For many gamers, “Tom Clancy’s The Division” was easily the most disappointing launch of this year, and the game flopped dramatically after getting gamers hyped with a lot of active marketing. In the end, it turned out that many of the promised features didn’t work as well as they were advertised, and the game also suffered from performance issues on some systems that made players give up relatively fast.
On the other hand, the gameplay itself reportedly got stale quickly, and the game’s core balance had multiple issues that were never properly addressed. The main one, enemies taking huge amounts of damage before going down, was actually what drove people away the most, and it’s still constantly brought up as one of the biggest problems of the title.
Now, Ubisoft are preparing to release the new “Survival” DLC for the game, and many players are wondering if there’s any point in getting back into it now. The player base has shrunk significantly since the original launch, and the publisher did relatively little to try retaining their players.
As a result, the main responses to the announcement of the new DLC so far have been skeptical, rather than the excited voices of players who’ve just been given a new reason to revisit a game they enjoyed. It’s pretty clear that the community is still disappointed over how the game was handled, and this sentiment will likely never die down.
The new DLC sounds like it has the potential to refresh the game quite well, and the current previews paint it in a very interesting light. It will offer a change from the original pace, grouping 24 players together on a common quest where everyone starts out in a weakened state.
As the mission progresses, players will have to pool their resources to try getting to the center of the map, but they will have a time limit for completing the operation too. It’s expected that the DLC will at least bring some players together and help the game to retain its current community, as forcing that many people to cooperate can always lead to interesting results.
Let’s just hope that the gameplay is handled in a more sensible way than before though, as there were some issues with the design of the original game which, while hilarious from an outside perspective, were highly aggravating for players themselves.
For example, starting the main game required players to use a computer which was shared by everyone else in their server instance, leading to situations where dozens of people were swarming the same computer trying to start their campaign.
Considering that the new DLC is going to feature so many players having to work together to complete their goal, this could either turn out to be a very fun experience, or a complete disaster. And, understandably, many fans of the game are skeptical towards the whole thing and expect that players are once again going to ruin it all.
“The Division” is still holding up more or less fine, but the game is far from people expected from it after half a year has passed. Ubisoft’s initial mishandling of the launch could have been “fixed” if the studio had been quick enough to respond to their fans’ complaints, but they delayed their patches far too long and by the time they showed any actual interest in working on the game, the damage was already done.