Life after the outbreak ain’t easy. Roving bandits, wildlife and a shortage of supplies means survival is by no means guaranteed.
Things aren’t all bleak though, people are banding together to make the new world bearable and make it just like it used to be. Theres a beacon of hope… That me and Luke made sure to shoot, kick in the nuts and then steal all its shit. Fuck you new world, we’re here to thrive not just survive.
Obviously this is just me being dramatic; the world hasn’t ended just yet, though we’re probably a lot closer than we like to think. What I’m talking about is the environment presented in The Division 2. If you’re looking for an actual review then stay tuned for Javier’s article, what I’m here to talk about is me and Luke’s tales of bastardry as we explored the PvP areas known as the Dark Zones. For anyone unfamiliar, The Dark Zone is a cross between PvE and PvP with groups of high tier enemies moving throughout, each likely carrying some powerful loot. This loot has a chance to being incredibly high level, but this comes with a disadvantage of being called “contaminated”. This sickly gear is kept in a separate pouch of your inventory and is unusable until you have it airlifted out. This sounds easy until you realise that the airlifting process takes 2 minutes and leaves the chopper hovering over your head for all to see. Waves of mobs come at you to try to take your life and your gear, though they’re just a nuisance. The real issue is the rogue agents. The Dark Zone servers allow up to 12 players at once, when you enter you’re set to be friends with everyone and can’t harm your fellow agents, sweet right? However, with a quick press of a button your agent will “go rogue” and you’re free to take down your fellow agents to steal their stuff or just because you want to ruin someone’s day I guess?
During our first trip into the Zone me, Luke and Javier were just a little nervous. We slowly made our way through the misty fields and ruined streets looking for the fabled loot. When we eventually found some other players I suggested we help them out and maybe form a bigger team to get the promised rewards, Luke had another idea though. Choosing to go rogue, Luke switched over to the dark side which also dragged me and Javier into the same state, we were surrounded by friendly players at the time so you can imagine how things went when 3 low-level gear losers suddenly decided to turn on everyone else. Luke made one hell of a judgement call for us and I wasn’t best impressed.
After that fiasco I decided to spend some time in the Dark Zone on my lonesome and quickly discovered that trying to explore this environment without backup with low-level gear is just suicidal. With waves of enemies bum rushing me and rogue agents making sure to finish me off if the mobs didn’t, I died more times than I could count! Though it was a good learning experience and I used my time alone to work out a few of the finer details of the Zone.
Jump forward in time a couple of hours and you’ll come across me and Luke entering the zone together again. Me the grizzled vet, Luke as a young buck eager to impress. We both agreed that going rogue was the way forward. I introduced Luke to the rogue actions you can perform. Hacking satellite relays or breaking open locked containers rather than using keys will lead you to instantly turning rogue and leaving you in that state for just over a minute with the timer steadily increasing with each rogue action you perform. However if you do enough you’ll eventually be rewarded with “the thieves den” a safe zone you can hide in that will immediately remove your rogue status and grants you access to high-end gear when you reach the end game. We had a great time wandering about slotting enemies for high tier loot and breaking open lockboxes for the treats inside totally ignoring the voice telling us we were going rogue! Eventually we gathered all we could and extracted it with only a little resistance from the standard enemies, we planned to call it a night but on the way to the Dark Zone exit we came across a supply drop. Killing the surrounding mobs we opened the box and found it gave us a fun option, we could either take just what we needed and leave the box for other players to find OR we take EVERYTHING and then blow the box up for giggles. Of course we blew that thing sky-high and then went and did it again to the other drop we found! With our pockets again overloaded with sweet loot we went again to extract. Things went smoothly a second time with one stark difference. After the chopper flew off I spotted something we hadn’t seen for a while, another agent. We watched as he ran our way only to book it in the other direction when he realised there were two of us and the chopper had already left, clearly there was nothing to gain by trying to kill us. However, his intention was clear and me and Luke didn’t take kindly to it… We chased the little man down, flanked him and wasted his bitch ass. You don’t cross the cheeky Dark Zone boys…