YMMV / The Division

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • The Division (and the player) are presented as heroic, they can also be seen as the Secret Police of every dystopian novel ever that, this time, happened to fight for a good cause as soldiers fighting to protect the people from complete ruin. This may also be intentional as the second game illustrates that a fair chunk of Division agents really are Lawful Evil State Security or a bunch of megalomaniacs no different than the people they fight.
  • Are the Rioters just a gang or desperate people driven to desperate measures by an impossible situation?
  • Are the Cleaners a bunch of Blood Knight psychopaths indulging a sadistic desire to kill everybody or Well-Intentioned Extremist types who may actually be right that the asymptomatic carriers of the Dollar Flu are as much a danger as the more deliberate carriers.
  • Are the Rikers a bunch of Rape, Pillage, and Burn psychopaths or people who have been horrific victims of Police Brutality that are only now striking back? Both?
• Anti-Climax Boss: Many players and critics felt that the final boss of the base game, Charles Bliss, was extremely disappointing. Simply put, Bliss engages you with a large, easy to hit helicopter and has painfully predictable patterns.
  • In story missions, Rogue Division agents are still susceptible to various status effects such as burn or suppression just like common enemy types.
  • A large consensus seems to agree that the Falcon Down Incursion is extremely disappointing, since rather than an innovative, mechanically complex boss that fans were expecting, the Incursion in reality is just a Nintendo Hard survival mode where you stick C4 onto an APC to damage it every few rounds.
• Ascended Meme:
  • They got Alex! is the achivement for killing a number of Rioters.
  • Taken even further with the Deadeye Shield commendation, which features an audio clip of two people mixing up the details of whoever "Alex" is.
  Elizabeth Chan: Weather sucks today.
  Jordan Wallace: Yeah, it's looking like it's going to storm again.
  Elizabeth: You know what this reminds me of? The day we took down Alex.
  Jordan: That was a good day.
  Elizabeth: No kidding. That guy was huge. Must have been six foot five, two forty, all muscle.
  Jordan: Wait... guy?
  Elizabeth: Yeah, guy. I'm talking about Alex.
  Jordan: That's funny. I thought Alex was a woman. Short for Alexis. Hell of a shot, too. Picked off a couple of Agents at range.
  Elizabeth: No, no. Alex was a guy.
  Jordan: Are you sure we're talking about the same Alex?
  Elizabeth: I dunno. Could there have been more than one?
  Jordan: Beats me.
• Broken Base:
  • The inclusion of Encrypted Caches drew in the usual controversy surrounding their inclusion in just about any other game.
  • Rogue 2.0 drew some ire from PVP players for a few reasons:
    • They felt that it took away some of the chaos inherent to the Dark Zone. Going rogue was changed from shooting neutral players to toggling it on by holding a specific button. Before the Rogue 2.0 revamp, players often went rogue completely by mistake, usually with neutral players darting in and out of the line of fire of other neutral players. After Rogue 2.0, it's become more common to see several teams standing near each other in a Mexican Standoff, waiting for someone to go rogue.
    • Manhunts were also changed from being "survive for several hundred seconds" to "go here and hack this terminal". On the one hand, this change prevented manhunt players from camping in one spot to run down the clock, but on the other hand, manhunt players end up getting dogpiled by the rest of the DZ session 9 times out of 10, since their position and a rough estimate of their objective is shown to everyone on the world map at all times.
  • January 2018 saw the removal of the Mark I through Mark IV Encrypted Caches, which got replaced with a single type that contained the rarest clothing sets ("Collections" in-game). Sounds like a good deal, right? Well, the removed caches ended up taking with it all the non-Collection clothes, emotes, weapon skins, and backpack skins with it, which killed most players' reasons to even collect Cypher Keys in the first place (especially the emotes). Instead, all of the aforementioned removed items were placed on rotation in the premium currency shop, essentially moving all of them behind a paywall. As one might expect, the reaction to this wasn't great (with "blatant cash grab" and "competing with Fortnite" accusations aplenty), especially with the change coming two months before The Division 2.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The most overused weapons have to be the Lightweight M4 and LVOA-C for Assault Rifle in late-game. While other AR are decent, they were quickly overshadowed by them due to their high rate of fire, extreme stability, tight accuracy, and decent damage. As a result, it is relatively common to see Division agents wielding M4 and Lvoa in both PVP and PVE.
