The Division PC

Howdy folks, just loaded up the Division PC version, pretty terrible launch. I mean, it's Ubisoft, so I am not surprised. But I am still very disappointed.

First time I loaded it up, I got a black screen; heard there was stuff going on (you know, "mouse over interface" sounds, like digital chirps), just could not see it.

So I rebooted my computer (my first thing on my "game doesn't work checklist"), launched the game, and it worked! Created a character, went through the aim/shoot/walk tutorial, got to a safehouse and was booted for a server error (my guess, overloaded server).

Pretty terrible launch, the worst I have seen in quite a while. I know it has only been out for 43 minutes (at the time of this writing), but still...a big company with the resources of Ubisoft--and the extensive beta testing the game itself received--should prevent hiccups of this nature.

But, as I said...that's Ubisoft for you (which is funny, b/c my experiences with them have been pretty good, I usually just hear negatives from others).

Hope to be playing this in the next hour or so before I head to sleep, otherwise tomorrow will be a long day at work with thoughts of The Division on my mind.

Anyone else having issues?

I def. wait a week if it sucks now. I'll get my check then.

Back to Factorio....

*not that this is a bad alternative.

I haven't played it, but this pretty much follows my expectations of any AAA launch these days. It's rare when they aren't bad.

Will try it tonight but a friend of mine has been playing for hours without any issues (he runs it on medium cause his PC is older).

Ubisoft have temporarily taken down the server now to fix a few issues.

To be fair there are many more players than Ubi expected. For example my local EB Games sold out of Division boxes, which NEVER happens here in Aus.

Ah I did not know it was voluntary, that kind of changes things.

Server down due to poor population forecasting, bugs, and so forth....bad.

Server down so you can fix stuff....less bad :D

honestly this is my first bad experience with Ubisoft lol. Like I said, mostly hear about it from other people.

But yeah, the trend with AAA games seems to be getting worse.

Love Ubisoft games for the most part, they have really excellent IPs and a lot of talent, really great presentation.

To be fair again.

I don't think I can name a single online HUGE title that has launched as smooth as butter.

They ALL have issues at launch. That's why I always wait a day or so to play them.

I haven't had many problems. I had one crash during a mission a few other online players, but nothing apart from that. It looks great and runs well on the highest settings with no AA.

I played it for about 3 hours with no problems last night, haven't played it since then due to sleep and being busy. Booting it up again a bit later and looking forward to it..

I've been having fun with the game, but man it's kind of ugly. The lighting can be really nice, and indoor areas look great...but when you're outdoors and the lighting is flat, the game can be hard to look at. Kind of disappointing.

@mrbojangles25: The servers were only down for 20 minutes and every flipped shit and cried like a 2 year old. Average Steam user.

It's pretty easy to tell from all the footage that it's not much of a looker

It's a shame because I'd love to buy a pretty new game

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No problems here may just be the op. I saw at least 15 guys while i was on earlier. Pretty far from a terrible launch.

But if I got glasses then all the games that already look better than The Division (any game released within the last couple years) will look even that much better. Factorio just might be easier on the eyes - they should've went with the charming simplistic graphics route if they were going to half-ass it.

Graphics Whore :P

Love the game. I have spent the last three hours literally searching every corner of the first area of Manhattan. There is quite a lot of clothes in this game, that is what I have learned from it. I haven't really had to buy anything from vendors yet. Everything I own has been acquired through exploring, and the gear is pretty good. Completed a few side missions, I still haven't established the base of operations yet though.

There are outside areas that look great, but it goes from looking great to looking bland in other areas. I was having a fire fight earlier and a snowstorm I could not even see in started. I like the snow storms though. I think they will help in avoiding some people in the dark zone later on. Probably looks better at night. The game runs smoothly though, which is great.

A Steam Group for Anyone Who Wants to Team Up!

yeah, that about sums me up right there lol

But after playing it, it's great. It's that gray area, that instanced semi-MMO, homebase-lobby kind of deal. Surprisingly, reminds me a lot of Hellgate: London, a game I very much enjoyed and miss very, very much. Flawed, but fun!

