"BIOHAZARD WARNING! ENTERING CONTAMINATED ZONE!"
- The potential of Dollar Flu is some high quality Paranoia Fuel; a nation nearly killed itself without the usage of any outside threat. Itself a contagious lethal threat that is hard to detect among thousands of populace.
- The entirety of Manhattan is chock full of this, from the corpses and lootings, to the paranoia of the virus spreading. And the Rikers and Cleaners are none too pleasant about the remains of whoever gets in their way.
- Just the thought that now you can never walk in freaking Manhattan without hearing a gunshot or two everyday.
- The intel videos especially. While the echoes are just still hologram images with sounds of what happened before, the videos either depict story - or the horrible actions of the various criminals, like trapping a police car to ruthlessly murder the officers inside, or chasing a couple through the subway and brutally beating the husband to death while pinning the wife down.
- That said, the ECHO recordings are quite eerie. Often times, these still images are recordings of people at the moment of their death, with their corpses laying nearby. Couple this with the strange blue haze, muted sound and the strange electronic twinge that the voices you hear possess, it can feel like standing among ghosts.
- The Intel video of Joe Ferro is by far the worst of the lot. Taken from the POV of a random survivor, it shows the survivor trying to hide from the Cleaner leader and his cohorts, and at first it seems they were successful. Then the POV turns to find another Cleaner looking right at them. Cue whooshing sound of napalm. The worst part is that this isn't even the end of the video.
- The Cleaners depicted in "Agent Origins: Ashes" are walking examples of this trope. Cold-blooded, well-armed and frighteningly efficient, all but one of them comes across as implacable monsters. Even being one won't protect you: the moment one Cleaner is suspected to being infected (being found on top of a pile of plague victims will do that), his former comrades remorselessly turn their flamethrowers on him. The clipboard-carrying Cleaner is arguably even worse: he seems to treat the whole murder-and-immolation business as just a tedious but necessary chore, complete with paperwork and an icy, detached expression the whole time.
- The idea that any of the SHD agents activated could turn on their own colleagues. Not just you lot. Even the first wave.
- If you somehow doubt that Aaron Keener isn't jaded and crazy, there's an ECHO where he finds a JTF soldier in the middle of being hung from a construction vehicle by Rikers. He kills the Rikers... and then walks away, leaving the soldier to hang.
- The Dark Zone, which lives up to its ominous name. The place where the infection hit hardest, it is a completely lawless place where only the hardiest of people survive. As desolate as the streets in the rest of the city are, the Dark Zone is almost completely empty. You can't even count on your fellow Agents, who can attack you at any time, for any reason. Of particular note are the subway tunnels of the Dark Zone, which are choked with body bags.
- Contaminated Zones, those red spots in certain areas; You see spots inside that are scanned as CONTAMINATED. Whats worse, if your air filter isn't strong enough, you'll die in seconds.
- The Rikers on the whole. Led by a charismatic but psychotic Dark Action Girl with an Eat the Rich mentality, they are both incredibly violent and boundlessly sadistic. They focus most of their hatred on the JTF (or anyone in authority for that matter, including Division Agents ) who they all see as "pigs" and will not hesitate to kill in the most sadistic ways imaginable, to the point where JTF soldiers will openly state that they would rather die than surrender or be captured by Rikers. Their idea of "marking territory" is to hang the bodies of JTF officers at their checkpoints. That said, their violence isn't something they reserve just for their most hated enemies. It isn't uncommon in Riker territory to come across one of the escaped convicts wildly smacking a dead civilian with their AK for no discernible reason.
- Also, one should note that Rikers Island is one of the world's largest prisons, with an average daily population of 10,000 and a maximum capacity of 15,000. If Larae Barrett managed to bring even a tenth of the prison population with her, you're still looking at a sizable army of thugs hellbent on tearing their way through Manhattan, every single one of them raping, pillaging and murdering for all its worth. Now imagine if she brought a number closer to all of them off the prison with her.
- LaRae Barrett is probably the single scariest faction leader of the game. One video shows her extorting her psychopathic minions to cause as much pain and misery as possible for anyone wearing a uniform. JTF, EMT, firemen, postmen, she isn't picky. And all the while she's slicing up a bound, begging minion (who apparently didn't care much for her leadership style). An earlier ECHO depicted her comparing disemboweling a JTF officer to gutting a pig... and then she does just that.
- It also turns out that the then-current man-in-charge at the facility actually seriously had a thing for her, which probably explains how she got away with a lot of things whilst she was behind bars. As soon as everything goes to shit? She cons the guy into getting a barge for her to escape on; just when he thinks he's going to ride into the sunset with his outlaw woman, she kills him.
- Rescuing the hostage at the West 42nd Street police station reveals they apparently made the cells into their own personal torture dungeon. Most of them are filled with the dead bodies of the JTF prisoners. One in particular has what looks like a headless JTF officer hanging from the ceiling, and a bloody baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire propped up outside. Enjoy the implications of that, along with the idea that this is just one of what are probably dozens of such locations they have scattered all across their turf.
