For many, myself included, the dots between what Destiny offers, and what The Division is seemingly leaning toward are easy to connect. Though we’ve already detailed the basics of Tom Clancy’s The Division, the differences between The Division and Destiny, and the steps Ubisoft Massive is taking to avoid the disappointments that marred Destiny’s first year, the question remains: “What the hell is The Division?”

While you may have heard comparisons or read synopses, it’s not until you get your hands on The Division that you can really begin to understand it, to get a feel for what it’s really about. Indeed, some of you have already put your hands on a small slice of The Division thanks to its alpha and closed beta periods, but those only provided the briefest of glimpses as to the game’s structure and scope, like being allowed to touch the thing but not really get to grips with it.

There are as many questions created in these brief windows as answers, and coming from a place of fond memories with Destiny – late nights with close friends and strangers, shooting and looting into early mornings – I’ve been intrigued by what similar ways The Division might strike me.

Fortunately, throughout the two coffee-soaked days my colleagues and I spent in the second-floor theater of Ubisoft Massive’s Swedish office, having sizable chunks of The Division digitally splayed out across three giant screens and explained in measured detail, that familiar twinge of excitement stung me again and again.

That’s thanks to many reasons, one of the chief among them being The Division’s staggering replication of New York City and the amount of detail that’s gone into its recreation. The lengths Massive has gone in replicating New York is incredible: from nearly getting attacked by a homeless person for inadvertently photographing them in one of thousands of research pictures, to running simulated projections of Manhattan traffic during a state of emergency so the developers would know where to put most of the cars.

And beyond the small chunk we saw in the beta, New York City is an enormous, gorgeous, and boisterous place. It’s soaked in personality. Each neighborhood taking on a character. Hell’s Kitchen overflows with garbage, piled 20-feet high against the brickface residential buildings. The New York subway system has been converted into a morgue. And Bryant Park is a war zone in the midst of the Dark Zone.

But major New York landmarks like the Empire State Building still endure, and tower over the chaos on the streets, though many now serve as staging areas or strongholds. The Division’s New York City is vast, riddled with secrets, and ripe for exploration.

Then there are the weapons, equipment, skills, abilities, and perks, that all work together to make up the majority of the RPG power-climb. While similarities between The Division and Destiny are obvious when it comes to character building – three primary attributes that change, for example – Massive is building its cover-based shooter to appeal to the hardcore RPG-nerd in us all.

Destiny’s statistics and attributes were satisfying, but The Division ratchets it up, with cascades of numbers on each piece of loot that tweak percentages allowing for the opportunity to custom tailor your agent for any play style. Seeing the wealth of options afforded to a max level character is almost overwhelming, and the fact you’re not bound to a traditional class means you’re going to be constantly building sets of gear for every occasion.

Skills on the other hand are not so traditionally unlocked. Those of you that got your hands on the beta know that completing story missions allows you to unlock the Medical, Tech, and Security wings of your base of operations. And by collecting the associated resources, you can purchase upgrades that bestow new skills, and modifications for those skills. When you’ve completed your wing, you’ll earn a master modification for each skill that’s essentially a perk that works in addition to other modifications.

For example when you fully upgrade your Tech wing, your Proximity Bomb makes less noise and becomes harder for other agents to spot, and when you work that in conjunction with the Proximity modification – which causes it to explode when enemies enter its area-of-effect – you get an incredibly fun and deadly ambush tool.

As part of IGN First we’ll be unveiling a top-to-bottom look at the Tech skill tree and every unlockable modification, showing off some of the smart ordinance that annihilates roaming gangs of looters and coordinated factions alike with hellish techno-gravitas.

But my real starry-eyed moment with The Division came when I first stepped into the Dark Zone, the anything-goes playground where you can make friends, enemies, frenemies, or any combination therein.

Peeling back the plastic from the Dark Zone’s quarantined section of Manhattan reveals an oppressive, deadlier experience the deeper you wander into it. The zone itself is subdivided into six regions, and while other agents will always be in your level bracket, AI enemies become progressively harder the farther north you travel. Far past the small closed-beta slice that was DZ01 and DZ02, where AI enemies start in your level range, you reach the northernmost point of the zone, DZ06, where bright red skulls hover above the heads of enemies, warning you of your impending death.

The Dark Zone is the heart of Tom Clancy’s The Division, and for those that didn’t get a chance to try it for yourself in the beta, let me explain the macabre appeal:

Everyone in the Dark Zone enters as a neutral, passive agent. While you communicate with other players through emotes, and proximity voice chat, if you attack another agent, you get tagged as a Rogue agent. You’re free to kill Rogue agents without consequences (meaning you won’t go Rogue yourself), and to expedite that, Rogue agents appear on the map of every other player in proximity – so going Rogue is basically putting a GPS-tracking bounty on your head.