  • Submachine guns in late-game. Especially in Dark Zone. In fact, good luck finding anyone not using the Vector .45 ACP (or, more the AUG A3 Para XS).
    • With Update 1.3, SMGs had their weapon class bonus changed from Critical Hit Chance to Critical Hit Damage. This, combined with other weapon classes gaining inherent bonuses, has moved SMGs out of the spotlight somewhat.
  • For the DMR weapon class, the M1A, particularly its SOCOM and First Wave variants for the extra upgrade slots. Packing the best damage of the Semi-Auto sniper rifles, and good stats all around makes it popular for long distance, and for PVP. The M1A is so powerful that it remains the most viable marksman rifle even after several rounds of nerfs.
  • With Patch 1.3, several new weapons were added, all of which are amongst the most effective in their class- only LMGs and Shotguns didn't get any new, all-powerful weapons. With the rate at which these weapons drop, they quickly became the most popular options in their respective classes:
    • Assault Rifle users found that the G36 variants were all extremely strong compared to other automatic weapons- not just other ARs, other automatic weapons, period. As a result, they were set up to be nerfed pretty quickly.
    • SMGs got the PP-19, which boasts below average accuracy and fire rate, but well above average per-shot damage and a magazine more than twice as large as most others.
    • Marksman Rifles found the "SVD" (Snayperskaya Vintovka Dragunova, more commonly known as the Dragunov), which doesn't boast any immediately obvious advantages over the M1A, but quickly moved into the spotlight after it was found to have almost no reticule bloom, allowing it to easily be continuously fired at it's maximum RPM. This also made it the go-to option for users of Sentry's Call.
    • Sidearms, of all things, found a viable weapon with the X-45. Notable attributes include best-in-class accuracy, fire rate, and per-shot damage, which caused it to immediately become the most used Sidearm.
  • For Falcon Lost, the most common and effective tactic is to bunker up in the trench in the center of the map since it protects you from the APC's mortars and funnels all the enemies into two chokepoints. Either that or use one of the many exploit strategies to bypass the actual fighting altogether.
  • If you're planning to find the most efficient mission to play on legendary difficulty, play Amherst Apartment. Not only is the average completion time around 15 minutes, but if there is no wipe, then one hunter will spawn as a final boss, which has a 100 percent chance of dropping an exotic.
  • As of Patch 1.2, the "Tanktician" Build (4 Pieces of Tactician's Authority and 2 pieces of Final Measure, which focuses on stacking as much toughness and skill power possible) has become the primary build in the Dark Zone (though is only marginally less effective in most PvE activities). This is mainly due to Massive increasing the damage mitigation cap to 75% while at the same time nerfing or discouraging more traditional DPS/Toughness or Glass Cannon builds through various means (such as making Sentry's Call only activate on headshots with semi-automatic weapons).
  • Amongst 6 piece classified gear sets, the ones that stand out the most (especially in PvP combat) are Striker, Predator, and Nomad (Rare occasion would be D3, which is viable for incredibly durable shield). 6 piece Striker penalizes players less for missing shots and additionally adds a constant heal over time based on how many damage stacks the Striker player has. 6 piece Predator takes the 4 piece bonus's propensity for bleeding enemies dry and magnifies it based on the player's Stamina stat. Lastly, trying to kill a 6 piece Nomad player essentially becomes a Luck-Based Mission, now that their ability to come back from the dead has a fairly high random chance of resetting its cooldown upon activation.
