I had some pretty cpol moments in the Dark Zone. Unlike what Dan was predicting in the QL, I had many more tense but ultimately peaceful extractions than murderous bloodbaths. the longer respawn time as a Rogue, as well as the threat of losing XP, currency and loot is a very powerful deterrent. Most people are like you and just want to get their cool stuff extracted.
Here are some things that happened to me in the Dark Zone.
- Once I came around the corner and saw a player getting beaten by a baseball bat-wielding rioter. I decide to intervene, and the player catches a stray round or two from me. I go rogue. I immediately open the emotes menu and put my hands up. the person whips around and aims at me, sort of looks me up and down, and then takes off into the mist. In a similar situation where I surrendered with the emote it got me killed.
- Me and this other player were running towards an extraction that was in progress when we see a Rogue player behind some cover, taking shots at someone in the extraction zone. we had him flanked so we took him out. we walk up to the extraction zone and this player pops out of cover and does the wave emote. Maybe this guy had some great gear that he just found and was super worried about losing it, and we saved him. These positive interactions with people are just as rewarding as killing someone and robbing them. maybe moreso.
- I get invited to a group by some randoms and we roll together for a while. We are headed to an extraction point when we are ambushed by a player. This guy has very powerful weapons and almost wipes the three of us, but we managed to take him. so we all get back to our feet and round the corner to see the extraction point is up on top of a building and is being held by a group of four Rogue Agents. they start peppering us with gunfire. we duck into an alley, and make our way to the building from another direction. we burst onto the roof, take out the Rogue Agents and extract our loot.
- In this same group, there was one guy who would kill stray solo players once and a while, aka a total Waingro. So we would have to back him up and take these people out, and therefore the group would be turned Rogue here and there. One time while our group was rogue another two-man group came around the corner and for whatever reason didnt start shooting (probably because we had them outgunned) and just sort of nervously drifted past. We let them go.
- When i was in the Dark Zone solo, there was this one super powerful group of four Rogues running around. you can see Rogues marked on your minimap from pretty far away, so for like 45 minutes i was having to dodge this group. Often i would find myself cowering behind a car or in an alley as they ran down the street right in front of me, sometimes less than like 20 feet away. That was a really good feeling.
Now i realize that a lot of these kinds of moments can be found in something like Day Z, which has been doing to tenuous alliance trust/betrayal stuff for a while, but what this game seems to have that Day Z and other similar Early Access survival things lack is an actual tangible objective (beyond simply staying alive) to drive the action and good, non obtuse combat controls. I really like the extraction thing, because it creates these points in the map where people are always going to have to convene. I saw interesting player interaction at nearly every extraction point I showed up at.
I think this game could be my Destiny. While I loved the super tight Bungie shooting, there was zero else in Destiny that grabbed me at all. The post-disaster New York setting is just so much more my speed than the mythic robo space wizard stuff in Destiny. Brian Wood's DMZ is maybe my favorite comic series (you should check it out, its great) and The Division has an extremely similar vibe to it. I can't wait to get my hands on the full game.
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