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Ubisoft not only smashed their own records, they also smashed industry-wide records with The Division.Ubisoft notes that The Division is their best-selling game both for single-day sales and for the first week of sales. In its first five days, The Division sold more than $330 million around the world. This remarkable feat also surpasses the former record holder, Destiny, which debuted at $325 million sold in its first five days.
Beyond this achievement, Ubisoft revealed some other statistics from this first week of release. They note that at its peak this weekend, there were 1.2 million concurrent users playing. In the first week, players logged more than 100 million hours of game time.
I'd say the success is quite rightfully earned here. To their credit, Massive and Ubisoft have done a tremendous job reacting to issues that have popped up. Despite some launch day hiccups with the servers, it's been mostly smooth sailing, a rather remarkable feat given that this is Ubisoft's first MMO-like release. Even better is the fact that The Division was designed in such a way that many of the changes for the game don't need a client update, thus resulting in fast updates for all platforms without the need for console certification.
(via UbiBlog)
I have also seen the Diablo comparisons and those make the most sense to me, Diablo also doesn't have good moment to moment stories going on or variation in gameplay, just an overarching "you must kill Diablo", but that game has memorable locations, bosses, characters, you may even remember a unique weapon you found one time due to the famous naming conventions of those games.
Maybe that's a weakness of doing things the Clancy way in this case, in a JackFrags video talking about the game someone mentioned how one of the bosses could be in a humvee driving around that needed to be blown up or something, any kind of variation or surprise would go a long way to mixing things up a bit, making memorable moments.
If you don't break those other action games down to their basic elements then of course there is diversity in their gameplay, just as there is for The Division. You can't pick and choose things for this and go "let's break down The Division to its simplest gameplay elements but let's not do the same for these other, similar games."
As for story, Ubisoft did put a bit of effort by hiring Corridor Digital to manage live-action shorts in collaboration with RocketJump and DevinSuperTramp and create videos that are in each video producer's respective style. I'm mentioning this because although they are promotional videos, the stories in each of those videos are interconnected from various perspectives, and is canon to the game's story. While Zips did say he didn't need to check up on an external site to understand the story, apparently Ubisoft took the initiative to hire major YouTubers to provide story content ahead of the community creating wikis. While I certainly agree this isn't a deep story whatsoever (even with the videos, it doesn't add much), I do believe Ubisoft didn't treat the story as an afterthought.
I think the real question in regards to gameplay is, what will the additional content provide? When the DLC does come, what will the game look like then? I guess we'll find out when the it comes.