  • In Patch 1.3 for the Underground DLC, the devs introduced a new exotic shotgun: Showstopper. While the main talent is okay and it is rather decent in PVE (When the build isn't optimal), this shotgun later became a meta weapon for Dark Zones/Skirmishes due to its DPS and high rate of fire, which is enough to catch any high-skilled Division agents off-guard. In addition, it can easily stack Striker gear set bonus.
  • Patch 1.8 brings along with it the Exotic submachine gun known as The House. It quickly became the go-to SMG for both PvE and PvP content, as half its magazine automatically gets 20% extra damage, with the buffed half switching after 10 seconds or after emptying the magazine. Attentive players can time the switching mechanic to get 20% extra damage on the entire magazine. Lastly, since The House is based on the real-life MPX, a modern variant of the MP5, it sports exceptional accuracy and controllability for an SMG.
• Complete Monster: Larae Barrett is the psychotic and despotic leader of the Rikers, the most vicious faction to have taken over New York. Previously imprisoned for the murder of two cops, Barrett became the leader of the prisoners after seducing an administrator into getting her a barge, after which she murders him when the time comes to escape. Barrett has the Rikers go on a rampage across New York, slaughtering any and all law enforcement they can find, with Barrett declaring they will rule New York as anarchistic kings, at one point converting a jail into their own personal torture dungeon. Barrett has one of her lackies carved to death during a rally because he made too many complaints, and sets a rival gang leader on fire. When confronted, Barrett and the Rikers are hosting a "party", where captive officers are being tortured and murdered.
• Critical Dissonance: Despite mixed reviews from critics, the game sold enough and has enough player base to warrant a sequel.
• Demonic Spiders: These enemies are normally fairly tough to beat in the game's normal difficulty, but Challenge Mode takes it up to eleven, especially if you are doing a mission where you have to face off against the LMB. Challenge and Heroic Modes also makes all enemies gold level elites:
  • Shotgunners get a faster rate of fire, can instantly kill (not just down) you in a single shot, and are always going to try charging you in groups to take you out.
  • LMB Heavies can now be equipped with large shields that makes them completely immune to gunfire from the front, requiring you either use explosives or flank them.
  • Cleaner Heavies are suddenly even more capable of reducing you to a pile of ash than before, and will use a surprising amount of mobility to chase you down if you get too far from them.
  • Heavies with machine guns still have some of the toughest armor and highest HP counts short of bosses (or even including), and will gradually advance on your position as they pin you down with endless full automatic fire.
  • Grenadiers will constantly spam grenades at you from across the map, preventing you from being able stay in any one cover for too long.
  • Rogue Agents are by far the worst, as not only do they combine high HP and high long range damage, but they can also spam Seeker Mines, which will home in on your position and give you less time to react than to normal grenades.
  • Not only that, the further north you go into the Dark Zone, the higher level the enemies you encounter are, and the more likely they are to be Elites, requiring you to use Challenging and Heroic strategies against them.
  • Hunters are this trope in every game mode they're featured in. With the exception of the Resistance game mode, all Hunters are glass cannons with maneuverability on par with the player's and come packing with two skills and three medkits. Hunters equipped with either First Aid or Support Station are especially hard to kill due to their additional healing capabilities. They also melee players using the hand axe hanging off their backpacks, almost always guaranteeing a One-Hit Kill, making close-range combat especially dangerous.
  • Any LMB enemies in legendary difficulty would fit this trope. Not only are all the features mentioned above still there, they are now much faster, deal more damage, can dodge bullets frequently via rolling (Which is very difficult to line up shots especially for a player with striker classified build), can soak up damage, and can insta-down you with melee attacks like Hunters. Oh, and lets not forget that there will be at least 3-4 rogue agents in every area.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • Whatever SHD forces in other parts of the US are doing to control the outbreak.
  • What's happening in other countries following outbreaks in their territory. Ubisoft sponsored a contest to see how fans would envision the fall of Canada if the outbreak from New York reaches Canadian soil.
