Games
The shooter covers a single section of Manhattan. Which New York locations should it explore next?
With Tom Clancy's The Division, Ubisoft has mixed up some potent gaming alchemy: shoot, loot, level up, repeat. It makes the third-person shooter wickedly addictive, but also means that you may end up playing it so much that you'll exhaust the base game's content – all set in a portion of Manhattan's Midtown – all too quickly.
There are three pieces of confirmed DLC on the way for the game, which'll give you more to do in post-collapse New York, but there's no indication that these will take players beyond the game's current map. And the Big Apple is far more than Midtown Manhattan – it's a massive city of five boroughs, awash with variety, so it'd be a huge missed opportunity if Ubisoft doesn't expand the explorable area. So without further ado, here are our top picks for the spots we'd like to see The Division open up in future DLC.
Central Park, Manhattan
We'd bet big on Central Park featuring in Ubisoft's future plans for The Division (a clever Reddit user managed to access an unfinished part of the map including the park by glitching through some walls) but nothing has been confirmed at the time of writing.
Aside from it being one of the first places that people think about when you mention New York, Central Park would make a fine DLC addition for many reasons. Its lawns, woods, bodies of water and exposed rocky outcrops would be a welcome change of scenery from Midtown's endless concrete jungle, and it's bordered by two of the city’s finest art galleries: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum.
The Met, or, rather, a museum heavily inspired by it, has already been the the setting for some cover-based combat (remember Grand Theft Auto IV), but the Guggenheim, with its famous spiralling atrium, is arguably a better location for a massive multiplayer firefight.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
It's the Brooklyn neighbourhood that's become synonymous with hipsterdom, but in The Division's representation of Williamsburg you won't find a single tie dye-sporting skateboarder or PBR-chugging walking tattoo. There's no longer any ironic moustaches to be seen. That's not because of the biological outbreak, by the way. It's because all the genuine hipsters were priced out by polo shirt-wearing bankers and trust fund babies back in 2013. Thanks, gentrification!
That's not to say there's nothing of note to experience in north Brooklyn. There's the Williamsburg Bridge to fight across, for instance. It's certainly the least iconic of the three bridges spanning from Manhattan to Brooklyn (the other two – the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges respectively, feature in the game's Brooklyn-set tutorial), but its combination of road, rail and walkways would make it a fine spot for some multi-level third-person combat.
Inwood Hill, Manhattan
Right at the northernmost point of Manhattan sits Inwood Hill Park but when you're there, it's hard to believe you're still in New York City, such is the quiet, the lack of people and the fact that there are trees everywhere. In fact, this park is the only corner of Manhattan that's never been landscaped, so it's almost as it was before Europeans arrived in America. If you're lucky, you might even spot a bald eagle or two soaring above the Hudson River.
The park's wooded areas and Native American caves would open up some scope for non-urban exploration in the game, while the nearby Cloisters Museum is built using parts from five medieval European abbeys, giving players the chance to experience combat in a much more 'olde world' setting than the rest of the city provides, all without leaving the island.
The Bronx
The uncharitable might suggest the real-life Bronx today is dangerous enough without tossing a deadly virus and societal breakdown into the mix, but the truth is the borough is one of New York's finest. It's the place that birthed hip-hop, for one thing – but more pertinent to The Division's gameplay might be two of its best-loved landmarks: Yankee Stadium and the Bronx Zoo.
The former is nothing less than America's cathedral to its favourite pastime, and home to the world's best-known baseball team to boot. The Division could play off that image by tearing down half of it, turning it a potent symbol for the United States' collapse. Picture the thrill of sliding into home plate under a hail of bullets, or swapping your standard protective beanie for a batter's helmet.
The Bronx Zoo, meanwhile, is New York's largest, and could introduce new hazards in the form of escaped big cats immune to mere human pandemics. Or how about a Dark Zone mission to retrieve some panda cubs? We'd risk our gear for that.
Newark, New Jersey
Forget The Division's depictions of urban dwellers gone wild – ask most real-life New Yorkers and they’ll tell you that New Jerseyites are already invading their city on a regular basis, as the bridge and tunnel crowd pile into Manhattan on Saturdays to experience the Big Apple's myriad earthly delights. Perhaps some Division DLC can give New Yorkers the chance to get their own back by running through the Holland Tunnel and raiding Hoboken, Jersey City and Newark for loot.
Architecturally, these cities might closely resemble parts of Brooklyn or Manhattan (they are, after all, part of the New York metropolitan area) but make no mistake – New Jersey is in a different state to New York, both literally and figuratively. Think blue collar working Joes, Bruce Springsteen, Tony Soprano and suburbia. In fact, some New Jersey DLC would give The Division the ideal opportunity to take its action to the genteel 'burbs, where the effects of society's outbreak-sparked breakdown might be even more jarring to see than in the big, bad, built up city.
JFK Airport, Queens
Is John F Kennedy International Airport simply just too far away from Manhattan (12 miles, give or take) to be feasible as Division DLC? Perhaps, but if Ubisoft Massive can figure out a way to get the player over there, it'd make a great backdrop for some shootin' and lootin'. Why? For starters, it's a big place, with four runways and six passenger terminals currently in use – plus the iconic Eero Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Center (pictured above), which is as close to perfection as a big building where you wait to get on a plane can be. With its white, sweeping ceramic lines and red seating, the Flight Center (due to be turned into a hotel by 2018) would make a fine base of operations in any JFK-themed DLC we might see.
Oh, and might we suggest the introduction of a new enemy group called Baggies – disgruntled baggage handlers dressed in clothing scavenged from travellers' luggage, who hurl Molotov cocktails made from Duty Free booze? Just a thought.
For more gaming coverage, be sure to follow @RedBullGames on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
