Ubisoft Announces 'The Division 2,' Shaped By The Fixes To The First Game

The Division

When your game is the fastest-selling new IP in history, it stands to reason that yeah, you’re going to make a sequel. While The Division 2 has been a forgone conclusion almost since the launch of the original, Ubisoft has decided that today was the day to make it official.

Ubisoft has revealed that Massive has been working on The Division 2 for a bit now, and will be utilizing the feedback from two years of near-constant changes to the original to help craft the sequel. The Division 2 will be using an updated version of the Snowdrop engine, and has a bunch of other developers chipping in to help Massive with a project of this scale including Ubisoft Annecy, Redstorm, Reflections, Ubisoft Bucharest and Ubisoft Shanghai.

There’s no timeline given for when The Division 2 will be released, but 2019 seems like a pretty safe bet as a general target, which would be 3-ish years after the original, the same timetable that brought us Destiny 2. Massive also announced plans for two more global events for the current Division, along with a 4K update for Xbox One X.

How does The Division 2 avoid the mistakes of Destiny 2? Quite simply, don’t fix what isn’t broken, and be sure to utilize all the fixes you’ve already made along the way. Fans have been immensely frustrated with Destiny 2 due to Bungie’s insistence on changing how the game plays, how your gear up, how loot works, when D1 didn’t seem like it required those kinds of alterations. But it also seemed to lack the lessons learned over the course of fixing the original game for three years as well.

The Division

It’s good that Ubisoft is saying up front that this won’t happen for The Division 2. Possibly more so than even Destiny, The Division has totally transformed itself from a title with a non-existent endgame to possibly the best one in the looter landscape. The Division has expanded dramatically in the last two years, adding multiple ways to get loot, creating a “something for everyone” title that was hard to permanently put down. Even today, you’ll probably find more happy Division players than Destiny players, given the states of both series.

The one thing The Division never did well, however, despite all these gameplay fixes and additions, was to expand its story. The Division actually did have a genuinely interesting central storyline, but for all that was added to the game, it barely ever moved the narrative forward. Hopefully a sequel will do just that, though the form that takes is unclear. I’m not even sure this game will continue to be set in New York City, as we might move on to a different plague-infected location for a sequel. I’d be pretty surprised if we simply moved into upper Manhattan rather than an entirely new locale.

Whatever form The Division 2 takes, I’m excited for it. This was a pretty good game that became a great one in time, and if Massive really can learn from the original’s mistakes and develop a sequel that’s a genuine improvement and expansion, that’s going to be huge for Ubisoft, and its players. I can’t wait.

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The Division