• Fake Longevity: Marathon Boss variety. The PvE content is notorious for a "realistic" game with enemies taking most of magazines or even multiple magazines to kill. From rifles at close range. Into vital areas and/or areas that cannot feasibly wear ceramic body armor. The Angry Joe Show parodied this in the game's review intro. Somewhat routine for RPGS (where you can need multiple lightsaber hits to put down wild animals) but for something otherwise carrying the vibe (and brand) of real-world combat...
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: ISAC is not the AGENT from Decaying Winter, despite the game portraying the latter using the former's voicelines.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game sold well in Japan and in the UK/Ireland, earning the number 1 spot in their video game charts for a few weeks.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Before it was patched out, random bosses in the single player portions of the game could respawn if certain actions were taken such as killing the boss, but leaving his Mooks alive and either deliberately dying or returning to a Safehouse. The boss most commonly farmed this way was the "Bullet King", since he was maximum level and located near a Safehouse. Players would repeatedly kill him and then respawn him in order to farm higher end loot.
  • After the Bullet King exploit was patched out, a new exploit was found in the Russian Consulate mission, where after taking certain actions, players could infinitely respawn the boss without having to reset the entire mission. This has since been patched out.
  • After the Russian Consulate exploit was patched, a new glitch was found in Police Academy where players could skip straight to the boss by clipping through a locked door and bypassing the entire mission.
  • When Falcon Lost was released, two glitches were quickly found. One involved being able to bypass all of the attack waves and attack the boss directly without fear of retaliation, while the the other was a method to trick the game into award the high level weekly award gear item every time the Incursion was completed instead of once a week.
  • The Mobile Cover skill in general is commonly used to exploit bugs, since if used correctly, it allows players to clip through walls and barriers that are normally inaccessible.
  • There are also exploits that involve rapid item switching in your inventory to stack buffs. For example, getting an item with the Competent talent and continuously switching it with another weapon can easily balloon your weapon damage to deal over a million damage per shot. The same tactic can be used on kneepads with the Prosperous talent, triggering the skill multiple times every time you get a headshot kill for massive credit gain.
  • Players have discovered several talents and skills are doing the exact opposite as listed. namely the gear talent "Reckless", which is supposed to Increase damage a player deals and receives but instead is decreasing damage received, and the attribute bonus "Protection from Elites" which is instead increasing damage received from Elite enemy NPCs, rather than decreasing it as its supposed to. The latter was fixed in a minor patch, but the former wasn't fixed until update 1.2, almost a month after the discovery.
  • Similarly, the talent "Brutal" (which increases the damage from headshots) was said to be bugged in that it's increasing damage multiplicatively, rather than additively as intended. This is also due to be fixed in 1.2.
  • The talent "Balanced" was also said to be broken, with the developers saying that it was only supposed to increase the accuracy of the first shot of your weapon, not every subsequent one. Before update 1.2 fixed the talent, this meant that any weapon with "Balanced" basically had zero bullet spread, even when fired on full automatic making assault and marksman rifles (particularly the M1A) extremely powerful.
  • In the Underground DLC, players can trigger multiple waves of Hunters on the same floor simply by making someone else the party leader after defeating a group of them. This makes the grind for Hunter-themed cosmetic masks a little more tolerable and gives more chances at endgame loot.
• Harsher in Hindsight: While thankfully nowhere near as devastating as Dollar Flu, the 2020 outbreak of Covid 19 forced worldwide lockdowns and caused a staggering death toll. In addition Riker's Island ended up with a disastrous outbreak as well
• Jerkass Woobie: Quite a few factions and people could be considered this.
  • The Cleaners. Listening to collectible audio and ECHO files shows that they started out as sanitation workers who voluntarily stayed behind in the city rather than evacuate to help try and contain the infection. However, when the JTF pulled out of the city, they were left behind. Feeling betrayed, these workers decided to take matters in their own hands and formed the Cleaners. It's also specifically noted that Joe Merro lost his wife early in the outbreak and several of the Cleaners mention similar situations in idle dialogue, so they're also grieving the loss of loved ones.
