Holy smokes, I totally forgot to post my recap for gaming this past weekend! It's a short week for me as I have Friday off, but it has felt like a long week because of how tired I've been due to staying up late playing the only game I played not only this past weekend, but this whole week as well!
The Division - That's right, I've been playing the heck our of The Division. After doing quite a bit of solo play I decided to try using some pick up groups for the daily missions, and it has been very enjoyable. I was finally able to try out the Survival mode DLC, and it's probably the most fun I've had in the game since I came back.The premise is simple - you have to survive and the weather, starvation, thirst, people that want to kill you on site and extract with the anti-virals before you die from an infection cause when the helicopter you are in crashes. The weather is the first big obstacle that you will face. You start off with clothing that has very minimal protection from the snow storm that is pelting the city. You can get warmer clothing by crafting or loot from enemies and containers around the city.
While doing that you also need to find food and drink. While you will never die from thirst or starvation, food and water are important because food affects your ability to regenerate health and thirst will help you spot loot containers while traversing the snow covered streets. Being able to see loot better is actually important because the weather effects and lighting can actually make things on the screen difficult to see.
So you've got food and water, getting some clothing to keep you warm, now you must find meds to help slow down the infection. While you can actually die if you let the infection progress too far, it's pretty easy to find around the city. I have yet to die due to infection. There are two types of medications - pain killers and syringes with syringes being the stronger of the two. The thing is, the more of the medication you take, the less effective it will become as you gain a resistance to the medication. If you were to not take any medication at all, you have exactly an hour of real time to extract before death. The one time I did extract it took me also an hour and forty minutes, so medication does work.
In order to extract you have to craft a signal flare and get the anti-virals. The anti-virals are located in the Dark Zone. To get to the DZ you have to craft a contamination filter, but in order to do that you need to look crafting materials from around the city. Once you've done all of that and you've used the signal flare, you then have to take down what's called a Hunter, and these things are no joke. I've run into Hunters a few times by myself doing the Underground DLC and each time I got my face crushed. I got really lucky in the Survival that I did manage to extract from because I accidentally shot his grenade in his hand which caused a whole heap of damage. After that it was about trying to kill him before he healed to full health, which he did on a few occasions. Was a frustrating fight, but boy did it feel good once I boarded that helicopter for extraction.Survival mode is a really slow way to grind for reward caches, so if you're looking to grind for gear there are way better ways to do such. I will, however, be trying more Survival at some point. There is a bit of RNG because of the random start locations and of course the loot, but the feeling of satisfaction from completing an extraction was awesome.
