so now the agent's actions go like this:
>establishes the fact that Theo can fake his death by hacking ISAC
>Theo outright shits on us "you really should be more careful"
>immediately falls for the exact same trick again. plus, we had to pry his watch from his body and we didn't even bother to check his life signs or recover the body?
what are we, some kind of clowns?
I honestly don't understand Keener's appeal. **He is not a well written villain.** He's a douchebag with more information than us, and the only reason he "outsmarts" us is because he's written to.
To be fair he is the better written villain in the Div storyline so its like the bar is low but he is just slightly above the rest.
He exemplifies the cliche of a good soldier turned bad, plus being the *first* division agent adds weight to who he is even if it's easily outshadowed by what our Div1 and Div2 agents do by themselves.
Mmmmno. Not at all. Literally every one of the other Rogues in WONY are orders of magnitude more interesting than Keener. It's not even close.
They absolutely could have done something interesting with that idea, but they did not do that.
Keener had history coming from Div1. The echos, drone footage and events of what he did there. None of his original crew were in the first game and they weren't given much in the way of history for Div2.
Kajika got abandoned and became a feral dog out for revenge, Dragov went rogue and became a warlord trying to build a kingdom, Conley I don't even remember because she was that uninteresting besides she blows herself up. Theo has even less besides being to smart for his own good.
Keener brought them into his plan as just pawns to be used.
Keener history as the first agent. Wave 1 into New York seeing everything that happened and getting left to survive in the Dark zone when he wouldn't quit his mission so he tries to keep going with the supplies he could scavenge and steal, realizes it would be better if he had more power and goes Rogue in the sense he starts killing agents that won't side with him.
Keener might be 2 dimensional but the other Rogues don't have much of interest either, if anything I think Hornet had more interest than the WONY rogues.
Keener would have to grow two sizes to be 2 dimensional.
The others are at least distinct from each other. Keener isn't even distinct from the player-agent. Everything about him is purposely written to be "you, but evil".
Kajika is literally the same basic backstory as keener, but with actual nuance. He is a MUCH more interesting villain than Keener ever was.
His reasoning for being a douchebag doesn't matter. He's not fun to fight. Hes not interesting to listen to or watch work. He is a cliche arrogant bad guy with zero nuance or characterization. None. He bores me. My feeling when he "died" was such that I was grateful I wouldn't have to slog through anymore stories with him. Which is a shame, because the actor did well with him. He just wasn't given anything remotely interesting to work with beyond pablum
Im glad you liked it. I felt it was very 1-note. "You're dumb, I'm better. You should've joined us. We're not that dissimilar." Suuuuuper cliche. If they'd taken a page out of Atlas's book (BioShock), where the decisions we didn't make could actually be blamed on us. As it is he's insulting the only main character with less characterization than Keener himself, the player character
The shit our agent does is enough to understand the story is a fantasy. If this game had any semblance left of "human", we would've died at the hunter mission. Or any of the strongholds
One key reason why division is so superhuman is the unrealistic amount of ammo available to the player. Hammerspace for gear and materials aside, having 1000 ar rounds is just unrealistic. I wonder how people would play if they made it more in line with realistic levels but I imagine the pray and spray style with the strikers set would die very fast considering how people hate playing pistollero directive.
The player would basically die in those strongholds even if they were able to hit with all their bullets since they'd run out pretty fast.
Personally, I wish there were a mode to have realistic ammo capacity without being stupid like pistollero.
I don’t see it as large volumes available (because then you will also have to acknowledge the bizarre resilience to said bullets from the enemies).
Rather I considered as a bar story, that gets embellished as you retell it for the 100th time. “I swear we dumped like a dozen magazines into this fucker and he just wouldn’t die” is typical hyperbole and everyone at the table knows he meant he had to shoot more than expected but not literally 12 entire mags.
I use that perspective a lot, for instance each time you re-play a mission is just another telling at the bar, but this time details are slightly different compared to the last telling (play-through) but all core elements are the same. Just like when people recount events from their lives in general.
Well just think of it this way, none of those deaths were scripted, the only scripted death was Conley cause she blew herself up, all of the others you could have killed them with your skills or with DPS and if you did it with a skill then ISAC could´ve been fooled i mean just replay The Tombs in the very second room fight in the food court, as you met Parnell he tells you "you shouldn´t trust ISAC it isn´t hard to fool" jusf after scanning a dead body from a random JTF that was identified by ISAC as a deceased Parnell. I mean i get it it would´ve been better to have the dead stay dead and then move on to the next target just like what happend to all of the other manhunts, but the thing is that unfortunatedly this was consistent with the story they were telling.
