The Division 2‘s newest season—Year 6 Season 1—is now live and with it, Ubisoft also revealed its plans for the rest of the year. However, a big change on the roadmap involving seasonal characters that players must create fresh at the start of each new stretch has led to a massive amount of backlash online.
Released in 2019, The Division 2 has quietly been one of Ubisoft’s most successful online games, receiving continuous updates and patches since its launch. And since then, the third-person tactical looter-shooter has mostly worked the same way, with players working through each new season, unlocking new gear, and moving The Division’s storyline forward. And all of this was done with your main character. However, that’s going to change in the next season later this year, and longtime players with thousands of hours poured into the game aren’t happy about it.
On June 10, in a road map posted by Ubisoft, the publisher laid out its plans for The Division 2‘s sixth year of content. And in season two of year six, Ubisoft is going to move the game to a seasonal character model. This means that each new season’s content and story will only be playable as a new character created for that season. Players will have to level up from 1 to 40 and find new gear and weapons, too. At the end of the season, gear and XP will revert to your main character and your seasonal one will be added to your roster, letting you play with them more later if you want.
This is a similar system to Diablo IV’s seasonal characters. However, The Division 2 shifting things so much this many years into the game’s run has set off a firestorm online among players. If you hop on to Twitter or Reddit, you can find hundreds of players angry and confused about the seasonal character shift in Year 6 Season 2.
“Not excited about the new character for every season idea. It doesn’t seem like it’ll be fun for solo players who just want to relax and experience the story,” said one player.
“I don’t understand seasonal characters so what you’re saying is that our main characters/ agents that we have hundreds to thousands of hours on now [are] sort of useless,” said another player on Twitter.
“New Seasonal Characters only for Seasons? The hundreds of hours grinding for weapons, gear, skills, materials and to level up my expertise was for nothing! Great job of alienating your existing dedicated player base on a 6-year-old game & for what,” asked another fan.
Ubisoft responds to all the concerns and confusion
Ubisoft’s PR team on Twitter has been replying to many of these angry and confused tweets, trying to explain that this system will work well for solo players and that it will let them do more in future seasons. But the replies don’t seem to be helping much, as most players just respond with even more confusion or anger about the seasonal character system.
The overall takeaway I’ve seen from most players who have invested years of time into The Division 2 is that for the better part of a decade, they have been able to play through all seasonal events, manhunts, and missions as their main characters. And they’re frustrated that, in season two, that won’t be possible. Ubisoft assured players that they’ll still be able to use their main agents in the harder season finale missions, but that did little to help convince angry players this is a good change.
Kotaku has contacted Ubisoft about the roadmap.
For many players, myself included, The Division 2 isn’t a game that we play every day or week. It’s instead a game that a lot of people come back to for new seasons and missions. They play through some new content, make their main character even better, find some cool loot, and stop playing until the next update. This seasonal character shift is clearly intended to keep players around longer.
While I get why the devs might want to implement this big change—it lets them design wilder seasons with more modifiers—it does feel like Ubisoft has miscalculated how many Division 2 players aren’t looking to grind endlessly over and over each season. In fact, the backlash to this roadmap is so strong that I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubisoft and Massive shifted their plans before Year 6 Season 2 arrives. We shall see.
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