Two years after its release, it seemed like Ubisoft was throwing in the towel when it came to The Division 2, as players got seasonal re-runs rather than new content. Well, it seems that was exactly what was planned originally, as Ubisoft intended for The Division 2 support to end in 2020.
Speaking to MP1st, The Division 2 Creative Director Yannick Banchereau mentioned that the original plan was for The Division 2 support to end in 2020. However, it wasn’t because it was a bad game, but rather, the studio was busy with its in-development Star Wars game and there simply wasn’t enough cooks in the kitchen back then.
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It seems the game (The Division 2) was more successful than what Ubisoft expected from it after the release of its major expansion Warlords of New York that it became feasible for Massive to resume development of it alongside Ubisoft Bucharest which seems to be the main studio handling content for The Division 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 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 (and) Ubisoft Bucharest. What we’re seeing in Year 5 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 5 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 — the 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.
With Ubisoft announcing The Division 2 Year 5 roadmap, it seems players have a lot to look forward to this year. Add in The Division Heartland and The Division Resurgence to the mix, and it seems the franchise is thriving more than ever.
Speaking of things to look forward to, the Resident Evil apparel event is returning tomorrow! Read up on that here.
Stay tuned to our full interview hitting the site soon.