'The Division''s First Update Isn't What We Expected

Since its launch The Division has kept up with player demand through a series of patches, fixes and content balancing issues – teasing the first big update to the game with a set of livestreams, videos, and blog posts.

Rolling out to live servers tomorrow, update 1.1 introduces a plethora of new features including Gear Score, Gear Sets, Player Trading, Assignments and Dark Zone Supply drops alongside the first chunk of end game content, Falcon Lost.

Known as Incursions, missions like Falcon Lost are the long awaited end-game of The Division in a way similar to Destiny’s raid content. But with a steep difficulty curve and a short completion time, the first Incursion falls short.

Falcon Lost is a hard mission to complete — even at the easiest difficultly level — and features waves of enemies, a few turrets, and the addition of an APC boss battle to the game. You’ll start the Incursion by heading to the far southeast of the map and teaming up with a group of three others players, who will work through a short sewer tunnel and into a larger hangar where you’ll engage waves of enemies and plant a series of bombs on the new APC boss.

And that’s it — a horde mode for The Division filled with large health bars.

While the Incursion does offer a few new mechanics (namely, planting the bomb) and presents a new opportunity to collect loot for your character – it’s disappointing to see such a simple event presented as The Division’s first piece of end-game content. Falcon Lost is difficult and requires a dedicated group working together to complete, but that challenge doesn’t justify that it’s such a small area with a limited amount of assets to appreciate.

Before the Incursion, players would farm challenge missions in order to obtain gear, resources and end-game currency to purchase blueprints for pieces of gear. But even with the addition of the new Incursion, this original process still feels like the more interesting way to progress through the game. While the Incursion does offer access to the new gear sets, it really lacks the ingenuity behind the original missions offered by The Division at launch.

Each mission focused on clearing a specific objective, sure, but it presented players with a detailed and multi-room environment to navigate through — while dealing with the enemy challenges presented in each area. In a way, the original missions felt like instances you might find in Destiny or World of Warcraft, making them a bit easier to farm and enjoy the process.

The Incursion just isn’t fun to play, and maybe that’s why players are currently taking advantage of a glitch that allows you to kill the boss and obtain the gear without touching the encounter at all.

The new update added gear score and a series of dedicated equipment to the game, which are a welcome change of pace to the randomized loot pile currently at play. Each of these sets focuses on a specific character build in the game: support/electronics, assault, marksman and lone wanderers, providing your character with set bonuses unique to your specific build. You’ll be able to get these pieces from end-game activities like the new Incursion, the Dark Zone, challenge missions and crafting – although they will take a ton of farming to build via blueprints. Either way, the sets look fantastic and feature specializations that The Division needed to offer players are looking to perfect their role.

Assignments have also been added, providing much-needed currency rewards through daily and weekly tasks that players can complete. The developers have balanced these out though, decreasing the amount of Phoenix Credits attainable through the new activities which means farming is going to be something that still takes a ton of time for you and your buddies to get through.

All-in-all update 1.1 delivered a metric ton of content, activities and fixes to The Division that needed to be put into place to keep the game moving forward. While assignments, gear sets and the new Incursion certainly provide a fresh way of obtaining top-tier gear for your character – they have added a whole new series of bugs, fixes and new hurdles for the development team to grind out in the coming weeks. It may not be a jaw-dropping reason to return to The Division this month, but it’s one that does deserve some attention if you left the game looking for more content.