The Division 2 Interview – Ubisoft Massive Talks About Year 5 Support

the division 2 year 5 interview

In case you didn’t know, Ubisoft revealed recently that The Division 2 would be getting a full year of support this 2023 with Year 5. Before its initial announcement, MP1st had the opportunity to talk to Creative Director Yannick Banchereau about The Division 2 Year 5, where we also asked about crossplay, why it took this long to see a proper Splinter Cell crossover event and more.

MP1st: Will we ever see a native PS5, Xbox Series X|S version of The Division 2?

Banchereau: That’s unlikely because if we really wanted to take full advantage of those, since we only have one version of the game that is available on all platforms, taking full advantage of those would mean that the game would no longer be available on the old generations.

We still have a lot of players that play on all generations and we are not ready to leave them behind and ask them to upgrade. Right now we are trying to make sure every time we add something, it still runs smoothly on the old gen as well.

\The Divison 2

MP1st: Interestingly enough, a lot of people (ourselves included), thought that The Division 2 wouldn’t be getting any more major content drops esp. after the studio planned for Title Update 12 to be the last major update, and then started re-releasing season reruns in 2021. Then the State of Game devstreams ending as well, and add in how Massive is now doing a big Star Wars game, can you explain what happened and how we’re pivoting now to a full Year 5 support?

Banchereau: It’s crazy when you think about it, huh? That’s the beauty of it. It’s been quite a real rollercoaster because Yes, the plan was after update 12, at the end of 2020, the plan was to, to stop supporting the game. Because as the question mentions, 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.

It wasn’t because The Division 2 was bad just we need the people on the other projects. You know 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.

Really, everybody wanted to, but the main challenge was that we need people. The people we had on the project have moved on to our projects and we can’t just recall them and say, come back to the division. That was the main challenge for us,  was finding a team and we did that in Ubisoft Bucharest.

Since then it’s been a great collaboration between Massive Ubisoft Bucharest. What we’re seeing in year five now, it is the real result of it. The time we took to Ubisoft Bucharest for them to learn the engine, learn the game, us learning to work together in a way where we are flexing our muscles of running a live game.

We learned a lot with Year 4, which was our first real year of content after we started, we resumed production. And I think year five is where you’re going to see the real results of, now we have a full team, but is experienced but knows how to build things in The Division 2.

This is the full year, real full year of content that we’re going to be doing on The Division 2. It’s really exciting to see where we are today, compared to what could have been.

The Division 2 Update 1.46

MP1st: Will we see the State of Game devstreams return as part of Year 5?

Banchereau: If you know the division and I’ve been part of those streams for a very long time, I would love to. But there’s a lot of questions with State of game in terms of how do we keep it relevant on a weekly basis. We struggled with that in the past.

Just the shared time it takes to prepare. So it takes a full team dedicated to make it happen. I would love to, but it’s ultimately not my decision. That’s going to be depending on the people that are running community and communication.

If they want to do that and if we really see a demand for it, maybe then we should look at it. But so far it’s not planned.

MP1st: We can’t not ask this: but will we ever see crossplay make its way into The Division 2?

Banchereau: That would be very hard. Unfortunately the truth of it is that it’s not the way our online infrastructure was built. It was built before cross play became a reality in the industry and allowing it would mean rewriting and redoing everything and retroactively touching players accounts and how they’re connecting to the game. There’s a lot of risk and a lot of heavy work there and it’s very unlikely that this would ever happen.

MP1st: How will Year 5 of The Division 2 tie into Heartland? Or will the two just be separate titles that you don’t see players bleeding into each other? (Outside of the items you can earn for playing the different Division games).

Banchereau: Our ambition is and that is why we are talking about The Division as a franchise, we want people to play whichever game they want. We want people to find whatever experience they want and if they want to play several games like Heartland and The Division 2. That’s great, we are going to make sure that they are rewarded for it and for us, what matters is that regardless of which Division game you play, you are a Division player to us.

You are going to be rewarded and you’re going to get incentives to connect into one game or the other. We are very connected to the Heartland team because we know Red Storm and we’ve worked together for a very long time. We have a lot of ideas and hope some things we could do together.

We will be working hand in hand for sure.

