I've gone down to near-exclusively playing PvE Survival.

I bought the Season Pack plus the main game as part of the Steam sale and power-leveled with some friends. They mostly do dailies now and I've just gone into doing, like, 80% survival. It's just a crapload of fun, despite how salty I get every time.

I've only won once, because I happened to run into a chopper my very first run and helped them take down the Hunter.

Since then, it's been just a fun challenge of ingenuity. I've done PvP a few times with my boyfriend (and we've since learned that pairs are bad), but not as much as PvE, because I want to get a hang of the mechanics and tricks and nuances of PvE before I fuck myself over.

And I really, really fuckin love that Hunter class NPC. Not sure why, but it's ridiculously hilarious that he walks over, knocks you out, and camps your body. Medkit that shit.

I want to say "this would work as a standalone," and I get that it's a sentiment with some people, but honestly part of what makes the Survival good at all is that it's an expansion or remix - you're familiar with the NPCs and lore and mechanics and even the gameplay style. And I like all that, because I'm coming in from some light MMO experience (mostly The Secret World) and The Division has the things I like about shooters and MMOs, the "tactical" stuff (even though I know it's relatively... not) and the open-world-but-not-really feel of MMOs. But Survival just takes a lot of that to a whole new level.

Plus, I think the rest of the game just feels gratuitous at times, even in Challenging, especially when you're with capable people. (Except Incursion, my squad is too unorganized for it. ^Help. ) You just spend a lot of time feeling OP against the majority of NPCs. And yeah, I'm shit at DZ PvP, and my friends almost exclusively run dailies there and so I don't have a real PvP squad or build at the moment (though I just saw the Banshee one someone shared recently and I might try it out for kicks). So it's nice to have a game mode that escapes a lot of that and tries to kick your ass and make you think.

So thanks, I guess, Massive, for an actually interesting gamemode that isn't just overwhelmingly hard for the sake of it.

I wish Massive would make more environment-based objectives. One of the YouTube videos speculating about Last Stand guessed there could be a "rolling contamination" mode and I thought that that would be a really freaking great idea to implement. Massiv pls.