  • The Rioters (or at least some of them) could be considered this as well, as audio files show that some of them are merely acting the way they are due to the desperate circumstances they've found themselves in.
  • Even the Rikers can be seen as this, having been forced to endure some of the harshest and cruelest prison conditions in the United States (see Harsher in Hindsight). It's also not helped that one audio recording implies that the government deliberately denied medical care to sick Rikers prisoners when the outbreak hit and essentially left them on the island to die.
  • Aaron Keener, who was sent in as part of the First Wave, had his faith broken when the JTF refused to evacuate a group of civilians he was protecting, resulting in their deaths. As a result, he decided to throw his lot in with the LMB.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • This tweet and this video showing people lining up to progress a mission (as there's no character pass-through) both went viral extremely quickly. So prevalent that people are starting to call the game Tom Clancy's: Line Simulator.
  • The fact that your character will automatically shut the doors of a car as they use it for cover got an inordinate amount of attention. You even get an achievement/trophy for shutting your first car door in the game.
  • "They got Alex!"^Explanation Whenever you kill a Rioter there's a chance one of his buddies will exclaim "they got Alex!", which wouldn't be too bad... if it wasn't the only line of enemy chatter recorded for the game where a Rioter calls out a fallen comrade's name. Hence the meme that almost all of the Rioters are named Alex.
  • 94% ^Explanation Steam player data has shown that the game's active PC player count has dropped 94% just three months after release. Many detractors have taken to spamming "94%" whenever The Division is mentioned.
  • Fixed a weird door. ^Explanation Ever since the 1.5 update's patch notes included this phrase, it's showed up at least once in the patch notes following it. The original "weird door" in question was a comically large one◊.
• Narm:
  • Ubisoft's misuse of the word "iconic", round four: Agent Ryan's "iconic Division jacket" which is available from the Ubisoft Club or UPlay for thirty points. First it was Aiden's Pearce's cap, then Arno's pocket watch, and then the rope launcher. It's gotten so bad that Jimquisition did an entire video (mostly) dedicated to Ubisoft's, well, iconic misuse of the word.
    • Funnily enough, it's arguably the first time them calling something "iconic" is true, because the agent in promotional materials always wore it.
  • The addition of the West Side Pier means the addition of the Rikers, which means the JTF allies need to comment on them. Unfortunately, they comment the same thing over and over again at the worst possible moment, creating many situations where one is in a firefight and hears every friendly AI saying "how'd they get out of prison?" or "they should be rotting in a cell" as though that's what they need to be worrying or talking about.
  • The Cleaners would be truly terrifying foes (gas mask wearing lunatics obsessed with purging the virus by burning it and its hosts alive) if not for the fact that their backstory is that they're all sanitation workers who have somehow trained and equipped themselves to become militant death squads in a matter of weeks. Yes, this entire time you've been fighting the Cleaners you've been fighting garbagemen with flamethrowers.
    • Also their thick, stereotypical Brooklyn accents can make it hard to take them seriously.
  • To a degree, the Rikers. At first, they can be genuinely frightening to see in action. But the utterly gleeful way they just throw themselves at every For the Evulz stereotype you can imagine makes them snap straight to this. They act so by-the-numbers evil, with only the barest justification that it feels less like you're dealing with a breakout at Rikers and more like a prison break from Blackgate or Arkham.
    • One of the Rikers, Keller, sounds exactly like crooks from old-time radio shows (particularly The Shadow), only with more profanity.
    • Slider, the boss of the Clear Sky incursion, is just cartoonishly villainous, and his constant insistence that "[The Rikers] need more guys" because you shot up the last bunch doesn't do much to alleviate this.
    • Larae Barrett's insistence that the JTF are targeting her because she's another black body on the pile would be a little more cutting if she wasn't an unrepentant psychopath who was actively encouraging sadism and cruelty in her followers.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Cover and roll are both tied to the same button; in theory, cover is pressing the A/X button once and roll is pressing it twice in quick succession, but in practice, it's whatever the game arbitrarily feels like you were trying to do. This creates many a situation where one rolls themself straight into an enemy's gun barrel or takes cover directly under their head. Why exactly Ubisoft decided to map the two most important features of a cover-based shooter to the same button and then have no way to change the controller mapping is anyone's guess.