How is it running for everyone and what tweaks are you using? I am averaging between 60-80fps at 1440p on a 980 Ti while out in the open and higher while indoors. I have encountered a couple of areas that dip slightly below 60fps, but I am not worried about it as they are rare. I feel I have made enough tweaks without compromising the image quality during gameplay in any major way.

With the Nvidia guide as reference and my own observations, here are the tweaks I made (tested in all weather and lighting conditions to avoid drops below 60fps):

Depth of Field: OFF

Chromatic Aberration : OFF

Vignette: OFF

Post FX AA: OFF

Sharpening: 90

Shadow quality: High

Spot Shadow Count: Medium

Local Reflection Quality: High

Particles: High

Volumetric Fog: Medium

Extra Streaming Distance: 70

Object Detail: 72

Everything else is on the highest available.

Everything on Ultra except the Shadows where I don't use the NVIDIA settings (I think I have it on high). The NVIDIA Shadow thing takes a massive hit to the FPS.

@FelipeInside: Resolution and frame rate? minimum, average?

1920 x 1080 on a 27 inch monitor

I don't look at fps in numbers, but it runs butter smooth so I'm guessing it's at least past 60.

I have not tried 1080p yet. I will have to test and see what the performance is like.

Tried it out at 1080p with everything maxed (including the new Nvidia HTFS shadows) and it ran very well. Only dipped below 60fps at the usual trouble spots that I think are due to poor environment optimization. I did turn off the following for improved image quality:

Depth of Field: OFF

Chromatic Aberration : OFF

Vignette: OFF

Post FX AA: OFF

Yeah, that's why I haven't ventured into the 1440p realm yet.

It requires more horsepower and some games aren't optimized for those higher resolutions anyway.

My Samsung 27 at 1080p looks amazing anyway.

game is running flawlessly for me, personally.

Core 2 Duo
Nvidia 980
16GB memory
Win 10

Really enjoying it, too. Lots of fun.

It's pretty great so far. I hope to God Ubisoft puts an effort into optimization though. Every game is busted to hell.

New engine runs fine for me and a lot of other people.

Its not that it runs terribly. It just feels like it can perform better. Im still getting 35-45 fps, so its still good. I played Arkham Knight all the way through, and loved it despite the teeeeeerrible performance issues, so this game is no problem.

Why do you reboot your PC when an application locks up? I can't remember the last time I needed to reboot the computer because of an application locking up. All you need to do is alt+tab+del and force close the game from task manager.

Oh, and of course the game is giving you trouble, it's only just come out and it's Ubisoft.

Game runs awesome, besides server issue during the first hour the game was out monday night, its been nearly flawless. FPS wise it runs great, no crashes yet and it is a blast to play. Have everything on high, with an i5, 666ti, win10 and 8gb of ram and am averaging 50 fps. Was not expecting the game to run as well as it has during release and the last beta (Beta before that performance for me was meh, but since then pretty great).

Really wasn't expecting much at all out of this game after the first beta, but glad I gave it another try. Ubisofts best game and least buggy since Blood Dragon imo. Nice to see Massive Entertainment make another great game again (loved world in conflict).

Not perfect (AI is not that great), but the good far outweighs the bad, for me The Division >>>> Destiny and Borderlands 2 for loot based shooters.

1440p is definitely more demanding. However, I would rather play The Division 1440p/60fps with a few settings turned down than 1080p/60fps max settings. There are many settings in the game that don't have a very noticeable difference in visuals, but have a big impact on performance. It is nice that there are so many options in this game. You can tweak things to your liking. :)

Runs very well for me also, mostly max with non-nvidia shadows and a few of the sliders a down a bit on a 970/2500k at 1080p. 60fps 90% of the time with a few dips into the high 40's in outside areas with a lot going on.

