The Division: Best waiting-in-line sim of 2016?

Look how orderly these queues are!

Steven Hansen Presents Tom Clancy’s The Division came out today. Chris is working tirelessly on a verdict, but if you’ve played a Ubisoft game, you probably know what to expect, with that company’s wide paint brush of open-world business (this time heavy with multiplayer components, like The Crew).

If you’ve played a major, online-heavy game at or around launch — say Street Fighter V, recently — you also probably know what to expect. Server errors et al.

But here is something surprisingly interesting in the chaos: people forming orderly lines to talk to an NPC, because NPCs can’t talk to multiple players at once and players can’t phase through one another. 

It’s probably not “fun.” It’s definitely funny. And, I don’t know, kind of interesting? In the same way that rotating a DualShock to pour a glass of orange juice in Heavy Rain is interesting, but, still. And this is even more amusing in the context of a decidedly not Heavy Rain style of game.

It’s post-apocalyptic wish fulfillment bogged down by real life tedium and I like it.