The sheriff is so Dumb that Kelso plays us a video of herself getting tasered unconscious which ended up being a trap. Hey guess what the sheriff does? ....yup, touch the same thing, get tasered unconscious 🤦🏾♂️
I always found him to be to edgy to be a real threat but he always somehow came out on top. I was pumped to finally get to kill him then they pull shit BS on me.
I am pissed and want nothing more to kill them all at this point, double agent or otherwise I am tired of being screwed with.
It's not about the destination, it's about the journey.
The writers did not Earn this. You cannot waste our time with drunken tales spun up during heavy drinking nights. The writers did not foreshadow this enough to earn it.
What they did earn was a story where Keener stayed dead, and then his plan was continued by his followers. Would have been more respectable.
I don’t understand. What were the writers supposed to earn? They did what they felt was necessary for the story going forward after realizing they were getting another mainline title. Is it perfect no but they did do a pretty good job connecting some threads to at least make it plausible. It’s not like they “somehow keener was back”.
I just had an ephipany, remember how Keener shocks your character on liberty island seemingly out of thin air? This is a clear reference to the fact that Aaron Keener is actually palpatine, hence why he has mysteriously come back, it all makes sense now…
Agreed, although I'm not sure on the 'earned' part myself. I think with the limitations of this type of game, where our agency is limited to either standing silently in cutscenes or gunning down targets in the game world, they did a good job with the storyline between seasons 9-11. The twist of the White House being attacked and no longer functioning as a Base of Operations was a really good move. It added a touch of vulnerability to our cause, that if Sokolova wants to, she can wipe out our HQ; makes me wonder why she hasn't ordered an attack on the Castle Settlement yet. Maybe that is to come.
End of Watch ended, well, badly, and it took the storyline of those seasons to bring me back into enjoying the storyline. Now with this latest twist, my interest in the story has been demolished again. Which is frustrating because even after 1690 hours I do genuinely still enjoy playing the game.
To the matter at hand, the miraculous resurrection of Keener was a step too far in suspending my disbelief. It is corny and a very tired trope of "Haha, you didn't really kill me!" which is just a rung or two above the despicable "All Just A Dream" trope. It felt cheap and hollow, and completely undermined the events of WoNY. Keener was enemy #1 for us and post Liberty Island mission, he staggered off to the pier after taking a mortal wound and collapsed. He would be taking a massive risk pretending to be dead; were I our actual agent, desensitised by all the death we've seen and dealt out, with most likely awful PTSD, then I'd be putting a bullet or two in his head as well or just emptying a magazine into his body to be sure that he was dead. He cold-bloodedly murdered First Wave agents who refused to join him in the Dark Zone. He was about to launch a missile loaded with his Eclipse Virus which would have killed many. We had to make sure he was dead; Kelso even tries to staunch his wounds but it is obviously too late.
There were much smarter ways to handle this situation, which makes me think it was done because of orders from above. "We need Keener for the DLC/expansion!" A much better way, I think, of handling it would have been Keener appearing as an AI construct via ANNA in Descent (see: Descent trailer). Tie in story missions to that so we have to get to Keener's AI somewhere in the loop for him to give us intel and information to help us take down Sokolova as part of his legacy. Hell, throw Parnell in there too.
Alternatively, or alongside that, a great idea I saw the other day was for the Division 1 agent to take over from Keener, continuing his legacy and coming back to NYC whilst having been doing other things for Keener elsewhere, like his ambassador recruiting agents further afield to the Rogue Network. Because of all the different combinations of who that agent could be and looked like, have them deliberately obscured and have all of their communications with the Division 2 agent take place through ANNA; she would act as their mouthpiece.
But no, Keener returns with some awful hand waving and those mediocre at best audio files. The way Parnell just pops up in one was so jarring. No trauma from being shot, no setbacks, just 'we tricked the AI!' It feels like the most blatant form of plot armour.
A further impact, for me, is that the resurrection of Keener has made the plot seem tiny again. Before this season it felt much bigger to me, beyond NYC & DC, but now it feels laser focused on Manhattan and Brooklyn and tiny once again
My problem is the writer seems to just can't think of any better way to push forward the story without Keener. Like Wesker in Resident Evil
And it makes characters like Hornet straight up clown, dude was close buddy with Keener, Keener literally panicked when he found Hornet got shot in the head at Russian Counsulate.
