The Division's Dark Zone is the last place you'd want to be in a real apocalypse: a disease-ridden, urban wasteland where merely seeing another human being inspires suspicion and trepidation. What are their intentions? Do they mean harm? Or might they become a new ally?  "In the Dark Zone, we want you to experience the tension, and the fear, and the paranoia of playing in a place where absolutely anything can happen at any time," Ryan Barnard, game director at Massive Entertainment, said Tuesday at the E3 Electronic Entertainment Expo, "a place where you can trust no one."  Problem is, there's one basic feature apparently missing from the game that undermines this entire proposition from the very start.  The Division is among the gaming industry's most anticipated titles. If you're unfamiliar with it, the latest entry in the Tom Clancy family of tactical shooters takes place in a post-apocalyptic New York City that's been devastated by sickness. There are no zombies, but as part of a small team of special operators, you're charged with completing missions in conjunction with (or sometimes against) other human players with an eye toward restoring stability to the city.  In the game, you'll be able to roam across a vast, open-world landscape. And in parts of this landscape — much of Manhattan, according to Barnard — you're likely to come across other human players who are just like you, trying to survive by any means necessary.  Here's the potentially game-breaking mistake: Although you can fight against or alongside these players, you cannot talk to them.  It's hard to overstate how problematic this is for a game that's trying to facilitate organic interactions between players in a pressure-cooker environment. You can voice chat with members of your own four-person team. But interacting with foreign players? That's apparently out, judging from the gameplay demo shown at E3 this week.  The reality is — contrary to Bernard's claim that "anything can happen" in The Division — players that happen upon other players will face a binary choice: Shoot, or don't shoot. Compared to other open-world games that do support in-game voice chat with human players outside of your own party, this binary constrains players' tactical choices significantly.  At about a minute into The Division's latest gameplay video, the four protagonists we're following are about to ambush some computer-controlled opponents when two human characters sneak up behind them. A pause follows as both sides eye each other warily. The players on "our" side talk amongst themselves about how to respond — but importantly, all they can do is speculate as to their counterparts' motives. Eventually, a consensus emerges: Just wait to see what happens.  That decision all but kills the momentum of the interaction, all the suspense of first contact. Eventually the other players open fire on the AI opponents, leading to some momentary friendship as all six human players successfully defeat the computer. But being unable to communicate makes it harder to work as allies — instead of a coordinated attack, the result is a messy firefight in which the human players simply all happen to be shooting in the same direction.  In survivalist games such as DayZ, by contrast, players have richer, more meaningful experiences. Yes, there is an initial moment of tension upon first contact. But players who are thrown together also use voice chat to signal they're friendly, conduct negotiations, take people hostage, order people around, make trades and coordinate tactics. They "interview" prisoners and trick each other into false complacency. The conversations turn otherwise formulaic encounters — make contact, assess the target, shoot or withdraw — into funny, tragic, terrifying and ultimately human experiences.  Even after first contact, the tension never quite goes away, as you're never sure if a player's friendly words masks more sinister intentions. Here's an example.  I know that if I'd been playing that E3 demo, the first things out of my mouth would've been to order the other human players to drop their weapons or to shout "friendly!" — not to sit there and wait for them to decide what to do.  Would-be fans of The Division are already taking to forums online and lamenting the apparent exclusion of voice chat.  "There's a lot of value in talking to other players outside. It enhances that emergent gameplay of "FRIENDLY HERE!" then pulling a Brian and shooting someone in the back. Make friends (or enemies) easier and faster."  Others argue that enabling voice chat simply opens players up to unwanted verbal abuse. But there are ways to address that — and all else being equal, chat ability adds to rather than detracts from the tense post-apocalyptic experience.  "Players are thrown into a world and asked to create their own meaning," the Verge wrote of DayZ last year. "Many DayZ players rush to forums to share tales of conquest, defeat, and utter weirdness. Strange and terrifying experiences are recorded and shared all over YouTube."  Those are made possible in large part by the robust chat function in the game. The Division's developers hope it can replicate those experiences even when players are muzzled. But really, it's when you let people off the leash that they create the spontaneous interactions that make a massively multiplayer game memorable.  Brian Fung covers technology for The Washington Post, focusing on telecom, broadband and digital politics. Before joining the Post, he was the technology correspondent for National Journal and an associate editor at the Atlantic.
A lack of universal voice chat could hinder the kinds of interactions the game's developers want to facilitate.