The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

The Division 2: Warlords of New York Review – A Fun But Familiar Expansion

Warlords of New York adds a solid new campaign and some needed end-game changes to The Division 2, but ultimately feels like more of the same.

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The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

Going home can be hard for a lot of reasons. Sometimes returning somewhere familiar can bring up bad memories, or a place can change so much that it’s unrecognizable. Or maybe, as is the case in The Division 2: Warlords of New York, the old stomping grounds have been taken over by a cadre of elite operatives with weapons training and an axe to grind who are bent on bringing the city to its knees. Warlords of New York features some of the best missions in The Division 2 and paves the way for new seasonal content, but just like a hometown visit over the holidays, the new expansion will likely remind a lot of lapsed players why they left in the first place.

Warlords of New York takes players back to Manhattan, the setting of the first Division game, where they’re tasked with tracking down the game’s antagonist-on-the-run, Aaron Keener. This time, he’s gathered four lieutenants to help him unleash a new biological weapon to rival the Green Poison that set the series in motion, and it’s up to the Division to stop him.

The big selling point here is the manhunt – tracking down each of Keener’s agents on the way to the ringleader. Upon arriving in New York, players will find their maps obscured by the “fog of war,” which can only be removed by hoofing it through the fogged parts of the map. Between the fog of war and the manhunt structure, Warlords of New York at first seems like it will be about combing the city for clues, slowly revealing pieces of the map and closing the snare on Keener. In practice, neither concept amounts to much. Despite the fog of war, the in-game GPS still points directly to the next mission objective, and the manhunt doesn’t play out any differently from any other series of missions. One nice touch is that players are able to tackle the four warlord quest lines in any order, even bouncing back and forth between them, since enemies now scale to the player’s level.

The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

With a clear goal from the start, Warlords of New York is much more tightly structured than the main Division 2 campaign. Each warlord gets four story missions of varying lengths, and once they’ve all been dealt with, a final mission to take down Keener becomes available. It does keep the main story in focus, but also means that there’s not much time to really explore the revamped New York map or to get a sense of it as a real city full of secrets and power struggles.

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It’s a shame that the city fades from the spotlight in the expansion, because the new Manhattan map is gorgeous. It features a lot more confined, claustrophobic spaces than the wide streets of The Division’s Midtown setting and it does lose some of that map’s charm with the melting of the snow, but it still carries the series’ flair for making rubble and garbage look beautiful. While The Division 2 turned its attention to Washington, D.C., rogue engineering projects by the Cleaners and a massive hurricane have reshaped parts of Manhattan into virtual quarries and swampland, respectively, making it really feel like a city under dire threat. The campaign takes players to some incredible set pieces as well, including an oil-covered beach that’s awe-inspiring in the scale of its ruin.

The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

While Warlords of New York’s mission structure doesn’t do anything new, the missions themselves are still great, if a bit too familiar. The boss fights are the clear centerpieces. Each one has a unique set of mechanics to contend with, and they reward coordinated teamwork to a degree that’s not really present until higher-level encounters in The Division 2 base game.

Defeating each warlord will reward the player with a new skill, in the form of a new piece of Division tech, and get them one step closer to finding Keener. The new skills are a mixed bag of offensive and defensive tools, comprising a shock trap, sticky bomb, incendiary bomb, and the most interesting of the bunch, a holographic decoy. They’re all fun to play around with and present some new tactical options, but none really mixes things up too much or stands far above what was already on offer.

The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

Before Warlords of New York’s release, there was talk about how it might revitalize the game much in the same way that The Taken King did for Destiny 2 or A Realm Reborn did for Final Fantasy XIV. Having finished the story, it’s hard to see any way of that happening. It’s a good campaign, certainly, but it’s nothing Division players haven’t seen before, and the other changes that come along with the expansion and its associated patch are hardly revolutionary. Gear has been totally reworked, both in the stats it carries and how the game displays those stats in the inventory, and any particularly enticing attribute can now be permanently stored in a library to affix to other equipment. On top of that, the Dark Zone is getting a revamp to appeal more to hardcore PvP fanatics, and earning XP past level 40 will earn SHD Points to be spent for further stat progression. These are all welcome changes, but nothing that even compares to how other struggling live games have evolved over the years.

The biggest change coming for The Division 2 is the addition of seasonal content. Love them or hate them, season passes are now a part of The Division 2, offering players a track to earn better rewards as they gain XP throughout the season. Along with seasonal rewards, The Division 2 is also getting seasonal manhunts modeled after the Warlords of New York campaign. Each season, a cell of rogue agents will be unleashed for players to hunt over the course of 12 weeks. It remains to be seen how successful the seasonal model is for The Division 2, but it at least ensures a steady stream of new bad guys to hunt and shiny things to collect.

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The Division 2 Warlords of New York Review A Fun But Familiar Expansion

That is, after all, what The Division 2 is all about. As much as the game tries to sell itself as a serious tale of post-apocalyptic survival and black ops intrigue, its story has always been weak and Warlords of New York does little to buck that trend. Friendly NPCs are either blank slates or cliches and the expansion’s settlements feel even less like actual communities than those in the base game.

The only interesting new characters in Warlords of New York are the warlords themselves. In gameplay terms, they’re essentially just bosses waiting at the end of each quest line, but they’re fleshed out by a wealth of audio logs found throughout the campaign. These recordings paint a picture of a diverse group of people all brought together to aid Keener for their own reasons. In these logs, they seem to have genuinely understandable motivations for helping him, and one is explicitly being forced into his service under threat of death for an entire community. As the story progresses, it leans harder on the tension that’s always been present in The Division – that it’s perfectly reasonable for some people to see the titular shadowy organization as the villain of the story. But just like the series has always done, it pulls back from making that logical conclusion at the last moment, instead painting anyone who opposes the extrajudicial secret police with a license to kill as conspiracy theorists, obstructionists, and villains. That it comes so close to actually landing its critique this time and forcing players and their characters to actually consider whether the world would be better off without the Division only makes it more frustrating and unsatisfying when the super cops end up the unquestionable heroes once again.

Ongoing games like The Division ultimately live or die on whether they’re able to keep their players engaged between big content drops. Warlords of New York is definitely a good addition to the game, but it doesn’t offer much to suggest that it will keep players around for more than a few weeks. In the meantime, the fun but predictable campaign and Manhattan map make The Division 2: Warlords of New York a worthwhile expansion, but one that might not live up to its own pre-release hype.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/the-division-2-warlords-of-new-york-review/

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