The official announcement of Tom Clancy's The Division 2 was suddenly leaked yesterday. The game will be showcased for the first time at E3 2018; there's no word on the release date yet, but March 2019 is a good bet at this point, three years after the first game's launch.
Malmö-based studio Ubisoft Massive is once again leading development and hours after the leak, they hosted a State of the Game livestream on Twitch. First and foremost, they addressed why it was decided to go with a sequel instead of just updating the current live game, which has received positive feedback recently thanks to the latest updates.
Julian Gerighty (Creative Director) - It wasn't an easy decision, but there are so many stories and so many experiences that we want to explore within the world of The Division that we really felt a sequel was the best way to investigate these things.
Mathias Karlson (Game Director) - Also, I mean, the process of making something is such an important part of learning and improving what to do next, what to do in the future. And these are all the same people, all the same teams and studios that made the first game. It's an incredible opportunity for us to take all that learning, all that experience from what The Division is today and put that into a new game.
Also, technology advances with time. Snowdrop today is a better and more capable engine than when we released The Division. It was still fantastic, but we can do more now so we of course want to take the opportunity as well, which would be so much more difficult to do with the game that's live. There are many reasons.
Julian Gerighty then revealed that in addition to Ubisoft Massive and the team of studios who supported development with the first game (Ubisoft Annecy, Ubisoft Bucharest, Ubisoft Shanghai, Red Storm Entertainment and Ubisoft Reflections), Ubisoft Sofia also recently joined the world-spanning collaborative effort. Essentially, thousands of people are working on The Division 2 now, though Gerighty also revealed that a small crew had been working on the sequel's concept since April 2016 - just a month after the first installment shipped.
Throughout this year, in any case, The Division will still receive plenty of updates. In fact, the livestream was the perfect occasion to share the planned roadmap.
What would you like to see in The Division 2?
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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