The Division 2 will take players back to Manhattan next year

During Ubisoft's E3 press conference today, The Division 2's creative director Terry Spier took the stage to provide more details on the shooter's upcoming free updates. Broken up into episodes, The Division 2 is getting three updates by early 2020—in addition to having a free trial period between June 13 and 16.

The first major update, called Episode 1, D.C. Outskirts: Expeditions (yes, it's a mouthful) gives you main missions and a "brand new game experience" that takes place outside Washington D.C. itself. The National Zoo is the setting of one mission where you'll hunt down an Outcast leader and the final part of Episode 1 will take players to Kenly College. Spier says it's an "entirely new gameplay experience, one that will take exploration, investigation, and logic to uncover the fate of a military convoy gone dark."

Episode 2, Pentagon: The Last Castle will come later this fall and, as you can probably guess, will see players cross the Potomac to attack the Pentagon, where Black Tusk soldiers are close to uncovering its secrets. Episode 2 will also introduce The Division 2's second eight-player raid. 

Episode 3 was cryptically teased and wont be coming until next year. A small trailer announced the episode, showing Division agents returning to Manhattan. To what extent players will be able to explore this summertime Manhattan is not clear, but the prospect of returning to the location of the first game sure is exciting. You can see the teaser below:

Steven Messner

With over 7 years of experience with in-depth feature reporting, Steven's mission is to chronicle the fascinating ways that games intersect our lives. Whether it's colossal in-game wars in an MMO, or long-haul truckers who turn to games to protect them from the loneliness of the open road, Steven tries to unearth PC gaming's greatest untold stories. His love of PC gaming started extremely early. Without money to spend, he spent an entire day watching the progress bar on a 25mb download of the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo that he then played for at least a hundred hours. It was a good demo.