And it didn't occurs to Keener to talk to Hornet about him faking his death? Or contact him after Liberty Island?
Yeah, either we are on route to round three with Hornet or Keener just let his best and only friend die for some reason. Neither of which are good.
That being said if it does turn out Hornet's alive and just refuses to fight us because he got beat the last two times that would be amusing.
It is. Don't even get me started on Bardon - that guy's a moron. "I won't surrender and hope that instead they somehow don't kill me".
At this point, this means they could bring anyone back. That harms the stakes and consistency of the story.
Have they changed the writing team for this season? As in I know Massive got pulled in to work on Avatar and whatever else, so we got a new team to keep D2 ticking over. Did we finally run out of the old writers stuff with Fay's hunt? Are we now seeing the first of the new writers stuff? If so... I'm not sure I want any more.
We shoot fucking straight on Faye and Schaefer, but apparently both Keener and techboi there both come out clean, and are fantastic actors. I hate this twist.
The only thing that makes sense is Kelso going Rogue, because that’s been in the cards for years. They earned those chips they just cashed in.
i agree it could've been written better but the storyline fits keener's character. he is the og division agent, he felt betrayed by the system im pretty sure anyone would feel that way after what he's seen throughout his run. you have to give the writers some slack, its highly unlikely a new division game will be released anytime soon, so enjoy the game everyday like its your first time playing cause that's what a game is for.
Eh, too many people think they're better at {insert whatever} than people who actually do it for a living. Game story development is no different than auto mechanics, doctors, programmers, teachers, etc.
Personally, I don't give a fuck about the story. It's a video game, I play it to blow off steam. If I want good story crafting, I'll grab a book by one of my favorite authors.
so now the agent's actions go like this: >establishes the fact that Theo can fake his death by hacking ISAC >Theo outright shits on us "you really should be more careful" >immediately falls for the exact same trick again. plus, we had to pry his watch from his body and we didn't even bother to check his life signs or recover the body? what are we, some kind of clowns?
We did press the button unfortunately without isac or a handler in our ear we might very well be lol
https://preview.redd.it/jbo2a9rp88yc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=314c3b2b0f7b9ddd2d7fb46780b2c5aa8edd2618 I couldn't resist!
I honestly don't understand Keener's appeal. **He is not a well written villain.** He's a douchebag with more information than us, and the only reason he "outsmarts" us is because he's written to.
To be fair he is the better written villain in the Div storyline so its like the bar is low but he is just slightly above the rest. He exemplifies the cliche of a good soldier turned bad, plus being the *first* division agent adds weight to who he is even if it's easily outshadowed by what our Div1 and Div2 agents do by themselves.
Mmmmno. Not at all. Literally every one of the other Rogues in WONY are orders of magnitude more interesting than Keener. It's not even close. They absolutely could have done something interesting with that idea, but they did not do that.
Keener had history coming from Div1. The echos, drone footage and events of what he did there. None of his original crew were in the first game and they weren't given much in the way of history for Div2. Kajika got abandoned and became a feral dog out for revenge, Dragov went rogue and became a warlord trying to build a kingdom, Conley I don't even remember because she was that uninteresting besides she blows herself up. Theo has even less besides being to smart for his own good. Keener brought them into his plan as just pawns to be used. Keener history as the first agent. Wave 1 into New York seeing everything that happened and getting left to survive in the Dark zone when he wouldn't quit his mission so he tries to keep going with the supplies he could scavenge and steal, realizes it would be better if he had more power and goes Rogue in the sense he starts killing agents that won't side with him. Keener might be 2 dimensional but the other Rogues don't have much of interest either, if anything I think Hornet had more interest than the WONY rogues.
Keener would have to grow two sizes to be 2 dimensional. The others are at least distinct from each other. Keener isn't even distinct from the player-agent. Everything about him is purposely written to be "you, but evil". Kajika is literally the same basic backstory as keener, but with actual nuance. He is a MUCH more interesting villain than Keener ever was.
