UPDATE

One year on, Ubisoft’s Clancy MMO still hasn’t found its own identity.

It’s nearly been a year since I first reviewed The Division, and while I had fun, its attempt to tap into Diablo’s and Destiny’s endlessly replayable loot loop was misdirected and tiring. New gear was slow to get hold of, characters looked the same between min and max levels, and the open world was an empty, mob-killing chore hell. Things started looking up with patch 1.4. The introduction of World Tiers made the entire game replayable on harder difficulties, extending the quest for better gear while making loot drop like candy at the tippedover candy store. But it was still the same grind, just longer and kinder.

With the Last Stand expansion and patch 1.6, Ubisoft is making a big push to diversify The Division with enough hooks to keep everyone around. As the final mode coming to The Division as part of the season pass, Last Stand has the impossible task of pleasing everyone. It won’t. For some, player-vs-player is alienating from the start, and in a game in dire need of new zones, enemy types, and mission design, I feel it too. As a response to the Dark Zone’s impromptu free-for-all encounters, Last Stand’s team-based instanced PvP could be a direct way for players to theorycraft creative builds and test team compositions— if, that is, it gets enough time to bake in the Public Test Server.

Last Stand pits teams of eight against one another on a repurposed chunk of the Dark Zone, where the goal is to capture and hold as many terminals as possible. The team that holds more terminals builds up their score quicker, and wins the game. But a few variables add small bouts of PvE play and the potential for deploying defensive aids. Enemy mobs still roam, and players can take them out to earn a currency used during the match to build defenses, such as turrets to protect a spawn point or scanners that detect enemy movement in a designated area. And gear is normalized, meaning item levels even out to make things as fair as possible.

pts disorder

Right off the bat, Last Stand was incredibly unbalanced on the PTS. Transposing gear and buffs designed for improvisational Dark Zone PvP encounters and groups of dopey, bullet-absorbent PvE mobs doesn’t work in a focused competitive PvP setting. With the right loadouts, players can soak up enough damage to force encounters into the open, and even endlessly spawn-camp the opposing team without issue thanks to high-level healing ability cooldown timers. Ubisoft is aware though, testing resilience and ability cooldown nerfs with new patches every week up until (and beyond) release time.

But even if Ubisoft cracks the code and nails a perfect balance that makes developing a competitive PvP mode inside a larger PvE casing easy-peasy, players are still unhappy that there hasn’t been a stronger focus on building out more zones and adding more missions.

In Year One of The Division, its identity hasn’t solidified much. The Underground DLC sprinkled new missions and loot throughout an unremarkable setting, but the Survival DLC delivered an entirely new game mode. It’s been well received, but given that this is another appendage to nurture, Ubisoft might be spreading itself too thin—extra thin with Last Stand, supplying as it does another separate mode to bottle feed. Putting out mode after mode doesn’t seem sustainable or a great way to build a strong player base, but it sure is fascinating. As baffling as the update cycle has been, I hope to see another year or three out of The Division. Throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks takes time in game development, but surely something will dry up and stay.

Throwing spaghett i at the wall to see what sticks takes time in game development