When asked about the difficulty experienced by The Division 2 players on console, Ubisoft has announced that they are open to lowering the difficulty of Operation Dark Hours, the game's (and the franchise's) first eight-player raid.
Operation Dark Hours went live last week on May 16. Around five hours later, in a competition between thousands of players worldwide, a team of eight operatives led by Twitch Streamer MarcoStyle became the first players in the world to complete Operation Dark Hours on PC. While it was inevitable that someone would complete the raid on consoles as well (either on Xbox One or PS4), the community had to wait a full three days before the raid was finally completed on consoles. While on PC, Operation Dark Hours took only five hours worth of effort to complete, leaderboards on consoles showed that the two winning teams on PS4 put in 36 hours and 19 hours respectively into the raid before finally beating it, and that the first winning team on Xbox put in 17 hours.
Before Operation Dark Hours was finally beaten on consoles, the community took to social media to air their concerns over the 'impossible' difficulty of the raid on consoles. Users have gone on the game's officiall subreddit to say that despite having the most powerful gear, end-game experience, and nowhere near the same difficulty in other console shooters, Operation Dark Hours was just impossible to beat, and that was true for three whole days after it was completed on PC.
In light of these findings, Ubisoft has put forward the announcement that they may be considering lowering the difficulty of the raid on consoles. While nobody is going so far as to say that PC gamers are just better at the game than console gamers (which is undoubtedly untrue, especially if you hand a console gamer a mouse and keyboard) the discrepancy here is most likely due to hardware.
Even on the latest hardware, console gamers have to live with significantly lower framerates and response times than what can be achieved on PCs - and any serious shooter player will tell you that framerates make a huge difference in performance. Couple that with the fact that controller-aiming is signficantly slower than with a mouse, and you have console gamers at a major disadvantage and a higher difficulty rating when it comes to challenging end-game content like Operation Dark Hours.
