It’s been over four years since The Division 2 launched, but Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s open world looter shooter, and it’s fair to say that the open world looter shooter’s enduring support has gone on longer than most had anticipated. In fact, it’s support has last longer than even developer Massive Entertainment expected.
Speaking in a recent interview with MP1st, The Division 2’s creative director Yannick Banchereau revealed that the original plan within Massive Entertainment was to end support for the game following Title Update 12 in late 2020, and then move the team over to the studio’s other projects, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and an open world Star Wars title.
“It’s crazy when you think about it, huh? That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “It’s been quite a real rollercoaster because, yes, the plan was – after Update 12, at the end of 2020 – the plan was to stop supporting the game. We started working on the Star Wars game, we have the Avatar game. Everybody’s very busy at Massive and the idea was that we just need the people on those projects.”
Interestingly, however, following the launch of The Division 2’s expansion, Warlords of New York, the game continued to attract players in greater numbers than Ubisoft had anticipated, prompting discussions of continued support within Massive Entertainment.
“It wasn’t because The Division 2 was bad, just [that] we need the people on the other projects,” Banchereau said. “What happened is the game remained successful, and probably more successful than we had anticipated after the release of Warlords of New York, and the different seasons. So that allowed us to kind of resume the conversation internally of, ‘maybe we should keep going.’”
Of course, with the bulk of the studio busy with the development of the two aforementioned games, finding the people to continue working on The Division 2 probed to be a challenge- which is where Ubisoft Bucharest came in.
“Really, everybody wanted to, but the main challenge was that we need people,” he said. “The people we had on the project have moved on to our [other] projects and we can’t just recall them and say, come back to The Division. That was the main challenge for us, finding a team, and we did that in Ubisoft Bucharest.”
The Division 2 will be kicking off its fifth year of post-launch content in early June, which will include a free new roguelite mode called The Descent, a multi-season rebuild of the Castle, a new Incursion, new story content and outfits, and more.
The Division 2 is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. According to Banchereau, a native release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S is unlikely.