  • The changes to crafting in the 1.1 patch which significantly increased the amount of materials needed to craft items was met with much ire, since it made crafting significantly more difficult. This is also compounded by the fact that crafted gear tends to be superior to whatever is dropped by PvE opponents. The implementation of the Division Tech crafting material is also not well liked, since its rarity and difficulty of obtaining makes it a further throttle to crafting high end gear.
  • Update 1.2 introduced a few rather unpopular changes.
    • Extraction hijacking has been almost universally bashed by the community, since it provides an additional avenue for griefers to cheat players out of their hard earned loot.
    • While the new gear score system and the 201+ Dark Zone bracket aren't bad on their own, put together, this means that players who are actually UNDER the bracket but just so happen to be holding onto high gear score items in their inventory or stash are thrown into the 201+ bracket anyways, and are forced to deal with the higher level enemies with their inferior equipment. This mistake later repeated itself in Update 1.3, which caused a lot of undergeared players to move into the 231+ bracket with even higher level enemies, usually just as they were getting a handle on the ones they were dealing with.
  • The JTF allies seem incapable of doing anything other than just getting in the players' way. They deal next to no damage, are solid enough that the player cannot move them, and the enemies focus on the player anyway, so they can't even act as bullet sponges. That would be par for the course if it weren't for the fact that levels with JTF allies spawn more enemies to compensate for the fact that you have "help".
• Scrappy Weapon: Shotguns. For players, all of the shotguns have significant issues starting with the fact that Shotguns here still follows the the Short-Range Shotgun principle. Up to optimal range, the damage do upwards of 30k+ damage to the target with every single pellet hitting. However, as soon as you cross that, damage drop off occurs quickly. All of the shot guns have very mediocre Ro F and Reload times, compounded with each types. The Double Barrel Shotguns have the best damage, but have only 2 shots, and can't be equipped with any sort of weapon mod aside from the purely aesthetic paint jobs. That, and along with the M870 and Super 90 shot guns are limited to loading one shell at a time during reloads, making Extended magazines for latter two questionable due to the extended reload process. And the SASG-12 is a magazine based semi-auto shotgun with the best range and accuracy of the shotguns, but the damage is significantly less than the others and the reload is still slow. Compared to the friggin' cannons and Bullet Sponge nature of Elite Shotgunner NPC enemies, it's not only extremely risky to use Shotguns, but seems hardly fair.
  • Averted in 1.3 where certain changes have made shotguns, particularly the M870, a massive Game-Breaker in both PvP and PvE.
• Simple, yet Awesome: Shooting the tanks on Cleaner Heavies. Each one has three such tanks that can be detonated ^note One on their back, and one on either side of their hips , and it will cause massive amounts of damage to them. This really comes in handy when you're dealing with a group of them and your abilities are on cool-down. Typically, just destroying two of them will remove their armor, at which point you can just hose their head and move on.
  • To give an idea how they are compared to other Heavies, the Rikers and LMB Elites use Light Machine Guns, which have an ammo can on their back. Given how often you're forced into tight quarters with them, actually trying to get that can is nigh impossible without support. And even then, they tend to be a case of Acrofatic as they can spin around and acquire fast enough to put a Phalanx to shame.
• Spiritual Successor: The villain's plot and motive is virtually identical to those in Tom Clancy's novel and video game Rainbow Six, and this franchise could be read as a sequel where that team failed its mission to stop the biological terror attack.
• Tainted by the Preview: Thanks to past disappointments like Watch_Dogs, many people were skeptical about the features and graphic quality the early cinematic and gameplay trailers promised.
• That One Level: Russian Consulate and Warrengate Power Plant are by far the least liked missions on Challenge mode.
