This year hasn’t gone quite according to plan for Ubisoft and fans of The Division 2. The game has experienced plenty of ups and downs with the suspensions controversy and the continued effort to solve community frustrations that arose due to the changes made as part of the Warlords of New York expansion. The past week, The Division 2 experienced a major leak which not only may have revealed potential story lines for upcoming seasons, but a new game mode that attempts to solve the replayability issue.
One criticism that Ubisoft has faced with The Division 2 is that the game is seriously lacking anything that resembles Underground from the first game. Originally added to The Division in patch 1.3, Underground placed a focus on the PvE side of the game by introducing randomized and procedurally-generated dungeons. Players could further customize their experience by enabling certain modifiers which wouldn’t only make things more challenging, but offer better rewards as well.
While The Division 2 has nothing close to this feature, audio files found by dataminers from the PTS server may have actually revealed a new game mode which could fill that role. Inside of these files, Agent Kelso talks about a Skyscraper that requires players to clear and secure each floor. Additional details can be heard from the audio files including the existence of safe rooms, which act as checkpoints where players can save their progress and either continue or resume clearing floors at another time.
Eventually, these checkpoints stop and each floor gets progressively harder the further players advance up all 100 levels. What’s curious is that this Skyscraper idea was previously discussed on Reddit, so it’s clear that it may have inspired the team to make it a reality. While the story leaks are tied to specific seasons, this Skyscraper content currently isn’t tied to any of them.
Community manager Chris Gansler did respond to the thread to confirm that the team is currently working on new PvE modes that focus on replayability. While he didn’t confirm the Skyscraper specifically, he did mention that the content is in the early stages of development and won’t be releasing anytime soon. He also stressed that the studio isn’t interested in copying content from the first game, so this new mode won’t simply be Underground 2.0 and instead offer a new take on it.
Adding a replayable style Horde mode to The Division 2 is something that’s been high on fan wishlists. Kenly College was the studio’s first attempt at it but considering that the mode is only around for short periods of time and even spent a lot of time being reworked, the player reaction has been mixed at best. Some fans would even like to see Massive Entertainment bring back an updated form of Survival, which was a form of PvPvE Battle Royale before the genre really became popular with Fortnite. Unfortunately, that mode was locked behind an expansion paywall so it never hit the player numbers it could have with a live service style delivery system that The Division 2 has.
The Division 2 is out now for PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Stadia.
Source: Reddit