The Division 2 Update 1.47

MP1st: Descent is mentioned as a rogue-lite mode, which is something I don’t think we see often for shooters. What was the thought process behind offering it as the big Year 5 Season 1 content drop?

Banchereau: What we wanted with Descent was to give another chance for players to experience a power progression fantasy, which is something that for a lot of our players, they haven’t experienced in a very long time because you get that in The Division and that’s one of the great fondest memories that a lot of people have playing The Division is the progression part level 1 to level 40 and getting the gear and all of those things. But for a lot of our players that year in the past and have been max level and maxed out on gear since then.

They haven’t experienced that power progression fantasy, so that was the idea of The Descent initially was to put a game mode out there that basically takes away their gear and they’re going to have to work towards becoming powerful again within the game mode.

Of course, they get everything back when they leave the game mode. When we started writing down the design, it became clear about the rogue-like general. The biggest inspiration would come, from there how do we create mechanics that are interesting because we didn’t want it to be just you start with no gear and then you’re going to start dropping items and your gray quality, green quality and blue quality and basically duplicate what you have in the game that wouldn’t be interesting. We thought what makes it more interesting is what if we allow players to create combinations, gear mechanics in a different way compared to what the rest of the game offers. So it’s not just about becoming powerful and regrind the same things, it’s allowing players to experiment and play with the mechanics of the game in a way the rest of the game cannot allow them to do.

MP1st: We know it might be a little too early to talk about it, but can you give a tease on how The Division 2’s endgame will change in Season 4?

Banchereau: We are looking at when you play The Division 2 and when you play a lot of very content, heavy life games that there’s always that moment when you’re a player you start, you learn the game, you learn the tropes, you play the story and then end the game begins and that’s usually very daunting and that suddenly the whole thing opens and you get lost. The main ambition behind that change, revamp, is to create an end game that is going to be more welcoming to new players. So doing a better job at introducing new mechanics and introducing new modes and experiences. Really trying to give purpose to each one of them, so it’s not just I want gear so I can either play Countdown or play main missions, or I can play Manhunt and everything gives the same rewards. It’s trying to find ways so that there’s a reason why you would play this versus that depending on what you’re after.

In terms of cadence and how we are connecting all seasons, you can expect a big overhaul of seasons with season four and how seasons are built and how seasons are rewarding players. It’s really about the general structure of it. Why do we come back to the game? What do you do when you come back? What kind of rewards are you after? And really trying to have something that takes all of those pieces and reconnects them in a way that makes a bit more sense compared to what we have now.

MP1st: Why did it take this long to make a proper Splinter Cell crossover with the game? Aside from Easter eggs, fans have been asking for it for quite some time if we’re not mistaken.

Banchereau: I don’t know why it took so long but the opportunity we saw here is that Descent is an NSA space and you’re going into an NSA research center. We started thinking about any NSA and immediately of course our thoughts are going with Splinter Cell. That was kind of a fun thing for us to do, to try and to hit at it and to play with references. That’s why you have the color green and these kinds of things in The Descent. From there we thought, okay well a Splinter Cell can also be a fun thing and we wanted to add a Splinter Cell outfit which we know a lot of people have been wanting for a very long time.

I don’t know why it took so long but it’s more like when we did, it sounded like a great opportunity to bring in some Splinter Cell elements into The Division.

MP1st: With Heartland in testing and seemingly set for release soon, does this mean The Division 3 isn’t in development or is Heartland in effect, The Division 3?

Banchereau: Heartland is its own thing and they’re working on Heartland. We’re working on the Division 2 and that’s the focus of each of those teams (Basically a no comment)

MP1st: Does the dev team have a primer of sorts for those returning to the game after a long break? Or what about for those entering the franchise for the first time? 

Banchereau: As I mentioned, we hope a lot of people will come back and a lot of people will start the game. Seeing how it’s being supported and how ambitious we are with our plans.

We want to make sure that players coming back or experiencing the game for the first time,experiences are something that is welcoming where we’re really onboarding you to teach you all the right things. We are definitely taking over to heart and, that’s one of the main drivers, as I mentioned earlier, that’s one of the main drivers behind the end game change, the end game restructuring that we’re going to do in season four.

So absolutely, we are aware of that and that’s going to be one of the real focuses of Season 4.

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