The online shooter The Division 2 launched in full sprint in March. But those who thought it would only move forward from there are now mistaken. Recently, The Division 2 often stumbles over its own ambitions and small issues, says our author Schuhmann.
It was like this at the beginning: In the first weeks, one had to pinch oneself almost to believe it: The Division 2 had the best start of an MMO shooter. The leveling experience up to World Rank 4 was solid and there was plenty to do.
The developers seemed attentive and close to the community.
But an MMO shooter is not a sprint; it is a marathon.
Already in the second phase of the marathon, when World Rank 5 came, first problems emerged. It became clear that not everything was as great as initially thought:
- the build diversity was much lower than promised
- the PvP felt somewhat pointless
- players were unhappy with some sets
- and there were a number of minor issues
So it went after the 1st update: Massive essentially said, “Everyone wait a moment, we need to catch our breath.” Then the team took a content break to work on the balance and test new ideas on the test server.
The message was clear: Next, the focus is on the raid, where everything should run optimally. This will be a first highlight for The Division 2.
However, when the race was started again, Massive hardly got out of the starting blocks.
The raid, which many had been waiting for, turned out to be too tough a nut to crack for many on consoles – the raid was apparently only designed for mouse and keyboard. This caused a lot of frustration among gamepad users.
Moreover, the probably reasonable decision by Massive not to offer automated matchmaking demotivated many from even attempting the raid, crashing and cursing their way to improvement.
Players felt excluded from the start and complained.
Since Massive had previously canceled the planned increase of the gear score, there was hardly any reason for the agents to continue playing.
AI bug dominated the last weeks
So it continued after the raid: Since the raid went live, Massive has made more setbacks than progress.
An annoying AI bug that came with the raid update caused enemies to behave not like in a tactical shooter, but to charge forward like complete idiots.
Massive seems to be struggling with this error in the current “State of the Game”. It is said that they know how annoying the bug is, also because they play The Division 2 themselves.
The difficulties with the suicide NPCs were due to three problems that interacted:
- The NPCs apparently could not perceive players – they lost their direction and when trying to run behind the player, they just stormed blindly towards them
- there was a bug that briefly accelerated NPCs
- NPCs also had difficulties with climbing stairs
This caused the bug to “look worse than it actually was,” as one developer said.
Parts of the problem were fixed on Friday. Further bug fixes are expected to come soon.
So it continues: Massive is currently not revealing how it will proceed, there are only some hints:
- it is said that a 4th specialization and more content shall come
- additionally, a “second raid” is planned for sometime later, here Massive wants to learn from the previous experiences
- and they want to address a variety of current small and large player complaints, which they have all on their radar, but need time
We can only hope that the runner “The Division 2”, which had such a great start, will now recover again. Especially the AI bug was annoying in a “tactical shooter”, as one can also see from the developers’ comments.
They are proud of their AI, which is based on the experiences from part 1. In a tactical shooter, everything stands and falls with the enemy AI.
Just as quickly as the AI charged forward last time, agents wish the same for Massive – they should try to be a bit more tactical and skillful.
