Ubisoft revealed a ton of awesome changes coming to The Division last night.
Assuming you’re not bored of the online shooter yet (and why would you be?) there’s a lot to look forward to.
The biggest slice of news is the addition of something called incursions.
These are set to work in a similar way to Destiny’s raids, in that increasingly difficult challenges can be played over and over again. Players will have to work together if they want to survive, so be nice.
The first incursion is set in a water treatment facility hidden in the sewers, and will go live with the game’s big update on April 12. There are no checkpoints during these challenges, so bring your A game.
Ubisoft showed off a little footage of an incursion, but didn’t really go into specifics. They promised there were unique tricks to the encounters that they don’t want to spoil.
Players are allowed to use matchmaking for incursions. The incursion’s default difficulty is hard mode, will have a recommended gear level to ensure people that newbies don’t get fucked. Of course, there will also be a required gear level for challenge difficulty.
There are some other, smaller changes coming to the game, too. You wanna know what they are? Course you do.
Gear sets are being hidden throughout the game. Equipping a certain number of pieces nets you a unique talent, though individual gear pieces don’t come with talents.
Players can finally trade items with each other, but only in the group that generated the drops, and only within a two hour time limit. If you’re in the dark zone, you’ll need to head to a gate to trade.
There’s a new daily missions system (assignments) that are intended as quick challenges, such as killing X amount of a certain enemy.
Finally, the dark zone is getting hourly supply drops. High level gear will drop somewhere in the area, surrounded by high level enemies. Only the first group there can have it, which should make for some interesting battles.
That’s your lot for now then. It’s all coming April 12, so mark it on the calendar and get practicing for those incursions.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.