In a new interview, Ubisoft has admitted that The Division 2 was supposed to have a much different fate. According to creative director Yannick Banchereau, support for the game was supposed to stop by the end of 2020, less than two years after its release in March 2019. And yet now, The Division 2 is still going strong with plans for updates through a Year 5 roadmap that will include the free roguelike co-op mode Descent.
Ubisoft says it needed to work on Avatar and Star Wars at the time
Specifically, Banchereau says in an interview with MP1st that The Division 2 updates were planned to end due to the studio’s obligations with other projects at the time:
Yes, the plan was after Update 12, at the end of 2020, the plan was to stop supporting the game… We started working on the Star Wars game, we have the Avatar game. Everybody’s very busy at Massive and the idea was that we just need the people on those projects.
He clarifies that this isn’t because Ubisoft thought “The Division was bad,” though after the release of the Warlords of New York DLC, the game was “probably more successful” than the publisher had anticipated.
Since Ubisoft didn’t want to pull people already assigned to other projects, it decided to team up with Ubisoft Bucharest. It took a while for the studio to learn everything about The Division 2, but he believes Year 5 content will impress fans.
Accordingly, The Division 3 is apparently not in development, though that’s not too much of a surprise considering that they have plenty of work to do with The Division Heartland and The Division Resurgence.
