Murder With Friends: Tom Clancy's The Division

I should get better video game chums by the time Tom Clancy's The Division comes out. A five-minute staged "gameplay demonstration" fresh out of E3 shows friends being friendly, supporting each other, using abilities carefully, and generally making the game look awfully good fun. None of that will ever happen with the people I play Dota 2 with. We won't carefully orchestrate and execute plans, we'll run around doing as we please, whether that's chasing the glory of murdering particularly tough enemies or pausing to admire holographic reactions of people caught in the disaster. It'll be dreadful.

The Division's a funny-lookin' game in general, really. It's a third-person cover-based shooter but also an open-world online RPG. It's got levelling, and skills through gadgets like homing mines, flamethrower turrets, and drones with dazzling strobes. I've never clicked with Borderlands as a shooter RPG, but this being more tactical-y has my eye.

Though, of course, all the people 'playing' in this trailer add a lot of commentary which builds tension that might be wholly absent in the actual game. I wonder if their lines are dubbed in or they needed to play the demo section over and over until one take was just right. I do hope it's not the latter, the poor dears.