- The Rikers' Castle where you fight LaRae Barrett shows how brutal the Rikers can be. In a way, the utterly cliche methods they use to torture the captured JTF inside make it even worse. One man is forced to either play a song on a piano right or wind up dead like his partner on the guitar. Two National Guard soldiers are forced to see who can survive the most shots of bleach. As one JTF officer pleads for their life claiming he's more than just a number and a uniform, the Riker states that now the man knows how it feels.
- The Subway Morgue mission can be particularly unsettling. Upon turning on the lights, you'll see the subway tunnels full of bodybags and coffins as far as the eye can see. In addition, many of the public parks in the city have been turned into mass graves, and with the hasty retreat of the JTF, most bodies at the graves weren't even fully buried.
- The Falcon Lost Incursion reveals the LMB has not only split into factions and took over a water plant, but Faye getting a call from the National Continuity Coalition to bomb the place is making her worried about what's happened with the President of the United States.
- And in a more immediate example of Nightmare Fuel, they have a tank. note
- The idea of the Division itself is this: a sleeper cell that infiltrates the civilian population, doesn't answer to any other branch of law enforcement, and is permitted to kill civilians (criminals and gang members, but still) at their discretion, without due process or even an attempt at non-violent resolution. That is straight-up totalitarian.
- What's most frightening is that due to the nature of The Division as a de-centralized, stay-behind force that operates on near-total self-sufficiency (cells of four Agents maximum), you're looking at a heavily armed, highly-trained force with extremely advanced technology that answers to absolutely no one. This ultimately includes their own command structure. Totalitarian secret police? Bad. Totalitarian secret police that operate with such impunity that, should they decide to do things for their own selfish motivations, up to and including terrorist activities, the people supposedly in charge of them can do nothing about it? Horrifying.
- According to one of the incursions, things are worse. Faye Lau mentions contact with someone called the "National Continuity Coordinator". As Lau puts it, what's happened to the government outside of New York City?
- We finally get a glimpse of what happened to DC in The Division 2. As bad as New York looked, DC is even worse.
- Those supply drops for Division Agents in the Dark Zone that began dropping 1.1? Faye was informed about it out of the blue, and she doesn't even have a clue why they're being dropped inside of the DZ, instead of say, near the Base of Operations/Post Office. The fact that it's Division Tech has her even more worried, especially if someone (say, Rogue Agents) grabs them first.
- The Clear Sky Incursion has the Rikers taking over an abandoned LMB anti-air missile site! The fact that they'll gladly shoot down any air support for shits and giggles is a terrifying idea, regardless who you are!
- Survival Mode brings this all in full force. You and several other agents are sent to the Dark Zone via chopper to investigate a possible anti-virus, meaning that its priority is understandably put above everything, including personnel safety. Problem is, New York's being hit with the mother of all blizzards. Soon enough, your chopper is taken down by a flying billboard. When you finally come to, your hazmat suit is torn, and you're now infected with sepsis
. And it all goes downhill from there...- For starters, you're left practically naked. You have a shit hazmat suit, bare bones gear, a dinky little pistol, and none of your Division equipment (save for a map). You're at risk of starvation, dehydration, hypothermia, and sepsis. And the only way to survive is to scavenge any resources you can find to stave off the infection, and to recover any gear and clothing to stand a chance against the blizzard-torn city.
- Playing in PvP mode makes it that much more tense. Survival severely ups the difficulty of surviving together by making all resources found work on a finders-keepers basis. But PvP means that that now, all of New York is effectively the Dark Zone. And it's no longer the potential of loot, but survival of the fittest. Who do you trust? Who do you help?
- And suppose you manage to fight and craft your way into the Dark Zone, find the anti-virus, and signal for extraction (which is by no means an easy task). Getting ready for another wave of psychos, show 'em who's top of the food chain, and go on another power trip, right? Nope. You're introduced to a new faction of soldiers, known only as Hunters. Suddenly, your equipment shorts out, leaving you without your skills once again. And now fighting you isn't any of those psychos, but Splinter Cell-like soldiers who take advantage of your skills being Disrupted, while using that same Shade tech to shut you down. Don't let their lack of armor fool you, because the moment they find cover, they'll quickly recover any health they lost and proceed to run you down. Adding to this disturbing discovery is that they decorated with Division smart-watches. Either these are elites among elites within the Last Man Battalion, or they are Rogue First-Wave Agents, who're trying to stop you from making off with that anti-virus. The worst part of all this is that you never get any explanation or even hints as to why specifically they try and stop that anti-virus from leaving...
- According to what little lore exists about them, they're hostile to both First Wave and Second Wave agents. But that just further begs the question of who the hell are they?
- Just everything having to do with the Cleaners. Joe Ferro was probably an average middle-class man with a family until the Dollar Flu hit. Then his angrier instincts seemed to have rushed out when his wife died and Ferro blamed the "weak government" for not doing what needed to be done to stop the spread of disease. So what does Joe do? He organizes Manhattan's blue collar workforce, they arm themselves, and they set out to utterly burn the infection out of Manhattan. They think they're saving the city, even the nation and world, with every civilian they burn and every building they torch. You can't argue or reason with a zealot.
