The Division 2: Warlords of New York launches a day early, brings along bugs

(Image credit: Ubisoft)

The Division 2: Warlords of New York was supposed to go live on March 3. We said so multiple times, and in fact The Division Twitter feed still says March 3. But for some reason, it went live on PC today, a day early—at least for all of PC Gamer's non-Australian staff. That's good news for Division fans eager to take the fight back to New York. The bad news is that the rollout hasn't gone entirely smoothly.

After the update went live, numerous PC players began reporting some serious issues, including an inability to interact with community leader NPCs and Echo errors on login. Ubisoft reported in its forums that the Echo error is "a new issue that we haven't encountered in this way before," although some progress was made toward fixing it earlier today. A more lasting fix will hopefully be in place tomorrow, following three hours (assuming nothing goes screamingly sideways) of "unscheduled maintenance" set to begin at 12:30 am PT/3:30 am ET on March 3.

Ubisoft is working on these issues:

Fixing an issue that prevents the objective "Reach City Hall" of the WONY introduction mission from updating and teleporting players to a different location.
Fixing an issue that causes players who quit the helicopter cinematic to get placed into and stuck in Trinity Church.
Fixing an issue that prevents players from interacting with Community Leader NPCs.
Further backend improvements to prevent ECHO errors to occur for players.

Ubisoft warned that not all of these problems will necessarily be corrected in this update. "While we want to deploy these during the maintenance we currently cannot guarantee which fixes will go live," it said. "We will update you on the status during the maintenance."

The status of Echo errors can be tracked in this Division 2 forum thread, while players unable to interact with community leader NPCs can follow along with progress here. In the meantime, Ubisoft said that restarting the game and then fast-traveling in and house of the Safe House, or switching to another area, might help correct the problem.

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.