One would've thought that with The Division's embargo being lifted a little while back we would get a lot more HD footage and some high quality gameplay from the PC version of the game but that was unfortunately not the case.
Thankfully a beta tester who goes by the name Voodoo posted 5 minutes of The Division gameplay footage with the graphics set on high giving us a better view of both the visuals and the shooting mechanics. Here's the video:
Interestingly enough the footage shown above looks far superior than most of the screenshots released over the past week, though obviously a fair bit worse than the massive 4k screenshots Ubisoft uses for marketing purposes. While never shown in the video itself the graphical settings, if maxed, are set to high as the beta doesn't support the full range of graphical features and ultra quality just yet.
In other words, despite The Division undergoing a bit of a graphical downgrade I think its safe to say its going to look pretty damn good on launch. For those of you that don't know about it, the graphical downgrade mostly affected the lighting and number of objects present in each scene and was done primarily for performance reasons which I'd say is understandable when you consider how highly the recommended system specifications are set.
On the gameplay side of things I am glad that the bullet-spongy enemies don't seem to be present in this video as they were in some others though my main issue still remains. You can riddle enemies with so many bullet holes that they classify less as a person and more as a sentient piece of Swiss cheese and yet they will barely flinch at such an onslaught.
The feeling of weight and impact is incredibly important when it comes to making your weapons feel great to use, just look at Dark Souls as an example of what a really meaty combat system feels like.
That complaint aside The Division is looking pretty good and while I doubt it'll be as revolutionary as the marketing team would want you to believe its most likely going to be a good bit of fun with friends once it finally releases this March 8th.