The Division 2's first raid, Operation Dark Hours, is now live—without matchmaking

Operation Dark Hours, the first Division 2 raid, is now live. In the Special Report video above, Ubisoft went into detail on the raid, its rewards, checkpointing and more.

There's a weekly reset element to the raid—three gear sets and one exotic weapon are up for grabs through beating the boss during the raid. If you complete the raid a second time, you won't get access to that loot, but you are guaranteed to get 500 gear score loot items when you repeat it.

There's checkpointing in the raid, too. It's mentioned you can come back a day later, and continue to progress from wherever you last reached. How that works with seven other players is a mystery, I guess—but now you can jump in and find out.

Unfortunately there's no matchmaking, which means you're going to have to carve out some time with seven other players to attack the raid—this has proved controversial among players on Reddit.

According to associate creative director Chadi El Zibaoui matchmaking wasn't suitable because of the complexity of the raid. "We did a lot of internal playtesting and we quickly noticed that whenever there is just one player not fulfilling his role, that really messes up the whole experience and usually the teams don't stand a chance to beat the fight they've started."

The team are working on "a more dedicated solution" to the matchmaking issue. It doesn't sound like a full matchmaking system, it might be something like an official 'looking for group' system. Destiny 2's six-player raids also lack matchmaking, but players have found LFG solutions outside of the game. We'll have to wait and see what Ubi comes up with.

Matchmaking controversy aside, we enjoyed The Division 2 a lot, and it's proven a lot more popular on PC than the original.

Former PC Gamer EIC Samuel has been writing about games since he was 18. He's a generalist, because life is surely about playing as many games as possible before you're put in the cold ground.