However, there are perks to going Rogue, because killing other agents rewards you with Dark Zone experience and currency – which you use to purchase great gear and weapons from Dark Zone vendors – alongside the chance to loot some of the gear those agents were carrying if you can get close enough to their corpse before they respawn.

But the Dark Zone is a contaminated hunk of central Manhattan, where players are free to work together, attack and kill one another, or ignore each other completely. The beautiful, terrible catch is that all this chaos takes place alongside the RPG-esque quest to get the best loot possible, which drops off packs of AI enemies and bosses in the Dark Zone.

Once you’ve collected a piece of equipment, or several, you can’t just walk out with your newfound loot. Everything in the Dark Zone is contaminated with a humanity-threatening plague that’s kicked off this whole viral-apocalypse against which The Division is set, so any loot you find in the DZ has to be airlifted out via helicopter at an Extraction Point and scrubbed clean before you can use it.

Trust me in saying that when you’ve got an enticing yellow loot bag strapped to your back, the 90-seconds between calling your extraction chopper, and its eventual arrival, are some of the longest of your game-playing life.

Every agent in the area sees that an extraction helicopter has been called in, so they’ve got a minute-and-a-half to get there. Then, when the chopper finally shows up, you’re out in the open like a sitting duck for around five seconds while you tie your loot-loaded yellow goodie bag to the chopper’s tow cable. And all that means one thing – you’re ringing the dinner bell for opportunistic agents that are looking to kill you, steal your loot, attach it to the tow cable themselves, and then sprint away before other neutral agents show up to deliver swift bullet-y justice.

The fact of the matter is there’s a pervasive tension and an oppressive sense of dread that comes with braving the Dark Zone alone. But there’s also an incredible excitement stepping into it as a solo player. The Division’s Dark Zone is huge, and it’s easy to get lost in when you’re trying to hide from roaming squads of Rogue agents, or make it in-and-out of Extraction Points that are ready to explode in blood and betrayal as soon as the first eager bullet exits the chamber from a twitchy rookie.

Having spent a dozen hours playing in the Dark Zone alone, I feel confident in saying it’s simultaneously part survival horror and part lone-gunslinger power fantasy. The longer I spent in that little slice of urban hell-jungle, the longer I started to learn how to eek out a living. I’d spend my time camped in scaffolding just outside an Extraction Point, my 12x-scoped sniper rifle swaying between the stationary heads of the ten-or-so players standing around waiting for the chopper to arrive. All scared of one another, anxiously wondering if a trigger is going to get pulled and shatter the peaceful quiet.

And when the inevitable shot is fired, and four of those players go Rogue [an entire group goes Rogue if one member does] I’d go to work from behind my perch sinking headshot after headshot into the predators.

I was the Dark Zone’s invisible sheriff of etiquette.

But that’s all to say that although I’m incredibly excited to reach out to my friends, and put together a squad that will tear through the Dark Zone like The Four Horsemen of the Viral Apocalypse, I found it entirely possible, and perhaps even more rewarding, to go it alone and survive the diseased concrete playground with only my wits, skill, and sprint button.

The grey morality of The Division’s Dark Zone is exhilarating in a way that you can’t find in Destiny’s PVP game modes, but it strikes both those competitive teamwork and lone-wolf chords that I find so appealing.

But of all the criticisms levied against Destiny, the one that hits home the hardest – and the one I think The Division stands the best chance of overcoming – is the story. Though I enjoyed the sci-fi romp through various planets, at the end of Destiny 1.0, I was left feeling sorely in need of some semblance of impact on the world I’d spent a dozen-plus hours fighting to save.

From the extended story missions I’ve seen in The Division, and the tangible changes small and large that take place as you progress through those arcs, that feeling of contributing to the reclamation of New York City feels like you’re winning a foothold in a city circling the drain.

Admittedly, I don’t know what substance The Division’s endgame is going to include. Ubisoft Massive is keeping the details of the final content, and the content-after-level-cap very close to its chest. But I do know that from what I’ve seen, there are layers of difficulty that should help to stretch your time in New York beyond the final act.

With replayable missions on Hard mode, and beyond Hard mode, I’m getting the very same feelings of diving in and throwing myself against the toughest challenges. I’m ear to find find all the secrets possible, and carve my name on the streets of a brokedown world, just I tried to do back when Destiny first came to shore with its genre-bending online shooter.

With everything we’ve seen and played from the later game, it’s enough to get me excited that The Division will certainly scratch that Destiny itch, and I’m thrilled to dive deeper.