Ubisoft surprises The Division 2 players, confirms that new content is coming later this year

The Division 2
(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Earlier this week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that even though its Massive studio is now developing a new open-world Star Wars game, it will also continue to work on its other open-world shooter series, The Division. "The Massive studio is a large studio, and they are also collaborating with lots of studios all over the world," he told analysts in a quarterly financial call. "You're going to see more on The Division in this year and the year after."

Today the studio officially committed to that promise, saying in a message on Twitter that the recently-released title update 12 for The Division 2 was intended to be the game's final major update, "but thanks to your continued support, we are now in the early stages of development for fresh content to release later in 2021."

"While it is still too early to go into more details today, you won't have to wait too long, as we will share more as soon as we can," the message says. "In the meantime, we again want to send a heartfelt thank you for your continued support through The Division 2 post-launch period. We cannot stress enough how much this means to us."

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Title update 12 went live in December and kicked off the fourth season of The Division 2, pointedly entitled End of Watch. In case that's not quite sufficiently on the nose, the season is built around the return of Faye Lau, an NPC in The Division who goes bad and joins Black Tusk in The Division 2. I haven't played it myself but reading the wiki, it sounds very much a "closing the loop" sort of thing—a good way to wrap things up, in other words.

The Division 2 team may not be ready to share details on what it has in mind for new content, but Guillemot's statement that there's more on the way "this year and the year after" suggests that it won't be a simple one-and-done. 

The studio also said that it's currently investigating what sounds like a pretty serious crash bug, and is also close to having a fix for missing volumetric fog and screen space reflections on the PlayStation 5.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.