How The Division’s Incursions Update Misses The Mark

The build-up and hype for The Division’s release were huge, and as Ubisoft released their vision of a pandemic stricken New York City, they did well to match many of the expectations heaped upon it. Not only that, but with a series of monthly expansions, both free and as part of the season pass, the game’s longevity was also looking good.

Admittedly, there was something lacking from the so-called end game at its release. Yes, you could delve into the Dark Zone, and collect Phoenix Credits from doing daily featured missions, but there was little impetus beyond preparing yourself for what was to come. The 1.1 patch that was released last week goes some way to improving the end game.

There’s now a number of daily and weekly challenges to complete in addition to repeating missions on Hard and Challenging, just as we had before. It will be to kill certain enemies, land certain kinds of hits, to craft certain items or materials, and give you another avenue to earn Phoenix Credits. Additionally, killing the named enemies will now net you a yellow High End, and you can keep an eye out in the Dark Zone for supply drops, which will get you vital crafting materials at the very least, or can now be dropped for your squad mates to pick up within the first two hours of picking them up.

There’s also new rewards to look forward to, with a couple of new named High End weapons to hunt down, as well as four gear sets that are coloured green in your inventory. They go above and beyond what the High End kit offers, with stacked bonuses and perks for wearing several pieces from each set that can help to boost a particular style of play, whether support, dealing damage or to help you go solo. Some you will have to earn from completing the new Incursion, but others can be bought from northerly vendors in the Dark Zone or as blueprints from the Special Gear vendor in your home base.

That’s all well and good, but the most looked forward to aspect of the update was the Falcon Lost Incursion. Unfortunately, it does little to live up to what had sounded like a grand MMO raid-like encounter, and is only thematically different to a horde mode that has been seen in countless other games. “Incursions adds a new endgame activity specifically designed for squad play,” Ubisoft wrote on their blog last month, but that description feels largely untrue.

The Last Man Battalion are far from done and dusted, with the WarrenGate water treatment plant under their control and one squad of Division agents already lost. It all takes place in one large room, with a fearsome APC at one end that needs to be destroyed, while you try to fight off wave after wave of enemies – this in a game that was already dominated by having to fight off waves of onrushing enemies. There’s new enemy types, with the LMB deploying drones to attack you from the skies.

There’s some interesting things being done, where you have to take explosives from certain enemies and, having deactivated a pair of turrets, use these to blow chunks out of the APC’s armour. However, there’s nothing substantially new or different feeling from the rest of the game, and the overriding feeling is that this mode is relying far too heavily on ballooning health bars, high damage enemies with snipers and shotguns, and the enemy sending numerous grenades your way to keep you out of cover. Even the APC sends big area of effect attacks your way, but it does little to keep you moving around the map, and instead pushes you to find a small area that you can defend while shifting from cover to cover.

Unfortunately, this update has brought with it a number of bugs and has caused a few issues. Most notably, there were a handful of exploits in the Falcon Lost mission, as well as issues with the weekly rewards for the mission which saw Ubisoft remove weekly rewards entirely to try and stem the flow of players quickly amassing the absolute best gear in the game and then having a major advantage in the Dark Zone. Since that hot fix went into effect, we’ve seen the same three daily and challenge missions repeated for three days on the trot as well.

Those can and will be fixed in the near future, but there are other oddities, such as the Gear Score system. As a basic indicator it makes sense to have a unifying numeric value to show how good your character is, but it’s just too inflexible. I’ve got lower tier gear with higher armour values and better perks than the High End gear with a higher gear score that is now dropped by named enemies. Similarly, my lower tier M1A marksman rifle deals the highest damage per second of all my guns, by virtue of a number of attachments, but is stuck at 131 gear score compared to guns on 184 or above.

While it’s currently a dumb and inflexible system, it does at least seem to lay the foundations for gear stats that can be digested at a glance. It’s currently a morass of glaring at DPS values, trying to remember what the gun was like without attachments, and so on, but gear score could alleviate that. Similarly, weapons could be bracketed together better, to avoid the idiosyncrasies of having lower gear score guns that are better than the supposed top tier.

Ultimately, there are a number of things that make the Incursions update somewhat disappointing. While there are positive steps with the end game loot and daily activities, The Falcon Lost level not only feels artificially difficult and uninspired, but came with a number of damaging bugs and curious design decisions. Hopefully May’s Conflict update can get The Division back on track.