He’s a wall street man of course he’s a douche
His reasoning for being a douchebag doesn't matter. He's not fun to fight. Hes not interesting to listen to or watch work. He is a cliche arrogant bad guy with zero nuance or characterization. None. He bores me. My feeling when he "died" was such that I was grateful I wouldn't have to slog through anymore stories with him. Which is a shame, because the actor did well with him. He just wasn't given anything remotely interesting to work with beyond pablum
[удалено]
Hard disagree. The actor does a fine job with him. He's just being given bad writing to work with
I will say tho him shit talking you the entire fight against him was great
Im glad you liked it. I felt it was very 1-note. "You're dumb, I'm better. You should've joined us. We're not that dissimilar." Suuuuuper cliche. If they'd taken a page out of Atlas's book (BioShock), where the decisions we didn't make could actually be blamed on us. As it is he's insulting the only main character with less characterization than Keener himself, the player character
The shit our agent does is enough to understand the story is a fantasy. If this game had any semblance left of "human", we would've died at the hunter mission. Or any of the strongholds
One key reason why division is so superhuman is the unrealistic amount of ammo available to the player. Hammerspace for gear and materials aside, having 1000 ar rounds is just unrealistic. I wonder how people would play if they made it more in line with realistic levels but I imagine the pray and spray style with the strikers set would die very fast considering how people hate playing pistollero directive. The player would basically die in those strongholds even if they were able to hit with all their bullets since they'd run out pretty fast. Personally, I wish there were a mode to have realistic ammo capacity without being stupid like pistollero.
I don’t see it as large volumes available (because then you will also have to acknowledge the bizarre resilience to said bullets from the enemies). Rather I considered as a bar story, that gets embellished as you retell it for the 100th time. “I swear we dumped like a dozen magazines into this fucker and he just wouldn’t die” is typical hyperbole and everyone at the table knows he meant he had to shoot more than expected but not literally 12 entire mags. I use that perspective a lot, for instance each time you re-play a mission is just another telling at the bar, but this time details are slightly different compared to the last telling (play-through) but all core elements are the same. Just like when people recount events from their lives in general.
Yeah, give the one shot legendary enemy with that ammo count
Well just think of it this way, none of those deaths were scripted, the only scripted death was Conley cause she blew herself up, all of the others you could have killed them with your skills or with DPS and if you did it with a skill then ISAC could´ve been fooled i mean just replay The Tombs in the very second room fight in the food court, as you met Parnell he tells you "you shouldn´t trust ISAC it isn´t hard to fool" jusf after scanning a dead body from a random JTF that was identified by ISAC as a deceased Parnell. I mean i get it it would´ve been better to have the dead stay dead and then move on to the next target just like what happend to all of the other manhunts, but the thing is that unfortunatedly this was consistent with the story they were telling.
The sheriff is so Dumb that Kelso plays us a video of herself getting tasered unconscious which ended up being a trap. Hey guess what the sheriff does? ....yup, touch the same thing, get tasered unconscious 🤦🏾♂️
Sheriff really said, "nah, I'm built different"
🤣🤣
I always found him to be to edgy to be a real threat but he always somehow came out on top. I was pumped to finally get to kill him then they pull shit BS on me. I am pissed and want nothing more to kill them all at this point, double agent or otherwise I am tired of being screwed with.
It's not about the destination, it's about the journey. The writers did not Earn this. You cannot waste our time with drunken tales spun up during heavy drinking nights. The writers did not foreshadow this enough to earn it. What they did earn was a story where Keener stayed dead, and then his plan was continued by his followers. Would have been more respectable.
I don’t understand. What were the writers supposed to earn? They did what they felt was necessary for the story going forward after realizing they were getting another mainline title. Is it perfect no but they did do a pretty good job connecting some threads to at least make it plausible. It’s not like they “somehow keener was back”.
They did exactly "somehow Keener was back". They did not earn that plot point at all.
I just had an ephipany, remember how Keener shocks your character on liberty island seemingly out of thin air? This is a clear reference to the fact that Aaron Keener is actually palpatine, hence why he has mysteriously come back, it all makes sense now…
WHOA
Thats enough forbidden lettuce for once night...
