Ahead of this week’s Ubisoft Forward event, I was asked to send over my availability for a few demos, interviews, and hands-off opportunities for some of the games that would be featured at the show. One of my appointments was for a short play session with The Division team, which I assumed was forThe Division Heartland, a free-to-play extraction-style spin-off revealed during last fall’s showcase.
When I got to the meeting, I was disappointed to see people playing on their phones. This wasn’t The Division Heartland, it was theotherDivision game, The Division Resurgence, a free-to-play mobile MMO prequel coming to Android and iOS later this year. As someone well-versed in the nightmare world of free-to-play mobile games, I went into the demo with the most open mind I could muster. Lucky I did, because The Division Resurgence seems pretty damn good.
The key thing that the developers kept emphasizing during my play session is that Resurgence is a fully featured The Division game, not just a mobile spin-off. The deep RPG systems, co-op gameplay, and expansive open-world that have made The Division an enduring series are still the focus. The experience has been adapted to the mobile interface, but Ubisoft says there’s nothing significant that’s been lost in translation.
I’m pretty experienced with touch controls, and I have to say, Resurgence’s layout is one of the best. It’s pretty cluttered, as all mobile shooters are, but the on-screen buttons are responsive and intuitively positioned, and it does a great job predicting what you meant to press even when your inputs aren’t precise, which is important for a game as fast-paced as The Division. It has full controller support too, and while I’m looking forward to trying it out with my Razer Kishi 2, I much prefer aiming with touch controls because of the mouse-like speed and precision it provides. Aiming, taking cover, swapping weapons, looting, and using skills was easy, and the interface never got in the way or became overwhelming.
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The gameplay will be familiar to The Division fans. New York is an open world filled with enemies and objectives that you can explore with up to four players. There’s dungeons to explore, new specializations to customize and upgrade, weapon crafting, and though I didn’t try it myself, PvP Dark Zones and Conflict modes. It has clans, matchmaking, gear progression, and original story, the whole shebang. I asked the developers constant questions, prodding for anything I could find that makes Resurgence fundamentally different from the other games in the series, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anything missing at all.
That’s great if you like The Division, but that also means it does all the same things that might turn some people away. Dungeons are bare, industrial spaces that are surprisingly easy to lose your way in. Bosses are damage sponges that absorb tens of thousands of bullets before they go down. Some might say The Division lacks personality, and I tend to agree. It’s a real time-consuming grind of a game, but if you’re into that kind of thing, you’ll soon have a new way to do it.
The big question when it comes to any mobile game is the monetization, and unless Ubisoft totally bamboozled me, I think Resurgence’s hands are pretty clean. Ubisoft promises seasonal content updates with new storylines and activities on a quarterly basis, but that content won’t be locked behind a paywall. There is a seasonal battle pass, but we’d expect that from non-mobile games, and it even has a free track. I did not see any kind of Diablo Immortal-style system, like buying crests to get legendary gems, that would necessitate throwing endless amounts of money into a pit in order to stay competitive. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but I asked directly and was told it wasn’t that kind of game, so there’s hope.
If that’s the case, Ubisoft should be making a much bigger deal about The Division Resurgence. If this is a true triple-A MMO mobile game that isn’t junked with pay-to-win microtransactions, it will legitimately be the first of its kind. Ubisoft deserves a lot of credit if that’s the case, and if I were in its marketing department I would be screaming that fact from the rooftops right now. If Red Storm really resisted the urge to fill Resurgence with predatory bullshit, it should be rubbing Blizzard’s, and everyone else’s, faces in it.
We’ll see later this year when it launches. As you might expect, Resurgence is Ubisoft making a play for certain markets where consoles aren’t as ubiquitous but mobile gaming is huge. The studio says as much in itsThe Division Resurgence Team Manifesto, which states “Our objective…is to enable more people worldwide to enjoy this open world experience whenever and wherever they want.” The unbelievable success of mobile gaming in places like India, The Philippines, and Korea shows that players there are more tolerant of pay-to-win schemes and predatory monetization practices, and they’re more willing to monetarily support dubious games. The Division has never been that kind of game, and I hope this entry doesn’t end up sinking to the basest instincts of the mobile game industry. If it isn’t P2W, Resurgence could very well end up being an important and even seminal game for mobile.
