The Division 2 has had more success than initially expected, support would end in 2020 – That’s Gaming

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It has now been more than four years since the release of The Division 2, but Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment’s open-world looter shooter still continues to receive support. It’s fair to say that the game’s continued support lasted longer than most expected, even longer than developer Massive Entertainment expected.

In a recent interview with MP1st, The Division 2’s creative director Yannick Banchereau revealed that the original plan within Massive Entertainment was to end support for the game after Title Update 12 in late 2020 and move the team over to the studio’s other projects, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and an open-world Star Wars title.

“It’s crazy when you think about it, right? That’s the beauty of it,” he said. “It’s really been a roller coaster, because yes, the plan was – after Update 12, at the end of 2020 – the plan was to stop support for the game. We started working on the Star Wars game, we have the Avatar game. Everyone is very busy at Massive and the idea was that we needed the people for those projects.”

Interestingly, however, after the release of The Division 2’s expansion, Warlords of New York, the game continued to attract more players than Ubisoft had expected, leading to discussions about further support within Massive Entertainment.

“It wasn’t because The Division 2 was bad, just that we needed the people for the other projects,” Banchereau said. “What happened is that the game remained successful, and probably more successful than we expected after the release of Warlords of New York and the different seasons. So that allowed us to internally resume the discussion of ‘maybe we should continue.'”

Of course, with most of the studio busy developing the two aforementioned games, finding people to continue working on The Division 2 proved challenging – and that’s where Ubisoft Bucharest came in.

“Everyone really wanted to continue, but the biggest challenge was that we needed people,” he said. “The people we had for the project transferred to our [andere] projects and we couldn’t just bring them back and say come back to The Division. That was the biggest challenge for us, finding a team, and we did that in Ubisoft Bucharest.”

The Division 2 will kick off its fifth year of post-launch content in early June, including a free new roguelite mode called The Descent, a multi-season rebuild of the Castle, a new Incursion, new story content and outfits, and more.

The Division 2 is available on PS4, Xbox One and PC. According to Banchereau, a native release on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S is unlikely