The long-awaited The Division Incursion update finally dropped on Tuesday. We were supposed to be celebrating all the improvements we were promised, but so far the feedback doesn't look good at all. Actually, it looks really, really bad. What the hell happened?
Let's start off with some positives: Moments after the new The Division 1.1 update went online, players discovered that the Challenge Mode missions yielded some pretty big rewards. In fact, killing named bosses awarded players with not just one high-end item, but a whopping four! Obviously, delighted players promptly farmed the challenge modes.
Unfortunately, this did not last long at all. Developers at Massive caught on to the farming and immediately put in a hot-fix to bring the number of dropped high-end items back down to one. Welp, it was fun while it lasted.
Fair enough, four high-end drops IS excessive. After all, a game is only fun when it's fair and balanced for all players. Unfortunately, The Division has been broken from the moment it was released (namely, the imbalance of character strengths in the Dark Zone). Sadly, the 1.1 Update risks making the game even worse.
Via Forbes tech reporter Paul Tassi, the Dark Zone has become somewhat of a shit show. As Tassi’s rant flawlessly explains, the new The Division 1.1 update and the Incursion event only amplified the issues the Dark Zone suffered all along:
“Top-tier Rogue teams are now essentially strip-mining other players instead of DZ enemies,” Tassi explained. “These are the types of teams who have beaten the Incursion a dozen times already and have full gear sets. The type who play the game like it’s their job (and for some of the streamers, it actually is). Having players that are this dangerous in the DZ makes the mode completely unsustainable for the general public. The PvP isn’t even close to an even playing field, and PvE farming is 10x harder than it ever was because of the rampaging Rogues. ”
The Dark Zone has always been controversial in The Division and many players have opted not to enter the DZ at all and prefer the measured difficulty of AI enemies from the missions. The Incursion event had the potential to improve upon the non-DZ experience. However, unlike other mission events that move the player forward through a series of checkpoints, the Falcon Lost Incursion is essentially a survival mode objective that involves taking on waves of LMB in a fixed room. While this will no doubt make the mission extremely challenging, it’s also missing a certain dynamic and dimension to the gameplay.
Of course, the main incentive for the Incursion mission is to gain high-end loot. Although high-end items are now dropping far more frequently in missions, it still doesn’t guarantee that you will actually receive a superior item. As the high-end title suggests, it’s the highest tier of gear. But based on the new gear score level, many players still do not find the elusive “max gear score” guns and gear. While the update offers more gear in a shiny color, it doesn’t mean it’s great gear that intermediate Level 30 players will use to replace their current outfit any time soon.
Finally, the biggest and most unacceptable bug affecting The Division right now has completely crippled the game for Xbox One players: characters have been erased due to a login error. Of course, a fix to recover the erased characters is the priority for the team. Via a statement from Ubisoft on the official Ubi forums, the team has determined that the characters can be restored from the latest uncorrupted save. That said, it also suggests that the recovered characters may still see loss of progress from yesterday that did not save.
The latest update for The Division has caused a lot of grief among players but there must be something positive we can take away, right? Let us know whether you like the new The Division 1.1 update and Incursion event in the comment section below:
