Tom Clancy's The Division

Tom Clancy's The Division dropped players into a snow-covered, epidemic-devastated New York, where as agents of the secret Strategic Homeland Division organization they fight to restore order amid anarchy, gangs, and collapsing infrastructure. The game combined cover-based third-person shooting with a deep RPG system of loot, skills, and ever-stronger gear, making it an online action RPG with pronounced looter-shooter elements.

Visually, The Division was among the most impressive titles of its generation. A snow-covered Manhattan with elaborate lighting, drifting snow, and finely modeled streets created a dense, believable atmosphere of a city in crisis, further heightened by a melancholic soundtrack. Besides story missions, the game offered an extensive endgame with the so-called Dark Zone, a risky PvPvE area where players could fight each other for the best loot, creating a tension unseen elsewhere in the genre. On PS4 the game ran stably and managed to deliver a detailed open world without noticeable compromises to its atmosphere.

Players could customize their character through gear with randomly generated properties and specialized skills, such as attack drones or healing turrets, allowing distinct playstyles to be built within a cooperative team. The shared world also connected players outside the active team, who could join an ongoing mission through random street encounters or, conversely, compete against each other in higher-risk areas.

After a troubled launch, when Ubisoft grappled with build imbalance and a lack of endgame content, the game improved considerably through a series of updates and became one of the successful examples of a live-service game that managed to hold its community for years to come. The Division helped popularize the genre of online looter shooters with a realistic setting and paved the way for a successful sequel as well as similarly styled titles from other studios.

Why play it: For players interested in online looter shooters with a realistic setting, The Division, after a series of improvements, offers one of the successful examples of a live-service game with a long-sustained community.