In Malmö, Sweden, a team of developers is currently working on The Division 3. But the game feels like it’s in an impossible situation. Nevertheless, there seems to be an air of confidence. MeinMMO author Schuhmann looks at the difficult situation surrounding the shooter game series
Why is the situation for The Division 3 so difficult? The team at Massive is indeed in a really tough spot:
Because the game series “The Division” was practically dead and canceled. If it had been up to Ubisoft, the expansion for The Division 2, “Warlords of New York” in March 2020 would have marked the end of development. However, Ubisoft realized how loyal and dedicated the fans of the game are, and development was ramped up again.
But the cessation of development meant a long content pause from which The Division 2 never fully recovered.
In 2023, far too late, it was finally announced that a The Division 3 is on the way.
The Division 2 has been continued for years with seasonal content but is hardly being actively developed:
What about other things in The Division universe? Up until around 2018, The Division was still the shining star in Ubisoft’s sky, and numerous new games and even a movie in The Division universe were announced:
- We were actually supposed to be playing “The Division: Heartlands” by now, a Free2Play version of the shooter – but that was canceled, so Ubisoft apparently no longer has much confidence in the game series.
- A mobile version “The Division: Resurgence” doesn’t really interest anyone. However, the game is supposed to be released in 2025.
- The movie based on “The Division” featuring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Chastain, announced in 2016, has not been a topic since 2022. The idea of a movie was killed by Covid: After the global pandemic, the fictional dollar bill pandemic of The Division was too close to reality.
Ubisoft has neglected The Division for Hollywood, but that brought no success
How are the developer and publisher doing? Ubisoft criticized The Division 2 back then for not meeting sales expectations. Therefore, they apparently shifted priorities and assigned the developers at Massive to big names from Hollywood. They even outbid a studio for the rights to Avatar that offered everyone a nose of cocaine.
However, the last two games from Massive Entertainment, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (72% Metacritic) and Star Wars: Outlaws (75% Metacritic), are considered flops that hardly excited anyone. Outlaws was mocked for its stealth requirement.
Publisher Ubisoft has been in a deep crisis since 2023. There is talk of a possible sale to China or even bankruptcy.
Nothing is known about The Division 3 yet
What is known about The Division 3? Absolutely nothing. Although the game recently has its own sub-section on the page of Massive Entertainment, there is no game presentation, no trailer, nothing at all.
It is only known that they are looking for “new people for the project” and that Julian Gerighty is leading the development. But based on the information from Massive Entertainment, one cannot even say that active work on the development is already underway.
The Technical Director of The Division 3 is proud of his engine
How do they spread good cheer?? In fact, they are currently celebrating themselves a bit for having the technician Nikolay Stefanov as the chief architect of the Snowdrop Engine and the Tech Director of The Division 3.
He proudly shares (via massive) how he landed in Malmö in 2009 and has been working on the engine that has proven how great it works and that it can now also present open-world sci-fi games wonderfully.
He is proud that the Snowdrop Engine has powered several “AAA” projects such as The Division 1 and 2, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and Star Wars Outlaws. In the two new games, they have made “great progress” in what is possible in open-world games and have upgraded the engine to the new generation of consoles.
The Tech Director emphasizes that the Snowdrop Engine achieves 60 FPS on consoles with ray tracing. They are particularly proud now that in an article by Digital Foundry, they are mentioned positively for Star Wars Outlaws as a game that shows what is possible with modern technology.
Ubisoft doesn’t have a good touch with The Division
Why is that so sad?: It is really hard as a fan of The Division to feel good or optimistic. This is because Ubisoft has handled the franchise too carelessly in recent years.
They have sidelined The Division to work on the big names Star Wars and Avatar, only to realize that this was a wrong path that brought no profit: Both games were unable to create the hype in gaming that The Division 1 and 2 did back then.
The neglected brand The Division has a lot of potential that has been left unattended for almost 6 years. Because “The Division” has always had a loyal and dedicated fanbase that spends hundreds and thousands of hours in the game and has been waiting for new content for years. There’s nothing comparable to The Division in the realm of a PvE cover shooter: Players love collecting items, perfecting their builds, and completing missions together as a team.
Especially the atmospheric tension in The Division games is considered exemplary for the genre, the US cities are beautifully captured, and the moral conflicts brought on by such a pandemic are wonderfully narrated.
Even with The Division 2, Ubisoft showed a lack of insight because they drew the wrong lessons from The Division 1 and left the improvements of the predecessor in replayability and different game modes behind to focus on delivering a better campaign.
The financial situation of Ubisoft reveals what a poor decision was made to neglect such a loyal and dedicated player base. We can only hope that Ubisoft will invest more resources into The Division 3. But at the moment, it does not look like we will be spending more time in the world of The Division in the coming years: “The Division was a masterpiece” – Players rave about New York in the winter of the great plague
