An early look at The Division 2's private beta, as shown at a recent Paris event. Developer Massive puts its Snowdrop engine to use on a major sequel, with improvements to AI, grass rendering and much more. Tom covers the bases on what to expect once this beta rolls out later this week on Xbox One X and PC.
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Key Points:
- Private beta footage from XBX and PC
- Snowdrop Engine returns
- Snow dynamic, volumetric lights, global destruction are key highlights
- On XBX pop-in is minimal on long stretches
- Vegetation is upgraded over the first game
- Water reflections use lower res cube maps rather than SSR
- Different weather states present
- Every faction has a different AI logic
- PC: Terrain quality is higher than XBX
- Parallax Occlusion Mapping included on both
- Draw distance and effects very close and match console on high
- Bokeh DoF is more aggressive on X
- PC has higher grade AA
- XBX renders natively at 4K before downsampling for the 1080p footage
- XBX shows stair stepping on some edges because of lower grade AA compared to PC
- A little confusing here, Tom says that super sampling makes pixel counting trickier after the earlier point about native 4K
- They didn't comment much on X performance because it's obviously WIP, some frame drops and bugs were encountered
- PC beta had various settings available to test.
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