'The Division' 1.4 patch notes & release date: Update aims to entice fans back to the game
If you or someone you know gave up on Tom Clancy's The Division, the post-apocalyptic shooter set in post-viral-outbreak New York City, developer/publisher Ubisoft surely hopes that the latest patch, update 1.4, will lure you and others back to the game.
The Division is a persistent-world multiplayer shooter in which players take the role of Division Agents, members of an intelligence community that is activated when all else fails and the government has fallen apart. Players in The Division fight to take back New York from the criminals and lunatics who threaten to destroy it in the absence of a government to stop them following a massive viral outbreak that kills most of the city.
Finding and upgrading armor and weapons is a huge part of The Division. The more challenging the game's missions become, the higher-quality gear you can earn. Unfortunately, The Division has a similar problem as Pokémon Go in that there's no satisfying endgame, or no reason to do all the work to get all the good gear. And what you have to do to earn said good gear gets repetitive and pointless.
The Division update 1.4 patch notes: Making the open world of Manhattan feel welcome again
Update 1.4 seems meant to address some of these issues directly. The official patch notes for update 1.4 state that players will now be able to select a World Level Tier or difficulty level for The Division's open world portion literally patrolling the streets of Midtown Manhattan.
In The Division, the main map of Manhattan serves as a hub for players to explore, with missions usually taking place in areas attached to but inaccessible from the main map. When Division agents in the game achieve a high experience level and have all the best guns and armor, Manhattan gets to be too easy to provide any sense of challenge, however.
With update 1.4, The Division players will be able to set a World Level Tier that will make the enemies in the open world more powerful, therefore offering a more appropriate level of challenge. Setting a World Level Tier will also change the quality of the rewards that drop. The tougher the enemies, the better the potential rewards.
Update 1.4 makes combat in The Division feel good
Ubisoft is also announcing changes to the way combat works, most importantly decreasing the number of bullets it takes to kill an enemy, or "time-to-kill." Enemies in The Division turned into real bullet sponges at higher levels of difficulty, which could get boring.
Enemies' artificial intelligence is also being improved, which should make for more challenging bad guys. Enemy shotgunners have been made a little less brutal. And if you're into the player-versus-player Dark Zone portion of The Division, Ubisoft has also changed the way map indicators work to make it clear how far away an enemy player is from you, which will be a major help in PvP.
How much longer does Ubisoft have to make fixes to The Division?
Update 1.4 could become very important in the annals of The Division, because the game was released March 8. Seven months is a long time in the video game world, and we're in the middle of a Fall release season that contains so many powerhouse titles, including Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and Civilization VI, to name a few.
With so much competition in the shooter field specifically, The Division is running out of time to bring old players back to the game before those old players get distracted with so many new titles.