They've built a great engine here, particularly fond of the weather effects and lighting. Lots of reactivity in the environments during firefights.

Getting 30-40 fps on ultra with a GTX960 and i5.

Playable, but the eye candy is not worth the framerate drop, it's "nice" but not gorgeous.

Kicking down to medium, you don't really miss anything, but the higher framerate feels soooo much better.

I'm glad I got this game on PC, 30 fps would have sucked the fun out of it.

Game devs really need to committ themselves to 60 fps as the minimum standard.

@ZombieKiller7: Agreed 100% I like to play all my games with a constant 60fps or higher. 30fps is painful.

Anybody been placed in a player queue when loading up the game? I had this happen to me last night. I did not wait long, but this is not cool. Ubisoft needs to add more servers or do whatever needs to be done. I did not buy the game to be waiting around.

Another thing... what is up with the visual glitches popping up in cutscenes? It is like it is trying to render the 3D HUD indicator prompts for a split second or something.

I imagine the ques will decrease and eventually disappear; they only seem to be during peak hours (i.e. when people get home from work/school), and are not long. In a month or two, when the game is not brand spanking new, I'd wager there won't be ques.

They're not bad; longest I've had to wait was around 200 in que, which took a couple minutes. I've played singleplayer games that took that long to load, so I'm not complaining lol

I'm only getting connection issues :/, this game should have been made for offline use too

So... after about 30 hours of playtime... I am loving this game. One of the most immersive worlds I have ever played in. One of my favorite co-op games ever. It is still fun to play solo, but roaming the streets with a group of friends and doing random encounters and missions is so much fun. We constantly get side tracked and get intrigued by something in the environment and go exploring. We will be on our way to one mission and then a gunfight breaks out in the street and there are bullets flying, glass shattering, alarms going off, flame throwers, explosions, etc... The atmosphere in this game is fantastic. We will spend 30 min just doing random shit before we realize that we haven't even started the mission yet. lol. Sure, a lot of the mission structures are similar, but we have never been bored once in our 30 hours of play. We haven't spent any significant time in the Dark Zone either. This game is awesome.

I'll probably play it years from now... I've noticed all the MMO's I've played at launch got significantly better when I came back a few years later, so I'm just going to start buying them when they're already better instead.

Problem there is population at lower levels. Everyone has moved on by then.

@FelipeInside: I haven't run into that issue but the oldest MMO I play is DCUO. Lower levels sure, but there is still plenty of people.

That's why I said lower levels.

Sometimes you need a group in starting areas and if you play the MMO years later there is not many people left available.

@FelipeInside: I thought you were saying lower levels as in just less people in general. I haven't run into having too few people at low levels either.

My point is that when you play an MMO in the starting months, finding a group takes seconds. (matchmaking or manual searching)

If you play the same MMO years later, finding a group at the starting levels takes longer (or sometimes you can't)

Yeah, and a lot of devs scale the leveling process to make getting up to within 10 levels of the cap pretty easy. I think in SWTOR you can get to 50-55 in a matter of days of semi-casual playing (2-4 hours a day); WoW is pretty similiar last time I checked as well.

One thing SWTOR has done that I like (as far as grouping goes) is the tactical flashpoints; people of all levels can group together in certain flashpoints because they scale up/scale down low-level/high-level players depending on the flashpoint (dungeon).

SWTOR is exactly the game I had in mind when I made my first comment. I played it at launch for a month or two and am now playing it again and it is a million times better in just about every way. And Felip, I understand the point you are trying to make. Personally, I have not had that issue in any of the MMO's I play (which currently I will switch between SWTOR, DCUO and TESO).

@MuD3: how is TESO now? I wanted to like it at release, but couldn't get into it.

Maintenance :(

@mrbojangles25: I liked it at release, I don't know what you didn't like about it but if you didn't like it then I don't think your opinion would be much different now.

I can get the Gold Edition for $80 cause of Amazon Prime account, you guys think it's worth it?