When Ubisoft's The Division was originally showed off, it garnered worthwhile attention from both the media and potential players. Its post-apocalyptic environment was immediately more relatable than the decimated world of Bethesda's 'Fallout' series, and with co-op and gunplay playing a major part in the adventure, it unsurprisingly performed well upon release.
But once the "wow" factor wore off, The Division began to show its cracks. Exploits and cheating were rife among the community, and many felt there was either not enough to do once reaching the game's level cap, or the difficulty simply outweighed the reward.
As time went on, the bulging playbase began to dwindle with Ubisoft delaying certain impending features until they were fully content in their efforts to fix the game. Now, however, with test servers and tweaks in place, the latest content update for the troubled shooter seems to have players flocking back.
So what's new in Patch 1.4? For one, it aims to make the place more newcomer friendly. Check out the plans here.
“Since the release of patch 1.4, we went back to the daily active users we had at launch, because people were [so impressed],” said Anne Blondel, VP of live operations at Ubisoft. She continued: "...we had to make that tough call - do we keep providing them with extra content or do we stop everything for a while, settle down, fix everything and then once the game is where it should be, then we start providing more content."
In the end, while the lingering playerbase was unhappy with their decision to push back new content in order to fix the immediate problems, the scheme seems to have paid off. Bringing a task force of sorts to help Massive fight through the workload, The Division is seemingly back on track with a noteworthy improvement in player attitude too. They're even expecting the work to bring in more new players in the future.
