The Division’s underwhelming beta dampens our expectations

If only the game played as well as it looked in this beta.

We'll admit we've gotten a bit caught up in the buzz for Tom Clancy's The Division since its stellar premiere trailer at E3 2013, so much so that we put the game on our most anticipated games of 2016 list. After I played a few hours of the closed beta for the game on Xbox One yesterday, my anticipation isn't gone, but it has been dulled quite a bit.

That's not to say there weren't things I liked. The beta shows off the same kind of detailed environmental design as those initial trailers, rendering a disease-ruined and fallen world where hauntingly beautiful signs of decaying civilization are everywhere you look. I also like the game's augmented-reality style interface, which overlays paths and information neatly over the "real world," including map projections that make it easy to figure out where you are and which way to go. The mix of high-end, near-future technology and crumbling urban infrastructure is certainly visually striking.

The online party integration also seems pretty solid so far. While you can see a whole server full of players running around and buying items in central "safe zones," individual missions are split off into smaller team-based instances. It's relatively easy to join up with friends or strangers to take on those missions in small groups and coordinate your goals on a shared map. The only quibble is that voice communication seems to be the only reliable way to communicate; there are no in-game tools to quickly highlight nearby points of interest or send quick commands and information to your team (if there are, I didn't find them).

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