Today is a sad day for me. As I write this I’m slowly coming to the realisation that a game I have defended and come to rely on as my go-to feel good game is, in fact, now trash. There, I said it. The Division 2 is now officially a broken mess, inside and out.
For clarification on why and how I’ve finally let the rose tinted glasses slip from my face, first I’ll have to take you back to late 2021. Massive Entertainment (Ubisoft owned studio) delayed the next major update to The Division 2. This update promised new game modes, new story missions and content and a plethora of bug fixes. This update was delayed until ‘February 2022’. See the inverted commas there? You can probably already guess where this is going, don’t worry, we’ll get to that. So, instead of releasing said update, Massive make the decision to rerun an old season, they marketed this as a ‘chance for players to get the pieces they missed, first time around’.
This angered the community, expectedly. There was an uproar on social media stating that the older seasonal content items were redundant now and don’t fit in with the how the game plays now. This was true, I found myself going over the content, unlocking or obtaining items that were fundamentally, useless. And it was recycled content, so boring to boot. This stopped me playing, for the time being, whilst I waited for the patch, my character was in a good place, my build was crafted how I liked, I could wait a couple of months, no biggie.
February 2022, update release day! No. No update in sight, no studio update. No communication for TWO days! Then eventually Massive release statements on Twitter etc, stating that the update has been delayed, indefinitely! And so the decision was made to rerun all past seasons until the update was ready. That was the last straw for me, or so I thought.
Fast forward to May 2022. An update, a new season! New game mode! New cosmetics! At last, we’re saved!! I jumped back in, a new sense of renewed excitement. The seasonal content was brilliant, the story compelling. I looked forward to the new cosmetics event releasing at the end of May, all was looking good. Then, the inevitable. The cosmetic event was delayed until the end of the next month. Then mere days after this disappointment, Conflict mode is taken offline in game. A mode some players exclusively play. The shit show continues to roll. The next month, the cosmetic event is delayed AGAIN by two weeks. At this point the game is like a runaway train hurtling towards a brick wall, with players desperately clinging on to the outside of it, as other players are strewn spiraling away from the uncontrollable flaming dog poop in paper bag, that developers are frantically trying to stamp on. I was one of those gaming, refusing to give up, clinging on, soldering on with the new content they’d given us the previous month.
Then, huzzah! The cosmetic event dropped. And it was, meh. You’ll probably not believe this, well actually you probably will, the star of the show, the main unlock, was bugged, broken and removed from the game. Slow clap Ubisoft/Massive, take a bow, this is now becoming comical. And yet, for some unknown, sadomasochistic reason, I persevered with game, clinging to a hope that one day, one day soon it will all be OK.
As the months rolled on, more delays, server issues and bugs began to happen. And now, today, we find ourselves in 2023. The game is in the same state, it received two further cosmetic events (both delayed) and has developed a bug, that has yet to be fixed, despite receiving updates and ‘bug fixes’ over the last four or five months. The ‘new’ seasonal 10 content has continued to flow, albeit, without me. You see in November of 2022, a documented bug began plaguing me. Every time I loaded into the new end game mode, the game would crash. So okay, “don’t that mode I hear you say”, easier said than done, when that mode is the only way to farm for weapons and gear that I need. The bug has been reported over and over again. And yet, still no fix. So for me, the game is unplayable. Then Ubisoft tweeted a major patch and and new season coming in the end of January. I got my hopes up, the fool that I am. Then I see this –
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise if I’m totally honest with myself. They’ve repeated every other season so far why shouldn’t this one be different? At least we’ll get Season 11. Right? Ubisoft/Massive then tweeted this on the 3rd of February.
Fuck off Ubisoft. I’m done.
Written by Lance.