While it’s been out of the limelight for a fair long while now, Ubisoft’s The Division 2 is silently trucking along the sidelines. Updates are still coming in, alongside a somewhat modest seasonal content model. But there are some big changes coming, like the upcoming seasonal characters.
Specifically, The Division 2 appears to be adopting one of Diablo 4‘s seasonal progression tricks wherein players interested in progressing through the live content of the game need to create a temporary new player character whenever a new season is released. If this sounds at odds with The Division 2‘s previous content model, you’re not wrong, and TD2‘s players are predictably unhappy with this decision.
The Division 2’s new seasonal changes are going live in Year 6 Season 2
In concrete terms, Ubisoft has recently clarified what its plans are for The Division 2‘s sixth year of live content. There is a lot of stuff to take into account here, but the crux of it is the following:
- A unification of base Division 2 and Warlords of New York‘s respective endgames.
- Removal of the World Tier difficulty system.
- Removal of the Gear Score system.
- Unlocking the majority of the game’s gameplay systems at level 40.
This is, obviously, a massive re-envisioning of how The Division 2 works at a core progression level, and it would’ve been a major enough change to shake up the playerbase all on its own. All of the changes outlined above will be going live very shortly, as part of the new Year 6 Season 1 release, but there’s more to come.
Ubisoft is making one hugely significant change by introducing the concept of “seasonal characters” into the mix. To engage with The Division 2‘s seasonal content from Year 6 Season 2 onwards (i.e. not this season but the next, at the time of writing), you will need to create an all-new character and level them up from zero. It takes but the shortest of scrolls down the comments of Ubisoft’s patch notes on Reddit to see how the community feels about this particular change.
The good news is that all the earned gear and XP you accrue as part of your seasonal character’s progress through the narrative will get rolled back into your main, legacy characters as seasons wrap up. With that in mind, it’s not a total loss, though this does mean that our legacy characters will simply no longer be relevant for the latest content, which is a strange concept.
Arguably, it’s simply too late for Ubisoft to be pushing such significant changes to The Division 2 in the game’s lifecycle. Further, some of The Division 2‘s gameplay systems, such as Weapon Expertise, aren’t being changed to accommodate the presence of seasonal characters, so it’s all quite strange to see in action.
We’ll just have to wait and see how these changes pan out in practice. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Ubisoft clarified what’s happening so far in advance, though, it’s hard to tell.
