The Division Resurgence

What you think about Resurgence is largely going to depend on what scale you use to measure it. As a game designed first for mobile and then directly ported to PC, it’s actually quite good. It’s a competent third person shooter that captures a lot of the essence of The Division. But as a videogame without the ‘mobile’ label - just comparing it to everything else in my Steam library - it’s not very good. Shocker, I know. I played Diet Division for 35 hours to complete the story, reach the level cap, and earn all of the achievements. Had you asked my opinion on it during this process, the answer I gave you would have varied wildly based on when you asked. For the first ten hours or so, it’s (just) okay. Shooting feels surprisingly decent, visually the game is stronger than I expected, and there seems to be a lot to do. Hours 10 through 20 were mostly a good time - You start finding more advanced equipment, understanding the systems, and can begin some basic buildcrafting. The loot you find is exciting and scratches that specific itch. And then, hours 20 through 35 were a monotonous boring slog as every progression system slows down from a gush to a trickle. It’s a somewhat competent third person shooter buried under layer after layer of mobile bloat. The UI is awful, being largely designed for touchscreen devices. There’s a bunch of different types of currencies doled out at a very specific pace to maximize engagement. There’s a battle pass, a monthly pass, daily and weekly missions, reset timers, daily caps on both loot and XP, and of course, a gacha system. Speaking of the gacha system, it has gacha mechanics but they’re so boring - all you can get out of the standard boxes is upgrade materials. Functionally, this is the same as every other gacha, right? In those, you use duplicates of other weapons to ‘feed’ one copy of it and increase its level/rarity. In Resurgence, this isn’t how it works - you just use materials. So while yes, you’re still hoping for the orange-rarity upgrade materials or whatever when you do a 10-pull, there’s something deeply funny to me about how it makes a big song and dance of opening the crate and you get… Fabric, But It’s Special Fabric. This is a classic example of Ubisoft looking at systems in other successful gachas, and kind of understanding what makes them tick but not really. There’s no dopamine to it. When I look at something like Genshin Impact, or FFVII Ever Crisis, or Diablo Immortal, or any other of the bajillion gachas out there, I could see why people might be tempted into spending money. On the other hand, I am not convinced that The Guy Who Spends Money Pulling For Special Metal Rods actually exists, even if they are useful. The game also employs Daily XP bonuses and penalties - The XP bonus is pretty standard fare, giving you boosted XP rates for the first X amount you earn per day - but the penalty once you’ve played “too much” is terrible, earning only a minimal fraction of the normal rate as a punishment. Seriously, [i]let me play your game[/i]. There are limitless games on my backlog, and against my better judgement I am spending my time on this one. The least you could do is not rub that in my face. A similar penalty also applies to loot from public events once you’ve completed 10 per day. Once you’ve hit your “daily limit”, there is simply no reason to continue playing, even if you want to. The Dark Zone gets a special shoutout for being particularly painful. It isn’t even the other players - I got “betrayed” by a rogue agent only once - but the PvE enemies are hilariously strong, deal a ton of damage instantly, and your reusable medkit has an extremely long recharge time, relegating you to a full 90-120 seconds of complete boredom if you are shot once. I would say around 4 of my hours were in the Dark Zone, and I enjoyed maybe one of those hours. The rest were an exercise in extreme frustration and futility. I’ve played a few of these mobile gacha spin-off games lately. Most recently was Final Fantasy VII Ever Crisis, which I have still logged into twice a day, every day, since “finishing” it. I didn’t like Infinity Nikki anywhere near as much, but I still played that one daily for a while too. I uninstalled The Division: Resurgence about 30 seconds after obtaining my final achievement.