Well, there it is. It looks as though all that ‘top priority’ business wasn’t just big talk. Has Ubisoft gotten its act together and fixed that nefarious skill bug in The Division 2? That’s what they’re claiming.
Let’s start at the beginning, though. The Division 2 was destined to be one of early 2019’s biggest games. The original was something darn special, after all; blending action RPG and TPS elements with a heaping helping of Tom Clancy strategy thrown in.
Well, as far as Tom Clancy strategy goes, maybe we’re overselling things a little. As we’ve reported before, the reaction to the sequel announcement wasn’t exactly oh holy heckola, King K. Rool and Ridley are in Smash Bros. at last levels of hype. Nonetheless, as The Division 2’s release came closer and we learned more about the game, the hype train gathered more and more steam.
Since its release, The Division 2 has been pretty darn well received (much more so than fellow big-name Anthem). It’s had its share of unfortunate teething troubles, though, sadly. As anyone who’s played Skyrim will tell you, most games will have bugs and glitches to contend with. The Division 2 has brought us one that’s proven to be particularly irksome, though.
The infamous skill bug is an issue that’s made the game’s variety of player abilities almost impossible to use, because they just don’t work as they should most of the time (on activation, some have been destroying themselves immediately and going onto a fifteen second cooldown).
While this would be unacceptable in any game that happens to feature abilities like these, it’s particularly egregious here because the game is designed around the use of these things. It’s super difficult to get through with just gunplay alone. This isn’t an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
Fortunately (and it isn’t often that we get to say this), a big developer heard our cries and came through. Over on Reddit, the team promised that they were making this bug their ‘number 1 priority.’ Twelve hours or so (and a brief hunk of maintenance downtime) later, it seems that the problem has been fixed… to a certain extent. As Massive Entertainment posted on the official forums prior to the maintenance:
“…you should encounter these issues way less often from this point on. The team is continuing their work to resolve all the remaining issues on this topic with a future patch later this week. Until then you can try to avoid the talents EXTRA and OVERLAP which seem to be the culprit and can cause skills to act up even after maintenance, albeit still much less often.”
The bug hasn’t been eradicated, then, but we’ve taken a huge step forwards. Fans will probably happily take that for now.
