It felt different this time, but honest and reasonable. We haven’t covered last week’s State of the Game after a longer pause because it was more or less just a recap of known issues, problems and other things the game is currently plagued by. It’s time to look forward at what needs to be done over the next months to bring the game back on track where it deserves to be and we finally got some insight about that during today’s stream.
Roadmap, Update 1.4 and Season Pass DLCs
The Division’s Community Developers Hamish Bode and Yannick Banchereau made sure from the beginning what’s going on and let the cat out of the bag right away.
Update 1.4, the free update for everyone, will be released separately from the Season Pass’ 2nd major expansion “Survival” somewhere in October, which means that the Survival DLC will be released later, somewhere between October and the end of this year. At the same time, “Last Stand” will be available early 2017. You can find an official FAQ here.
The Division v1.4 Preview
With the upcoming Update 1.4, things like bugs, loot, quality of life systems, balancing of enemies, weapons and PvP as well as other issues will be addressed. Not everything will make it into this first big game overhaul including massive changes, but it’s supposed to be a fresh start and ongoing process for the game and hopefully ensures that feature updates in the future will not longer suffer from currently existing problems anymore.
It’s all about improving the whole gaming experience. The developers’ focus for update 1.4 are the following key aspects that will improve, change and impact this experience in different ways.
- Fixing bugs, including those listed in our Known Issues as well as many other ones
- Making loot drops more relevant to the player
- Enemy difficulty and time to kill
- Gear Sets and weapons balancing
- Solo player experience
- Dark Zone and PvP balancing
- Quality of life additions based on community suggestions (such as weapon skins no longer taking inventory space, craft-all button, running in the Base of Operations, buyback option)
Special Report
At this point, also sharing progress with the community is important. We will hear more about it in the next SotG streams. A complete overview of the changes to come in Update 1.4 will be revealed during a Special Report livestream on September 13th.
Feedback
Also feedback of the community is highly appreciated, whether you would like to share your opinions, or constructive complains in the official forums, the official subreddit or through other ways, do it now!
Some members of the community will also get the chance to directly work with the developers from Massive at their studio in Malmö, Sweden for a few days. An appropriated signup form will be launched tomorrow and only be opened until the end of the weekend, but more about that tomorrow!
Agent Intel
Besides the submission, you can also participate in discussions in the therefore newly created Agent Intel forums, a dedicated section on the forums where you will find open discussions around certain topics, polls, and theory crafting. Community feedback seems to be one of the essential things for them to get it done right – and it’s actually the right way to go.
The first topics can already be found here!