Ubisoft’s Division 2 team posted a memo to players this morning that seems like good news but is being read as the opposite. For starters, the memo promises that the new season will indeed begin on February 25th as planned – fine. But then Ubisoft basically admits to a delay of the next DLC.
“We know you are eagerly awaiting the release of the upcoming DLC,” the devs write. “To ensure we deliver the best possible experience, we’ve decided to take a little extra time to refine it[;] therefore[,] the DLC will not ship during Year 6.”
That takes a bit of disentangling because Ubisoft doesn’t just mean “2025” by Year 6. Its last Year 6 roadmap included the back half of 2024 as well as the DLC and season 3 for 2025. So presumably, the end of Year 6 is whenever this new third season ends – at minimum several months of delay (the game’s subreddit is still arguing over what exactly it means in terms of timing; it’s almost as if Ubisoft made it vague and confusing on purpose, eh?).
Either way, the problem is that this DLC has already been heavily delayed; it was supposed to come out a year ago and has been put off repeatedly since then. The mood on the sub right now is basically disbelief that the game will ever recover from neglect and that the DLC is vaporware.
Readers who are paying attention to the state of Ubisoft right now know that the company is in a very bad place; amid the Guillemot family’s attempts to take the company private with Tencent’s assistance, executives have slashed around 2000 jobs and shuttered multiple studios around the world. Just yesterday, Ubisoft laid off 185 more people, affecting four studios in Europe – including teams that worked on The Division. The logical assumption here is that the team working on the DLC was hit and therefore needs more time. The only remaining question is whether a live service game that’s already been kicked around for years can afford that time.