You start off with a base camp which is more depleted in resources, and as you complete missions, you get resource points in either Medical, Security or Tech which you spend at your base camp to make upgrades, which in turn gives you access to more skills, talents, and built in perks. Missions in each area of the map consists of side missions or encounters, in which you have to find a certain hidden item (sometimes in a set time period), shoot down an elite mob, grab and defend supplies, or rescue some hostages. In most of these areas you will also find 2 sub-areas which are much like RPG instances, in which it is one longer mission with better drops, and most importantly you can team up with others to complete. Once these instances have been completed, you can replay them are harder levels for better drops but you will encounter much hard AI mobs.
The Security Wing upgrades, with the bonuses offered
Being Ubisoft, there are a gazillions items to collect within the game, from phone records to survival guides. These only give a few hundred XP each so relying on collecting them to level up will probably take you a year or so, thats if there’s enough of them.
Throughout your gaming, you can venture into the Dark Zone, this is where you will find the better loot, or level up your Dark Zone level so that you purchase from Dark Zone vendors either the blueprints of better gears (recommended) or the gear itself. This is also where the best fun is to be had, as this is a PvP zone so you can team up with others and kill other players. Dying in the Dark Zone deducts your Dark Zone level, but why kill another player? Loot. When you kill an AI mob, it sometimes drops an item. Unlike in the regular areas of the map where you can instantly equip and use a dropped item, in the Dark Zone the item needs to be extracted by a helicopter before it ends up in your stash back at checkpoints from which you can equip and use it. Extractions are at set points in the map and takes around 2 minutes for the chopper to arrive, at which point more elite AI mobs appear, and other players either helping out so they can extract their items as well, or pick off other players as once dead you drop everything you’ve just collected in the Dark Zone. This gives rise to an issue of do you trust the friend you fought in the Dark Zone with, as will he/she betray you. You friend might have just spent 2 hours helping you fighting off elite mobs, yet he might quit your group in the last second and shoot you in the back so he can grab all the goodies you picked up.
The game map, with the Dark Zone smack bang in the middle. You can see missions available and fast travel points