  • Russian Consulate has you facing off against many high level LMB soldiers in close quarters, making it very difficult to flank them and making their shotgunners even more dangerous. You'll also be constantly pitted against Rogue Agents as well.
  • Warrengate Power Plant, like Russian Consulate, is fought in fairly close quarters. While the Rikers individually aren't as tough as the LMB, Warrengate has the habit of just mercilessly throwing wave after wave of enemies at you. It also doesn't help that part of Warrengate is a Timed Mission where you need to defeat four waves of Rikers in roughly ten minutes. In addition, once you reach the final leg of the mission, you need to fight through three waves of enemies before being able to face the boss, with no checkpoints in between, and when the boss does show up, he's accompanied by three super elite heavies who all have SIGNIFICANTLY more health than their regular elite counterparts. It also doesn't help that even if the run goes smoothly, Warrengate is probably the second longest mission, with only the General Assembly being longer.
  • Falcon Lost has garnered its share of hate. Not only is it majorly disappointing, but it is ruthlessly hard for all but the most dedicated or coordinated of players. Players will have to survive fifteen waves of very tough enemies, while the APC constantly launches One-Hit Kill mortar strikes. In order to even hurt the APC, players must carry a bomb to it, but the APC is protected by a pair of turrets that can only be disabled for a few seconds, meaning there is a high chance the bomb carrier will die during or shortly after he plants he bomb. Oh, and if your entire squad wipes, even if you're on wave 14? You have to start all over again from the beginning. It also doesn't help that the most effective ways of beating Falcon Lost are to use exploits, and the developers even admitted that their own in house team couldn't beat the mission themselves.
  • While not nearly as long as Falcon Lost, Clear Skies is not necessarily easier, as it incorporates many of the same mechanics that make Falcon Lost such a chore to play. Bullet sponge enemies that deal massive damage and keep spawning in endless waves? Check. An extremely powerful stationary turret that essentially locks off half of the map? Check. A constant rain of instant kill mortars that prevent players from being able to take cover or even catch their breath? Check. Annoying objectives that require you to deliberately run into enemy fire to complete? Check.
  • The Lexington Event Center is an okay level except for two things. One, it is about a full section too long, and since the game is constantly throwing horror after horror in your face the entire time it's very emotionally draining, and not in the good way. Second, the final battle against Larae and her guards is unnecessarily hard - it's two boss level enemies with miniguns, seemingly endless grenades that constantly force you into the open, a tight space where they absolutely have the advantage, and no way to replenish any supplies you use; just to top it all off, the area is littered with JTF allies, who accomplish nothing except getting in your way and getting you killed. The subsequent battle against Larae herself isn't as difficult (you just have to worry about hitting her while she runs), but the two guards will put up one hell of a fight.
  • Any missions that can be played on Legendary would fit the bill. Do I have to explain it? The game will try to shove every difficult enemies in that difficulty and if your stamina is low, then you're in for a really bad time.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some players expressed disappointment that the game focuses around dealing with the aftermath of the Dollar Flu outbreak rather than in the chaotic period during and immediately after it.
• Win Back the Crowd:
  • The game's beta did this for a lot of people once they had finally gotten their hands on it. The full release won back even more, considering it's the second biggest franchise launch in video game history. Then 1.2 (with easier-to-get gear, a new Incursion deemed to be far more fun than the first one, and more endgame PvE solo content in the form of Search & Destroy and High Value Target missions) won back even more.
  • However, numerous bugs and unpopular changes seem to have taken its toll, and player populations (at least on Steam) have dropped by 94%.
  • The announcement that the release of the Survival and Last Stand DLCs will be delayed so that Massive can focus on game balance and bug fixes, in addition to inviting players to visit the studio to provide feedback on the game and upcoming changes to it and the announcement of a public test server for the PC release appears to be an attempt to win back players by addressing their grievances with the game as it is.
  • Opinion of the game's current state seems to have been stabilized after the release of the Survival DLC and several patches introducing comprehensive balance changes.

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