The Division book is a real-life survival guide with a story in the margins
Lots of games have strategy guides, but far fewer can say they have honest-to-goodness real-life survival guides. Tom Clancy's The Division: New York Collapse is filled with actual survival tips for an urban disaster, but in the margins you'll find the story of one woman trying to get by in post-outbreak Manhattan.
Handwritten notes (well, handwritten and then printed onto the page) are scrawled around instructions for constructing shelter and finding food, recounting the survivor's day-to-life. The book also has seven "removable artifacts," including a city map and a transit card, all of which will help you piece together her story. You may even learn about the mysterious origins of the Black Friday pandemic, the aftermath of which you'll explore as an agent of The Division.
Putting out a paperback to expand on a game's backstory is hardly a new idea, but delivering that lore in the margins of a (theoretically) useful survival guide, complete with good old fashioned immersion-building "feelies," is pretty novel. The Division: New York Collapse will release alongside the game on March 8, 2016.
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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.
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