One YouTuber breaks down The Division's netcode, and the data he uncovers is more troubling news for the already frustrated playerbase in Ubisoft's RPG/shooter hybrid.
Multiplayer games like The Division often cater to very specific groups of players. There are the casual players who simply enjoy a good gameplay experience and never really delve too deeply into the game's content or intricacies, and then there are the more enfranchised players who play as competitively as they can. The former player group in The Division is likely still pretty pleased with the game overall, while the latter has begun to express frustrations over Ubisoft's shooter containing more glitches than many thought a modern AAA release could be capable of housing.
What hasn't been discussed as much in the wake of the multiple exploits that surfaced in The Division's Falcon Lost Incursion, however, is the state of the game's multiplayer. YouTube channel Battle(non)sense specializes in breaking down the way a game's multiplayer and online connection functions, and recently examined the way The Division works for multiplayer. Although the video below goes into much more explicit detail, a brief summary of the findings is essentially "The Division's multiplayer is in a very bad place."
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The content in the video is quite dense at times, but it is easy to break down. The Division's current online structure is flawed on a number of levels, and it is a shocking revelation for a game that has been pushed so heavily by Ubisoft. According to the tests Battle(non)sense did, The Division is optimized for accuracy in the way it sends data from a server to the players using it in any given game, not efficiency - which means at a fundamental level that The Division is built from the ground-up to have more lag as a result.
Even more troubling was the discovery that The Division has an abnormally high level of lag compensation, which results in players suffering from heavy lag being able to damage other, unaffected players through cover while the game tries to compensate. This is a huge blow to the credibility of The Division's multiplayer, which was also revealed to never disconnect players based on high levels of lag, despite the fact that this is common practice for other games to eliminate an imbalance in the experience for everyone involved.
Given the level of expertise demonstrated by the maker of this video, the information seems legitimate enough to pose a large concern for the multiplayer of The Division. While many gamers have been caught up in the debate over whether The Division players should be punished for glitch exploitation, it appears that it isn't just the PvE content that needs a lot of work. This kind of multiplayer experience is certainly enough to turn a lot of gamers off from Ubisoft's The Division, and it remains to be seen just how many will be left after the many problems the title currently faces.
What do you think of these findings? Are they as big a deal as they seem, or are we making too much out of something small? Let us know in the comments below.
The Division is currently available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.