Have you ever played Tom Clancy's The Division?
It’s a loot-and-shoot style MMO game that blends third-person shooting with the classic RPG. In The Division, Manhattan has fallen into anarchy after a biological attack spreads smallpox among its residents, leaving it in chaos. The initial response team sent to provide relief has gone dark, so it’s up to you and your friends to drop into Manhattan and see what’s happening. The game features an near-future apocalyptic New York setting, RPG elements like progression and weapon upgrades, quests, base building,
Sounds great, right? In the weeks leading up to The Division’s 2016 launch, it was. Hype trains tend to end in heartbreak, though, and on launch, the game received poor reviews from the media and gamers alike. Unless you were one of the few members of the community who stuck around through the rough patch and became part of the core audience, it’s likely that just the name of The Division conjures up memories of a terrible flop and yet another unoptimised and overhyped Ubisoft launch.
First of all, the writers absolutely crushed it with the setting and theming. New York City in the winter is traditionally associated with romance and Christmas, but The Division turns this on its head. The dingy back allies and piles of trash stacked in the streets are urban to the core— it’s an evocative place to battle it out with bandits and PMCs. The actual game loop is also intriguing. Abandoned police stations and meatpacking district warehouses are narratively compelling ideas for dungeons, a welcome break from ancient temples and ruins. The risk/reward calculus of the PvP-enabled “dark zone” incentivizes players to drop the grind and slug it out with each other.
These are the things that, despite the rough launch, have held the community of The Division together. It has a small yet passionate fanbase, enough to spread occasional hype on Reddit but not enough to prevent The Division 2 from being a commercial failure.
It’s easy to get rosy-eyed about the past and to imagine what the game’s legacy might have looked like. The Division was probably never going to be 2016’s game of the year, but the fact that it did so poorly lodged an impression firmly in the gaming Zeitgeist: not just of the game, but of the genre it was trying to spearhead. There are very few examples of true MMO shooter games out there— there’s Planetside and Foxhole, which are wargames. There’s Destiny and Palworld, which have some ostensible MMO traits. But as far as a looty-shooty, grindy third-person shooter that wants to be a persistent, massively multiplayer experience akin to Runescape, there’s really not much out there that’s quite like The Division (save for its 2019 sequel and the upcoming 2024 title).
This matters. An entire game concept, a genre that could have breathed a new life into the contemporary understanding of the MMO, was quashed before it could be born. It’s not very wise to mourn what could have been, but it is interesting to consider whether the ideas forged in The Division’s design document could have solidified themselves in the genre had the launch not been so messy.
It is the big studios like Ubisoft that have the real power and resources to innovate, to create, to define new genres like the one that The Division was trying to kickstart. When they succeed, it’s amazing. AAA companies and indie teams alike have a whole new sandbox to play in and try out new ideas. But when they fail (or leave a negative impression in the community), that entire path is blocked off for would-be developers. Why on earth would you want to make an MMO shooter? After Ubisoft’s attempt, no one’s ever going to buy a game that even reminds audiences of The Division.
A new generation of developers are entering the industry. The making of games is accessible to more people and ideas are on the market than ever before. But like all markets, game makers are limited by demand. With no demand, there’s no incentive for anyone to even try to make something vaguely similar to Tom Clancy’s The Division ever again.
The games industry is undeniably in a challenging time at the moment, with declining sales and mass layoffs across all platforms. The reasons for this are many, but what’s absolutely true is that games need constant and ongoing innovation— testing new ideas, building new subgenres, expanding the medium’s landscape. But it’s discouraging when the power to make such innovation is sequestered in the hands of the few powerful studios with the resources to execute. And when AAA studios don’t care enough to deliver a great product, their sales aren’t the only thing that suffers. It’s the very ideas from which the product is woven.
