Here is the link. I will try to do a video in the next couple days.
https://www.amazon.com/Tom-Clancys-...eywords=division+new+york+co llapse There is also a lot of side material on the game.
In the game, the organization CERA is actually FEMA, the "Division" is an actual agency, which I think in the real world is a subdivision of FEMA, staffed mainly by retired military and auxiliary federal agents. The directive 51 I think it is, is actually a real thing.
The agents are trained, equipped, and then re-embedded back into society in case needed. In the real world, they are like a reserve of the reserve federal forces under a pretty restrictive mandate. Basically the "me too" crowd in the alphabet agency rosters. They have no authority until an emergency is declared then are placed under some emergency government.
Game play is basically a test of sorts for division candidates and skewed in several ways that screw up the application of conventional infantry tactics. My biggest beef being the level based game play which belies the level based mission assignment protocols of FEMA. For example, lower level agents are tasked with taking down rogue criminals and street gangs at first, then a few survivalists, then rogue lower level municipal employees called "The Cleaners". Then rival "first wave" agents who went rogue begin showing up in the storyline, usually hostile. The next bigger threat are the hardened criminals who broke out of Rikers Island (known as the "Rikers" in the game) and then finally, the "Last Man Battalion", a paramilitary contract organization modeled on a bigger badder version of Blackwater. The scenario planners place the tactical threat posed by survivalists to be above that of common street gangs, below that of organized rogue municipal employees or the more hardened criminal convicts who break out of prison in the lead up to the game scenario. The Survivalist are not even remotely in the league of the Blackwater-like force. I would also note, that due to that treatment in the scenario, I peg the survivalists as being most capable of success if they can keep their presence in a particular area helpful and low key. There are many closed doors in the scenario which are neither open nor meant to be open, and we are led to assume there are pockets of survivors who are not part of the scenario during the time period the scenario is taking place, and the only people on the streets are people desperate enough to venture out for desperately needed items, or representatives of any of the faction gangs. Interesting to note, in the "dark zone" where government monitoring is extremely limited and high value loot is more common, all factions fight each other and it is not uncommon for agents to create mini-alliances which backstab other agents to take their loot. I would go out on a limb and guess that the game monitors who does that sort of thing on a regular basis vs those who stick to their missions and collect loot just from bad guys and not by attacking friendlies.
The problem with the game engineering is that if you are tactically competent and get good usable weapons, you can't just pick who you are going to go after, like ignoring lower level threats and going after who you want. That's the real masonic key to the game design (done by the same people who did Assassins Creed and took over the Tom Clancy franchises). If you are a low level guy and sneak over to the high level area with a sniper rifle, and decide to take out a high level enemy leader, you can't. You shoot the guy in the head, he spits back at you and his guys all come after you, and happen to be bulletproof unless you have worked up to that level. Kind of understand the mentality right? Another bad example on the game play is you get a bunch of enemies lined up in a hallway, cut loose with an M60, and the guy at the front decides you are not high enough level and just blasts you with a pistol.
At higher levels, you eventually run into what is called "agent hunters" but they are not addressed in the survival guide. These are people with a vendetta against agents and are particularly skilled at killing agents.
Foreign nationals are welcome to play the game as it is based in New York, the defacto world capitol. Part of the game scenario is to massacre the Blackwater guys who have taken over UN headquarters and aligned themselves with a few surviving UN delegates to declare a new political order, but nobody is listening. Your real orders come from some secret organization through a commanding officer who was severely wounded during the deployment and never leaves the command center. She maintains communication with higher command, as an agent, you never do. You eventually learn that the main bad guy is a fellow agent who was activated a few months before you and went rogue, taking control of a bioweapon which he plans on using as leverage to exert control over the world. His allies are unknown, but eventually you learn his identity as "Asher". "Asher", knowing the secretive nature of the real command had been inserting his own commands into the communications flow in order to get new agents to wipe out his rivals.
The entire series is educational in nature to the up and coming generation. Very carefully researched and thought out on a no-holds-barred budget. It is THE scenario the government is bringing their people up for. Not zombies, not aliens, not so much civil war at this point. It is the scenario that the combined resources of the government and the gaming industry poured billions of dollars into studying. The game release itself is a case study in the sociology and behavior of the players under various circumstances, except that it is skewed by limited options in on a lot of stuff. You basically have to complete the entire game before it becomes a true open world game. It also has some limits on play progression so once it plays out, it plays out and your new play is only a question of how different groups of people run the same scenarios. I am guessing that's where the mass study goes in and little tweaks are made in the later releases.
My take on it is with the amount of money and production value that went into the game, it is important to become familiar with all things Division in order to even communicate comprehensively with the incoming generation. Not so much on the game play, but many of the concepts in the game. Quest givers for example, mission completion chains, group dynamics, establishment of safehouses. It's all there. Some of the zombie games put that together, but this is the one which was engineered to put it together in a playable realistic scenario.
