As anyone who’s both played The Division and been to New York can instantly recognise, the developers did a pretty good job nailing the look and feel of the city’s streets. Which is cool for tourists and residents, but what about cartographers?
For those concerned with the accuracy of the game’s map (and mission placement upon it), Feanauro (via PC Gamer) has done his best to recreate things from a top-down perspective, building a custom Google Map that lays stuff like story missions and safehouse locations over the actual Manhattan.
Is it perfect? Of course not. The Division is a video game, not a recreation project, so while it looks like the real deal, there are of course differences, as he explains:
The game makes some simplifications from rl NYC (for instance, some streets do not exist in game) which create some inconsistencies or visual anomalies (like, the aspect ratio of some DZ landmarks seem unnatural). For this reason, I didn’t attempt to reproduce the DZ border in game faithfully with all its nooks and crannies, just closely enough to correspond to the major streets.
But whatever. The similarities are still interesting to look at! And if nothing else, the map is a good reminder that there’s still a lot of New York left unexplored…
Comments
4 responses to “The Division’s NYC Vs Google Maps’ NYC”
I very much hope they start expanding on the city ASAP. The Dark Zone is too small and too crowded.
Indeed.
I’d absolutely love to see them somehow get some stuff happening further north in Central Park. It’d be a nice way to break up all the urban street fighting.
i noticed the other night that one of the ‘Incursions’ is going to be off the edge of the map, south of the area in the bottom right. There’s a huge chain link fence gate there and a yellow area, you just can’t get in at the moment. Who know how big it’ll be though.
http://blog.ubi.com/free-incursions-dlc-for-the-division-coming-date/
Sounds like the first two (free) updates will add an incursion each, which are basically self-contained dungeons… Paid DLC will actually expand the map beyond the current borders.