Compared to it’s contemporaries, The Division 2 launched with minor issues. Most people were singing the praises of both Ubisoft and The Division 2. This looked like the first ‘Games as a Service’ title that was a huge success immediately. From the get go, there was a good amount of content for launch, gameplay was good and the game looked incredible. All of those things still hold true, but people aren’t playing The Division 2 like one would expect. After a little over a month, people are realizing that the content has dried up, the gear grind is tedious at best, and the content has gotten stale.
What do you do when have played all the story missions, cleared a checkpoint for the fifteenth time, and the one invaded stronghold you need to complete an exotic weapon isn’t one of the active ones?
If you were like me and started playing The Division 2 at launch, you have completed almost everything in the game. Initially, there was a good deal of story missions and even more side missions sprinkled in. Those have been played out though. There are also bounties in which you can hunt down high priority enemy leaders. The city is covered in control points in which you can force enemy factions out of and reinforce with friendlies. All of this combined for a lot of content… initially. Now, these missions, bounties and control points are recycled. Sure, you can replay the story missions on a higher difficulty, but why bother? The Division 2 offers no worthwhile reasons to do so. Doing something because it’s more challenging isn’t always a good thing. Redoing the same missions becomes stale quick.
The Division 2 has become grind for more gear, but not necessarily better gear.
Some people will say, “But don’t you get better gear by completing these missions are a higher difficulty?”. The answer is, maybe. Sure the bosses will definitely drop MORE High-End gear, but it may not necessarily be better than what you have. You may get armor pieces from one of two special sets when you run invaded missions, but again it may not be better than what you have. It’s not worth my time to run a mission to get gear I will scrap or sell. In the last three weeks, my gear has only gotten marginally better and I am not sure if it is noticeable.
The Exotic Weapon drop rate isn’t good either.
Defeating a named boss also comes with the chance to drop an Exotic weapon or exotic weapon parts. Depending on the item you are looking for, the drops are abysmal. I have been trying to build the Exotic Marksmen Rifle “Nemesis”. There are 4 parts that you need to collect to build “Nemesis”, come from the final boss on each of the invaded strongholds. There are 4 strongholds, 2 of them are invaded during any given week. Of those two, the second one has always been Tidal Basin, so the other one rotates between 3 choices. The rotation isn’t set by any schedule though. District Union Arena and Roosevelt Island have both had at least two turns before the Capitol Building has had another turn. For me, I don’t see the point in playing The Division 2 until the Capitol is invaded again. That will be the next time I have the “chance” to get what I need to complete “Nemesis”.
These are all things that can be fixed in The Division 2.
The Division 2 is not a bad game. That is not what I am saying. The content has dried up and there are little incentives to continue playing it at this time. My hope is with the first 8 person raid coming up and more DLC later this year, I will have reasons to come back to The Division 2. Maybe Ubisoft will increase the weapon item level cap. They could also introduce new weapons and armor. Things like that, the change the way the game is played will help. Until then, gear grinding just to grind gear up has lost it’s interest on me.