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‘The Division 2’ Is Hiding All Its Good Cutscenes In Its Menus For Some Reason

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If you’ve played The Division 2 you know that it is…pretty light on story. You’re an agent, DC is falling apart after a virus has devastated the world, you have to come in and rebuild. And kill people preventing the rebuilding.

There are “cutscenes” in the game, but there are few and far between. They usually include you in some small dark room with Agent Kelso acting as a Division stand-in for you because you can’t talk, speaking to some settlement leader or the President or whoever. And that’s it, really.

But there are eight “hidden” cutscenes that are far, far more interesting than any of these are. They are “found footage” that you acquire after certain major missions, though if you didn’t know that, nor where to find them, I would not blame you.

The Division 1 also did this found footage thing, but I swear there was a much more clear prompt to get you to actually watch them once you found them. Here, I had no idea these even existed until someone told me about them, so now I’m telling you. You have to go three layers deep into the menus to find them. You need to go to progression, then to the DC tab, then to found footage where you will find the eight files.

The videos are all pretty disturbing. One shows one of the gangs attacking a group, usually in a brutal fashion, and another video to match the pair shows the leaders of that gang, your only real glimpse at some of those “named” enemies you were killing in the campaign. And a look at a little bit of what motivates these groups because the story really does not explain that much. During campaign missions you really are only hearing enemies shout things like “Division agents in the basement!” or your allies yapping about hooking ISAC back up or destroying virus samples. No real context.

These videos help flesh out these factions at least a tiny bit. Though the audio logs are what really help that you find around the world. I still don’t really know what to make of the “intro faction,” the Hyenas, who come off like organized rioters with a high council and everything, and their videos don’t really help explain things. The Outcasts were put in some sort of quarantine internment camps, which they are none too pleased about, and they’re now some sort of cult led by a woman you see in a video. The True Sons were perhaps the weirdest introduction as they really did come out of nowhere. From what I can gather they were actual US soldiers who decided to stop wasting food and supplies on doomed civilians and take it for themselves. We see their leader in a video as well, executing a doctor protesting this philosophy.

Again, these videos are not that much to go on, and yet they contain more total footage than probably all the other in-game cutscenes combined, and are the only time you will actually get a look at the specific enemies you’re fighting. The final two videos appear to show the invasion of Black Tusk, though we still don’t seem to know much about their motivations or leadership. Are we going to find Aaron Keener in that final stronghold, perhaps?

The Division 2 does a lot of things right, but I don’t think storytelling is on that list, and I wish that the entire plotline with these different factions was more fleshed-out than what we see in the game. These videos help, and you should watch them, but I still want more.

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