Ubisoft decided to back a successful game.
The Division 2, or Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 to give it its full name, has been out in the world for more than four years and the online-only action RPG has exceeded its publisher’s expectations.
According to The Division 2 creative director Yannick Banchereau, support for the game was supposed to have ended in 2020. That was the original plan, anyway, Banchereau revealed to MP1st. But the game became more successful than Ubisoft expected following the launch of major expansion Warlords of New York and its developer, Massive Entertainment, was then given the go ahead to continue working on the title.
“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”, Banchereau told MP1st. “Because [..] 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”.
Banchereau is referring to the project on which Ubisoft is collaborating with Disney and Lucasfilm Games for a new story-driven game set in the Star Wars galaxy, and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which is a first-person action-adventure based on the universe created for James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar movies.
However, The Division 2 remained successful and enjoyed further success once Warlords of New York released and the resulting seasons that arose from it. While Massive were still stretched owing to its responsibilities with those other projects, Ubisoft turned to its Bucharest studio to help and the creative director elaborated that Ubisoft Bucharest had to take time to learn the engine and the game, but that it paid off eventually.
In other news, Ubisoft has also made clear it is unlikely to launch native PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of The Division 2 since taking full advantage of the consoles would mean having to leave players behind on previous-gen systems the PS4 and Xbox One. “Right now we are trying to make sure every time we add something, it still runs smoothly on the old gen as well”, Banchereau told MP1st. Those playing on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S are running The Division 2 via backward compatibility with the only upgrade being the 60fps option besides the obvious improvements to loading enabled by SSDs. But since the game has so many players of all generations, the creative director said, the publisher doesn’t want to risk losing those to the older gen.
Last week, Ubisoft revealed the roadmap for The Division 2 Year 5, which will include a new game mode called Descent, Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher and Resident Evil outfits, among others. In addition, there is the free-to-play spin-off The Division Heartland being readied.
