them.

I find the modifier aspect of Underground interesting, but I’m not sure how I feel about it overall. For a mere extra 10% XP, it doesn’t seem worth it to take away your minimap, enemy indicators and even damage indicators, turning levels intro frustrating experiences where it’s easy to be snuck up on by shotgunners or melee enemies (it’s also a way to make sure you never find Underground audiologs, which are 300 XP each). All the rest are also just ways to make the game more irritating, like letting you rarely use skills, giving you way less ammo, or just flat-out draining your health. I understand the “challenge” concept behind them, but honestly, I felt like it was worth the slight cut in XP just to run through the missions normally. But once you start adding up the multiple bonuses, I suppose I can see the appeal. I just wish there were a few fun modifiers, rather than things to just make gameplay more of a chore. I guess this is the “Halo skulls” philosophy of challenge, which many do like (but even Halo threw in a few fun ones).

The cache system, so far, has been very rewarding. It’s nice that you can play the game at essentially any level, and start getting 240/204 armor/weapons immediately. It’s fun to work toward that next level, and that next cache, and it reminds me a bit of the loot crate system inOverwatch, only with rewards that actually have the potential to help you quite a great deal. TheUnderground levels themselves also do their best to be rewarding as well, hiding crafting materials, loot chests, and having bosses that drop HE and set gear along with Phoenix credits. Massive has done a lot to make Underground an attractive farming option.

But, I still take issue with the way it doles out rewards, and it comes back, as it always does, to the Gearscore system.

Take Hard mode, the difficulty that I feel most comfortable at in my present state, and where 95% of my group members are in the 200-240 gearscore range. If these are the kinds of people who are farming this level of content, why then are rewards from this difficulty all 182 GS gear, outside of Underground caches? Every run, you are farming…essentially nothing. Materials, pretty much. If you find a chest, that’s a 182 item, if you get an end of run reward, it’s a 182 item, if you kill a boss, it’s a 182 item, or if you’re really lucky, a 214 gear set item. You’re really only in it for the 750-1000 XP, as you work toward your next cache.

Again, this is the Diablo difference. If you’re running a level 30 Greater Rift, maybe your final boss will drop one level 70 legendary item. At a higher difficulty, level 40 Greater Rift, maybe he drops three. At level 60? Hell, he might drop eight. But the point is, it is the same level of item that is dropping, it’s only the rate that is changing.

Now, thanks to this new update, The Division drops “level 30” HE and set gear at 163, 182, 191, 204, 214, 229, 240 and 268. And there are hard limits in place so you just can’t get higher items unless you are doing ultra-high tiers of difficulty. Some may say that’s fair, but seeing a group of 220 GS players running a mission where the only reward is 182 GS gear is just weird.

Higher difficulties need to reward players with much higher drop rates, not drop quality if that makes sense. There is already so much RNG in getting good rolls on gear, but when you add innine different levels of Gearscore, it’s a mess. The point is, this is a larger problem The Divisionstill needs to address, and once again, it’s present in Underground like it is in so many other activities. The Division’s loot has been improved perhaps, but it is still a long way from where it needs to be. You can’t design a Diablo-ish activity like Underground, but not mirror the reward system, which is why people get hooked on infinite Rift runs and the game in general

Despite The Division’s larger looming loot issues, I can’t argue that Underground isn’t anything other than a new positive for the game. It’s a fun activity, they’ve done procedurally generated content well, and at least some aspects of it are pretty rewarding, the form of the cache system. I’ve enjoyed it so far, and I can see myself enjoying it for a while.