It was a no-brainer given the first game’s success, but Ubisoft is making it official today with the announcement that it is making The Division 2, a sequel to 2016’s hit cover-based shooter.
A logo for the sequel appeared on Ubisoft’s servers this morning.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” the game’s creative director, Julian Gerighty, said in a livestream today, regarding the decision to make a sequel. “There are so may stories and so many experiences we want to explore within the Division that we really thought a sequel was the best way to investigate these things.”
The comment appeared to acknowledge some fan requests for Ubisoft to refrain from making a sequel and just continue to expand the 2016 game.
Gerighty said that a team at Ubisoft started working on main concepts for the new game within a month after the first Division launched. He said the game will be shown at this year’s E3 show in June.
Development studios working on the game are largely the same as worked on the original game, with development led by Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft Annecy, Redstorm, Reflections, Ubisoft Bucharest and Ubisoft Shanghai.
Gerighty said that Ubisoft Sofia will also work on the game. That’s the studio behind the magnificent Assassin’s Creed Rogue and most recently helped develop Assassin’s Creed Origins.
The original Division will get two new patches, 1.8.1 and 1.8.2 that Gerighty joked should be called Strawberry and Parsnip.
“Strawberry” will include two existing missions, Amherst and Grand Central, reworked for Legendary difficulty. “Parsnip” will do the same for two other existing missions.
The “Strawberry” update will be out in April alongside the long-awaited Xbox One X patch.
The June-slated “Parsnip” 1.8.2 update will also add a feature called shields that will be challenges that will unlock content in The Division 2.
The Division launched to great fanfare in March 2016 on the heels of a high-interest beta. The game lets players run and shoot their way through a detailed presentation of post-disaster New York City. It’s a mix of open-world and linear adventures and can largely be played solo or co-op. Among its innovations is a “Dark Zone” that allowed players to hunt each other.
The game was beset by cheaters and frustrating imbalance issues that led to a backlash so severe that Ubisoft suspended post-release plans to set the game’s studios to work on a game-rescuing patch.
More than a year’s worth of updates rectified nearly all of the game’s issues, culminating in an impressive, expansive 1.8 patch that added new modes, new maps and was met with widespread acclaim.
Recent updates to the game felt like prototyping for a sequel. A late 2017 addition called Global Events, for example, would change the basic rules of the game for about a week, making it so that players might do more damage when stationary or instill poison damage on enemies if they score headshots.
The 1.8 patch adding new zones in the game that constantly generated new missions for solo players, making The Division more enjoyable for players who felt left out by the developers’ post-release attention to the game’s competitive and co-op modes.
While it’s unclear when The Division will come out, the developers’ vow today to not just attend E3 but all major game shows after that makes it likely for release within the next year or so.
Comments
19 responses to “Ubisoft Is Making The Division 2 (And Updating The First Division)”
I want to want Div2, but I felt really burned by the game we got vs the ‘gameplay’ trailer they showed early on.
Have you played it recently? Its a much better game!
It’s become seriously awesome in the last patch or two. I’m enjoying it more than ever, after initial disappointment and a long hiatus.
What exactly has made it a better game?
I guess I could just Google it?
No idea. I played it a few months ago, and it didn’t feel different.
Then again, I *hate* pvp, so that eliminates like 80% of the end game content. Did they ever fix the stupid bullet sponge end game group missions?
They got a new Horde mode and a few new areas as well!
From a personal point of view, I believe the current state of Tom Clancy’s The Division contains about 80% of PvE content and the remaining 20% being PvP related activities. The new Skirmish mode, Last Stand and the Dark Zone are the only three PvP styled activities in the game.
I hope that they think about all the content they have in Div 1, and don’t do a Destiny and chuck out all that content for the sequel if gameplay systems and locality can still be used.
I fully expect them to leave NYC and go to like LA, London or some other ‘iconic’ city.
or, ideally, more than one city 🙂
Like what was originally promised?
Tokyo or Melbourne please
Tokyo would be sick!
Definitely. Its got the dense skyscrapers, parks, and tons of underground subway tunnels exactly like new york in the division 1. So it could work very similarly but still feel different enough.
I can see them moving to Chicago. It’s a similar city with a waterline, dense city, skyscrapers, wind and snow etc.
Agreed. What is the point of building a persiatent MMO games as a sevice model… when you dont persist there.
Destiny 2 may be the slow death of Bungie cause all they did was undo everything they succeeded in patching Destiny 1 to trade it in for a game that had new problems and less content and then told players all their past progress and achievements were for nothing transferrable.
seriously may just wait for Defiance to go free2play.
And a surprising move, considering Ubi have said they’re going proper games as a service on R6 Siege (10 years, 100 operators). Maybe there was something holding them back technically, or they needed a clean slate to do it for Div.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The engine needs serious work to implement a lot of features they’ve wanted to do.
Things like the hunters in underground aren’t technically possible to do in non-instance areas because the netcode wont support it. And speaking of the netcode, its pure garbage in it’s current state and has been since beta.
I’m optimistic they will bring a large portion of d1 content to d2 and not screw the pooch the way Bungie have with Destiny.
I really enjoyed the single player game in the first Division, despite the weird feeling of emptying multiple magazines of 7.62 rounds in to gang bangers wearing hoodies and still have them standing.
Wildlands felt a little better in that aspect.
I will prob keep a good eye on this and hope they buckle down and improve on what was an alright start.
not going to lie, I went back and it was actually okay
let’s just hope they actually apply what they’ve learnt in #1 to #2 unlike a certain game that currently exists out there
I’m actually quite surprised to hear such an announcement considering what is currently occurring in Rainbow Six Siege.