Following last week’s disappointing earnings call with investors, Ubisoft revealed its sales and earnings figures for the first half of 2019-20 financial year this week, revealing a whopping 93 percent year-on-year decline in operating income.
In a press release, Ubisoft pinned the blame almost entirely on
Ghost Recon: Breakpoint but it’s worth noting that
The Division 2 didn’t meet sales expectations either. However, there was no mention of that in the financial report.
They are in deep shit.
Releasing a sequel to a persistent online game so quickly was bound to fail. They are not sportsball games or call of duty. Nobody wants to lose all their progress and pay $60 for some new content every year or two.
Why would I buy Division 2 more than a few months after release when I will assume Division 3 is already being worked on and Division 2 is on life support?
Really, was there any reason for Division 2 to be its own game rather than an expansion other than greed?
I guess the developers couldn't fix issues within the first iteration and needed to start clean. The issues I am talking about:
-movement and the "chicken dance" in PVP
-useless consumables with long cooldowns
-useless weapon types and no way to fix them without making them OP (pump-shotguns, burst-fire weapons)
-useless perks
-press-to-win ults
-useless and mandatory abilities (the meta requires at least one healing ability)
-boring enemies
The Division 2 tried to answer those with:
-more floaty movement so you cannot strafe and avoid bullets while your opponent empties his mag or you wait for your healing skills to cooldown
-consumables removed, grenades are tied to specialization (in the first game PVP was about rooting someone in place with stun grenades or nuking 1/3 of their health with frag nades)
-burst-fire or single shot weapons are now Rifles, burst-fire SMGs have been removed, pump shotguns got buffed
-perks have been changed by 180 degrees, people agree that TD2 loot is complicated and has even more useless stuff than the first game
-ults have been replaced with signature weapons
-mobile cover was a meme, got replaced with even more pathetic stuff like hive, or fireflies but there was an attempt
-increased variety, even starting factions have berserkers, shields, turret/drone operators or snipers, the rioters from the first game were golf-club idiots, snipers, grenadiers throwing smokes, grunts and LMGs (usually as bosses)
Other than that people begged for story content and more areas. Everyone knew that some things could not be fixed because every change to endgame / PVP would require testing the story mode if it is beatable. I do understand why someone would be dissapointed with developers decision but The Division was 3 years old and with many huge changes to gearsets there was no sight of a true balance between the builds (1.6 patch it was high-end exotics, 1.7 Strikers, 1.8 Predators and Nomads, 1.8.1 is a mix but still someone running FireCrest or Alpha in PVP or PVM/PVE is doing it for a meme).
I am planning on getting back to the first game. Some changes are controversial and were a huge miss like dividing Dark Zone into 3 separate areas, reducing player count to accomodate for smaller field, creating new loot while they had paved the way with some gearsets in the first game, designing the game with MTX from the start (the first game got lootboxes with one of the patches in year 3 IIRC and even then it was pretty moderate stuff, even generous as you could open many boxes through achievements - nicely balanced).
If the loot was more interesting and favoring different archetypes than just assault rifle DPS then I would buy it, after playing through free weekends and such I decided to stick with the first game which has more enjoyable PVP and more interesting builds like an actual healer, tank or dps even with some broken mechanics.