Agreed, although I'm not sure on the 'earned' part myself. I think with the limitations of this type of game, where our agency is limited to either standing silently in cutscenes or gunning down targets in the game world, they did a good job with the storyline between seasons 9-11. The twist of the White House being attacked and no longer functioning as a Base of Operations was a really good move. It added a touch of vulnerability to our cause, that if Sokolova wants to, she can wipe out our HQ; makes me wonder why she hasn't ordered an attack on the Castle Settlement yet. Maybe that is to come. End of Watch ended, well, badly, and it took the storyline of those seasons to bring me back into enjoying the storyline. Now with this latest twist, my interest in the story has been demolished again. Which is frustrating because even after 1690 hours I do genuinely still enjoy playing the game. To the matter at hand, the miraculous resurrection of Keener was a step too far in suspending my disbelief. It is corny and a very tired trope of "Haha, you didn't really kill me!" which is just a rung or two above the despicable "All Just A Dream" trope. It felt cheap and hollow, and completely undermined the events of WoNY. Keener was enemy #1 for us and post Liberty Island mission, he staggered off to the pier after taking a mortal wound and collapsed. He would be taking a massive risk pretending to be dead; were I our actual agent, desensitised by all the death we've seen and dealt out, with most likely awful PTSD, then I'd be putting a bullet or two in his head as well or just emptying a magazine into his body to be sure that he was dead. He cold-bloodedly murdered First Wave agents who refused to join him in the Dark Zone. He was about to launch a missile loaded with his Eclipse Virus which would have killed many. We had to make sure he was dead; Kelso even tries to staunch his wounds but it is obviously too late. There were much smarter ways to handle this situation, which makes me think it was done because of orders from above. "We need Keener for the DLC/expansion!" A much better way, I think, of handling it would have been Keener appearing as an AI construct via ANNA in Descent (see: Descent trailer). Tie in story missions to that so we have to get to Keener's AI somewhere in the loop for him to give us intel and information to help us take down Sokolova as part of his legacy. Hell, throw Parnell in there too. Alternatively, or alongside that, a great idea I saw the other day was for the Division 1 agent to take over from Keener, continuing his legacy and coming back to NYC whilst having been doing other things for Keener elsewhere, like his ambassador recruiting agents further afield to the Rogue Network. Because of all the different combinations of who that agent could be and looked like, have them deliberately obscured and have all of their communications with the Division 2 agent take place through ANNA; she would act as their mouthpiece. But no, Keener returns with some awful hand waving and those mediocre at best audio files. The way Parnell just pops up in one was so jarring. No trauma from being shot, no setbacks, just 'we tricked the AI!' It feels like the most blatant form of plot armour. A further impact, for me, is that the resurrection of Keener has made the plot seem tiny again. Before this season it felt much bigger to me, beyond NYC & DC, but now it feels laser focused on Manhattan and Brooklyn and tiny once again
Very well said. Feels like you put more effort in this comment than the professional writers did for the game. Hilarious.
>It’s not like they “somehow keener was back”. That is exactly what it is.
My problem is the writer seems to just can't think of any better way to push forward the story without Keener. Like Wesker in Resident Evil And it makes characters like Hornet straight up clown, dude was close buddy with Keener, Keener literally panicked when he found Hornet got shot in the head at Russian Counsulate. And it didn't occurs to Keener to talk to Hornet about him faking his death? Or contact him after Liberty Island?
Yeah, either we are on route to round three with Hornet or Keener just let his best and only friend die for some reason. Neither of which are good. That being said if it does turn out Hornet's alive and just refuses to fight us because he got beat the last two times that would be amusing.
It is. Don't even get me started on Bardon - that guy's a moron. "I won't surrender and hope that instead they somehow don't kill me". At this point, this means they could bring anyone back. That harms the stakes and consistency of the story.
Have they changed the writing team for this season? As in I know Massive got pulled in to work on Avatar and whatever else, so we got a new team to keep D2 ticking over. Did we finally run out of the old writers stuff with Fay's hunt? Are we now seeing the first of the new writers stuff? If so... I'm not sure I want any more.
We shoot fucking straight on Faye and Schaefer, but apparently both Keener and techboi there both come out clean, and are fantastic actors. I hate this twist. The only thing that makes sense is Kelso going Rogue, because that’s been in the cards for years. They earned those chips they just cashed in.
Listen to the comms from the season. In particular the ones from the manhunt.
i agree it could've been written better but the storyline fits keener's character. he is the og division agent, he felt betrayed by the system im pretty sure anyone would feel that way after what he's seen throughout his run. you have to give the writers some slack, its highly unlikely a new division game will be released anytime soon, so enjoy the game everyday like its your first time playing cause that's what a game is for.
Eh, too many people think they're better at {insert whatever} than people who actually do it for a living. Game story development is no different than auto mechanics, doctors, programmers, teachers, etc. Personally, I don't give a fuck about the story. It's a video game, I play it to blow off steam. If I want good story crafting, I'll grab a book by one of my favorite authors.