The Division 2 launched its first League event this week, and this week’s State of the Game livestream – whose hosts, including Associate Creative Director Yannick Banchereau, streamed from home this week as a preventive measure against COVID-19 – took a look at Leagues, what they mean for Agents, and what other changes are incoming. Some highlights:
- The Westside League is a two-week event that adds six new challenges and 60 League levels, with new rewards.
- The first Global Event, Polarity Switch, is coming next week to add an optional polarity-switching challenge to the game.
- The Division 2 and Warlords of New York are out now on Stadia, featuring cross-play and cross-progression with the PC version.
State of the Game streams on Twitch, Mixer and YouTube. (To find out what was covered in the last episode, make sure to check out the previous State of the Game Recap.
PRIORITY ALERTS
Ongoing issues and fixes:
- The ability to reset Manhunt progress is being temporarily disabled. The next update will restore this ability, and fix the issues causing the progression to reset.
- Fixed a progression blocker where an NPC would become stuck at the last stage in Castle Clinton.
- Fixed an issue that granted an incorrect number of Specialization Points per SHD level.
- Fixed an issue where blue-quality items dropped from regular NPCs in the Dark Zone regardless of player max level.
- Fixed an issue where players would gain multiple seasonal caches.
- Fixed an issue with seasonal cache rewards becoming contaminated if players raised their Season level while in the Dark Zone.
- Fixed an issue that prevented players from gaining seasonal XP from Dark Zone activities.
- Fixed an issue that caused enemy NPCs to disappear at The Nest Control Point, halting progress at the "defend stage."
- Fixed an issue that prevented completion of The Nest Control Point on challenging difficulty.
- Fixed an issue that would cause some NPCs to be stuck at spawn in various Control Points.
- Fixed some puzzle reset issues on all Hunter encounters.
- Fixed an issue causing Hunter encounters to give too many keys.
- Players who received too many keys won’t receive new keys until their completed encounters match their number of keys.
- On Tuesday, when the activities changed for the Season, all players who were online at the time had their Season progression reset. The developers are investigating and working to potentially restore progression to players who lost it.
Difficulty changes coming in next update:
- Changes are being implemented to address community feedback on mission difficulty after Title Update 8.
- The developers want enemies to be lethal, especially at higher difficulties, but want to reduce unnecessary or arbitrary “sponginess,” as well as time-to-be-killed that feels unfair or doesn’t give players a chance to react when caught by surprise.
- Among other changes, the veterancy scaler is being reduced, meaning enemies will deal less damage and have less armor. This affects all difficulties.
- Difficulty scaling for groups is undergoing general improvements to better balance it with the scaling done by different difficulty modes. This will be more noticeable at higher difficulties, and four-player groups playing on Challenging difficulty and above will see the biggest changes.
- NPC damage is being reduced by 20% across the board.
Difficulty changes coming in next update:
- There will be less targeted loot in the Dark Zone, but more in main missions.
Containers giving purple items:
- Most containers do not take difficulty into account.
- Drops from NPCs and bosses take difficulty into account.
- Difficulty changes should reduce time spent completing an activity.
SEASON 1 – SHADOW TIDE
The second Season 1 event, called Westside League, is now live.
- League events offer a number of new challenges, including speedrunning specific missions and dispatching enemies in a certain way.
- These activities all contribute to your League level, which is separate from Season level and features new rewards to earn.
- Six challenges are available in Westside League, with players able to earn 10 levels per challenge.
- The League is a two-week event.
- From week to week, League challenges reset so players can do them again and earn more League levels through them.
- Players don’t have to achieve the maximum rank in each challenge to rise to League level 60 and earn all the rewards; instead, they can come back and replay challenges after they reset.
The first Global Event of Season 1, Polarity Switch, starts next week.
- Enemies in this event will have different polarities, and the player's polarity will affect how they engage with the enemy.
- Engaging NPCs with the same polarity will do double damage to that enemy.
- Shooting an NPC of a different polarity will cause Agents to incur a status effect, and potentially change their polarity.
- Agents can change their polarity by reloading or changing their current weapon.
- Polarity only affects the player's firearms (primary, secondary, pistol, and specialization), so Skills and grenades do not do more damage or incur damage if targeting the wrong polarity.
- Some challenges are tied specifically to the Global Event, but Polarity Switch can be in effect during all challenges.
- Players can opt in or out of the Global Event.
- Polarity Switch will be active for one week.
STADIA LAUNCH
- The Division 2 and the Warlords of New York expansion are now available on Stadia.
- The Stadia version offers cross-play with PC players, and also features cross-progression for players who also own the PC version.
- Stream connect allows players to see the view of their teammates onscreen, with up to three feeds visible at once.
NEW ERA PROMO
- The Division 2 is celebrating its recent partnership with New Era Europe, which will grant players an in-game New Era The Division 2 cap until March 31.
The Division 2 is available now on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and is included in a UPLAY+ subscription. For more The Division 2, check out our previous coverage.
