The Division came out last week, breaking Ubisoft sales records and causing all civilised behaviour between RPS staff members to break down. Sleeper agent Brendan was activated and ordered to clean up the mess. Let’s see wot he thinks.>

I shot wildly and inaccurately at level 5 and was enjoying The Division. At level 19, I was grinding side missions and was not enjoying The Division. At level 23 I was sending little seeker drones full of explosives into rooms packed with angry men (I was enjoying The Division again). I could write the whole review like this but I think it would get a little repetitive.

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Graham: Tom Clancy’s The Division is out. It’s a mish-mash of genres: a cover shooter, with realistic weapons, an emphasis on multiplayer and co-op, in which you kill enemies in order to level up and find new loot as in an RPG, set among the looted streets of a post-viral collapse New York. It feels like a collection of well-observed trends, packaged together under a covering of very pretty snow. It’s much more fun than I, at least, was expecting.

If I wanted to make you click the read more button, I’d say it was a better RPG than The Witcher 3. Our full review will be along early next week, but until then you can come read me justify that statement in conversation with Adam.

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Why did Tom Clancy graduate with honours from business school? Because his Division was good.

Which is both a terrible maths joke and a topical> maths joke, because Tom Clancy’s The Division has sold more in its first 24 hours than any other Ubisoft game in history, according to the Ubisoft Blog.

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I don’t know what a ‘meme’ is anymore. First they used them for science, then memes escaped a lab as a virus in a monkey, then Internet turned the viruses into jokes, and then the virus infected every other form of joke. (I think, at this point, we’re either safe or have ourselves become memes?)

All I know for certain is that delightful recreations of video game box art using cheery stock art have recently filled my corner of the Internet, and I think you might like them.

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The Division [official site] has ensnared at least two members of RPS in its deadly streets, and as we creep through cover toward a better understanding of the game, we’ve taken a moment to reflect on the games that came before. Specifically, the games that carry the name of author Tom Clancy. From Rainbow Six to Ghost Recon and HAWX, the Clancyverse contains some of the finest tactical shooters that the PC has ever seen – and a few duds as well. Jake Tucker investigated the triumphs, the failures, and the origins of the Clancy game.>

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Everyone in The Secret RPS Chatroom Of Mystery is currently downloading all 30.5GBs of Tom Clancy’s The Division, which is out now depending on how you bought it. We either like the idea of zoning out to the ringing bells of Ubisoft progress mechanics, or we’re curious to leap into its Dark Zone and befriend and fight other players for valuable materials. If you’re already in and playing however, then you might be disappointed to learn that some of the post-launch DLC we wrote about last week won’t be available on PC till 30 days after it appears on XBone.

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A run-down of the previous week’s top-selling Steam titles is something I used to do regularly, but a combination of it tending to be fairly unchanging week-to-week and being a feckless human being who can’t stand to do the same thing for long meant I fell out the habit. These are changed times, though: with indiepocalypses here and flash sales there, the Steam charts are now wildly changeable, so I like to look in from time to time, like an old aunt raising a withered eyebrow at reports of what her nephews are up to at university. This week: a whole lot of Ubisoft, not a lot of XCOM and an unofficial Hunger Games (or an unofficial Running Man, if you prefer the awful classics). … [visit site to read more]

It’s gone five o’clock, which must mean… ah yes, here we are, Ubisoft have sent me something new about The Division [official site]. Following pre-load and unlock times, trailers galore, and a vision of my city filling up with dead improv troupes, here we have more word on the shooter-RPG’s first year of post-release content plans.

Yes, obviously this is Ubi gabbing about a load of paid DLC before the game’s even out, but they are also talking about new things they plan to add in free updates.

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