DLC #145 - Tom Clancy's The Division - Expansion III : Last Stand

This venture into Tom Clancy's The Division has come very out of the blue, and it's mostly been driven by this DLC pack.

This is a game that has been massively overlooked within my collection since I first bought it, and despite having attempted to re-visit it a couple of times in the past, it's remained both mostly unexplored and very low on my priority list.

This did change recently when I discovered that this content pack, specifically focused around the Last Stand game mode, contains a trophy that requires you to win 50 matches within this mode, and you need 16 players in the lobby to start a match - Which was enough for me to promote this game to the top of my current priorities. It turns out that this is still just about a popular enough game mode, though you do generally have to make sure you're playing at peak times of the day to access full lobbies, and  even then there was still a fair share of waiting around sometimes if there wasn't any availability within another current game, so I felt like this was still a good judgement call on the whole.

It is also important to note that you need to reach level 30 with your character in order to gain access to Last Stand, so there was a fair amount of preliminary work required too. This applies to all DLC packs, and even though my character was already level 11, it still meant I had to finish the main story along with a reasonable amount of side content, just to be able to start working on these trophies.

The DLC pack itself is simply an add-on with the Last Stand game mode - A domination-esque game where 2 teams of 8 players have to fight for control of 3 capture points (A, B and C), gaining points for controlling each capture point until 1 team reaches 15,000 cumulative points, or the 20 minute time limit expires - Whichever one comes first. There are also perk machines which pop-up for activation at pre-determined locations and times in order to give the team that captures these a boost in either one of two forms - Points for kills, or capture multiplier - Which also changes the dynamic of points scoring.

It's a very straight forward concept, and is just any domination game mode in it's purest form at heart. The trophies are equally as straight forward, with 5 in total, including 4 of these which will be no problem as you make your way towards the biggest goal within this list. You'll get trophies along the way for capturing 50 objectives and activating those previously mentioned perk machines 10 times, amongst a couple of other naturally achievable tasks.

However, this pack stands out for 1 reason inparticular;

Stand Taken - Win 50 rounds of Last Stand

The "Stand Taken" trophy, awarded for winning 50 rounds of Last Stand, is very self-explanatory, but the challenges I've faced around this trophy aren't really geared towards the difficulty of the trophy itself, but more the user experience.

The Division throughout it's core identity is a PvE game, and Last Stand is the first time it provides players with a dose of PvP, and it's incredibly biased towards long standing players of the game. This is the primary challenge, though there are a couple of other nuances too, but this was the main one I struggled with on the whole.

Last Stand is not a competitively balanced game mode. Stronger players will always prevail, and are never handicapped for the sake of balance or giving new players a fair chance. The only remedy is to spend time levelling your character up and looting from Incursions or the Dark Zone in order to be able to compete with the stronger players in the game. The catch here is, this late in the games life cycle, I found myself massively behind everyone else, so 95% of the games I played in just ended up involving me running around getting killed by practically everyone, and I could serve no other purpose other than just being cannon fodder. You can impact the game in other ways, whether it be via capturing objective points or activating perk stations, but that's about as far as your contribution will go.

I was purely here to win 50 matches, grab the trophy and then leave this pack behind, so I had no intention of spending any time to endlessly grind my character out and get better equipment, just to purely perhaps have a slightly better gaming experience. 50 wins is alot for any game mode, but it felt longer than usual because I was having such a torrid time of it.

On top of this, the game has practically non-existent matchmaking. Teams will be mixed together in completely random scenarios, with no consideration taken towards balancing the overall strength of the lobby. The majority of the players who still play this game mode are all level 99, but you'll often see small groups of lower levels in any given lobby. They're just as likely to all be on the same team as they are mixed together, so not only does the game insist on bias towards strength of loadout, but it also doesn't seem to have sophisticated matchmaking ability. It's an awful blend for someone who is brand new and simply there for the trophies.

I understand that they were possibly lobbying for a PvP experience that rewarded those players who have committed their time to improving their characters and could test this out an in environment against like-minded individuals, and I don't necessarily have an issue with this because it isn't my goal to get better at the game. As someone whose sole intention was to accumulate enough wins to unlock a trophy, they just simply haven't catered to my audience here, and it just ends up being a lousy experience as a result.

Finally, just to add some context to the grind, matches have a time limit of 20 minutes, whereby at the point of expiration, the team with the most points will win. You're way more likely to see a team reach the 15,000 points threshold, and this typically happens within 15-20 minutes, so if we just take the conservative 15 minutes, and the required 50 wins, combining them together, we already have a 12 and a half hour experience.

You'll also need to account for two other things; The losses and the lobby waiting times. The losses are hard to calculate because the game doesn't track these for you, but I would estimate I probably operated at a Win/Loss ratio of around 1.00, which would double the experience to around 25 hours. Stick another 5 hours on top for the amount of time I spent waiting around in lobbies to jump into a free game because of how unpopulated the game mode is these days, and I think that's a fair, albeit loosely based, reflection.

This wasn't one of my favourite gaming ventures. I actually sort of hated it. It actually reminded me of my experience with the Resident Evil 6 - Survivors DLC, in the sense that, I felt completly helpless to be able to influence my progress within this DLC and had to rely on being carried by chance of being on the better side. I tried to do my bit where I could by being an objective-terrorist, but it all led to a very hollow feeling that just felt like a motions exercise.

I'm glad it's finally done, and I ultimately didn't want to a reach a point in time with this DLC where I was potentially struggling to get into lobbies because of the 16 person minimum requirement, so it made sense to get this one finished sooner, rather than later. There's absolutely no doubt we've stumbled over the line here, but we've got to the end, and that's all that matters.