Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 stopped feeling like a post-apocalyptic RPG, and I can tell you roughly where it happened. I bought it about a year after launch, played through every manhunt, and liked where the seasons were taking the story. Then the Houndsman showed up, then the Bloody Houndsman, then Red Moon, and I started asking what game I was actually logging into.
What got me in the first place was never the gear. It was a world that had collapsed the way ours nearly did, a virus, no working government, and ordinary people whose watches lit up one day and told them to hold things together. After COVID that hit differently, because it felt like the version of the story I had just lived through. You weren’t a superhero, you were somebody’s neighbor with a badge and better tech, trying to rebuild a government where nobody was in charge.
The Division 2 Premise Was Rebuilding the World
The Division was the last line of defense. The world collapsed, the government collapsed, and these were the people trying to rebuild some kind of government on lawless ground, and to help with the vaccine while they were at it. That was the appeal that got me, and it is the part of Division 2 I keep looking for.
The agents were sleepers. Plain clothes with a badge, spies who walk among us, trained something like a black ops team and almost paramilitary, but pulled from every walk of life. They didn’t wear a label announcing what they were. Your neighbor could be one until the watch activated, and for a long time Division 2 let me play exactly that.
Division 2 Seasons After Battle for Brooklyn
The manhunts and the seasons were great, and I will say that plainly. Each one pushed the progression of the story forward and told me a little more about where this world was going. I covered the story side of both games in my Division 1 vs Division 2 story breakdown, and the seasons were the part of Division 2 that earned the comparison.
Then came Battle for Brooklyn, the stupidest DLC I ever fucking paid for. I bought it on launch, and I hated all of it. Theo Parnell, who I killed in Warlords of New York, is back as one of the good guys, and the voice acting on him and Hoskins is ugly as fuck.
On one of the main missions Hoskins is panicking so hard that Dr. Kendall has to step in and take over. Hoskins isn’t a Division agent, so I can almost give her that, but it still made the mission irritating to sit through. Parnell is the one that got me, because Parnell is a Division agent. He is supposed to be comfortable with being betrayed and with everything going to shit. Then he finds out Sarah, his friend, is the Rat Queen, and he panics. He was a lot calmer during Warlords of New York, and it was only after you went after him that he started losing it. Maybe that’s slightly fair since he was still a kid back then, but he is still a Division agent.
After Brooklyn, I started seeing fantasy shit. The story seasons gave way to events that felt like they belonged in a different game, and the progression of the story stopped being the point.
The Houndsman, the Bloody Houndsman and Red Moon: Division 2 Events That Do Nothing for the Game
First came the Houndsman, then the Bloody Houndsman, and now this Red Moon event. Every one of them is fantasy, and every one of them comes with costumes. Glowing costumes do nothing for the main game. They don’t change a mission, they don’t move a settlement forward, and they don’t add a single line to the story.
We don’t need cartoon armor or cartoon gear in a collapsed city. This was a game about plain clothes agents with badges, not tactical Barbie in colors that light up the street. It is the same instinct that makes me prefer a blacked out sleeper PC build over an RGB light show, because what you use should look like what it is for.
Where Did the Tom Clancy Go in Division 2?
Tom Clancy was a writer, and his stuff was military and CIA. Division 1 set the world and the tone of the game, and it used Tom Clancy’s world to do it, with agents who looked like normal people doing a job nobody else could do. That was the world I signed up for.
Division 2 followed up in that same world and added closure. But with the newer updates it became more cartoony. Now I am chasing a fantasy boss for a glowing outfit, and I cannot find the Tom Clancy in that anywhere. There is nothing military about a cartoon costume, and nothing CIA about an agent lit up like a Christmas tree. Somewhere between the sleeper agents and the seasonal events, the Tom Clancy went missing, and that is a big part of what happened to Division 2.
Division 2 Prototype Gear Is Another Endless Grind
Retaliation and Escalation were fine for me. I have no problem with that content. My problem is that the proto gear turned them into another endless, nonsense grind for gear that doesn’t do anything for the game.
There is no build experimentation anymore. Any gear can be prototyped and augmented with different shit, so there is no reason to try a strange combination just to see what it does. Even the hybrids, which used to help me narrow a build down, don’t do that job anymore. Working out what a build was supposed to do was a big part of why I played, and that part is gone.
A grind is fine when it leads somewhere. Say a game tells you to kill ten thousand hyenas, and once they are all eliminated, that is it, there are no more, and the game opens up. Maybe a hidden scenario unlocks. That grind changes the game, and that is a grind worth doing. Grinding for the next piece of gear changes nothing about the game or its progression. It just sends you back to grind for the next one.
Starting a New Division 2 Character Feels Like a Chore
In other games I can start all over and enjoy it. In Division 2, starting a new character feels like a chore. You can’t experience everything that was added after the DLCs, because so much of it was built around the seasons and the events that came and went.
Sure, there are season replays and all that. But the seasonal events and the new gear are, for me, what is killing the game. A fresh character never gets to walk through the story the way I did the first time. What used to feel like starting over now feels like catching up.
The Division 2 Dark Zone Was Supposed to Be Scary
I never liked PvP, but I did try to enter the Dark Zone for the feel of rogues and agents. It is cops and robbers. It is the PvP world, it is unpredictable, and that is the scary part, because anyone can go rogue, just like in Division 1.
Ever since Warlords of New York, the Dark Zone has been useless for me story wise. I haven’t even entered the PvE version. A Dark Zone is supposed to be a lawless, scary place, and what I hear now is that it is full of hackers and chicken dancing. That is not the Dark Zone I wanted to walk into.
Keener, the Waves and Where the Sleeper Agent Went
This is my understanding of the game, it comes from playing the game and from the echoes, and it is how I read the story. Keener was First Wave, and he was left in the Dark Zone. Manhattan was the Dark Zone back then, which is why Warlords of New York sends you back there. Most of the Warlords were First Wave too.
Lau is Second Wave, and so is Kelso. The Division 1 agent is Third Wave, activated while it was still winter in New York. The Division 2 agent is Fourth Wave, because the D.C. campaign is spring and Warlords of New York is summer, months after that winter. That is why I am the lowest agent in the room. If I were First or Second Wave, I could be a commander. But no, I am a sleeper agent who just got activated, after the green poison was already out and the collapse had already happened.
What bothers me is what happened to Keener. He started as the enemy, his story turned tragic, and somehow he stopped being your enemy. Now, almost every season, he is the true protagonist of the game. So what does that make me? A normal agent in plain clothes, watching a story about someone else, while the game hands me glowing uniforms.
Division 2 on PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox: Upgrade the Setup, Not the Game
Division 2 is on PC, PS4, PS5 and Xbox, and it is an old game by now. Most of you reading this already own it, and you already own the console or the PC you play it on. I am not going to tell you to buy new hardware for a game I just spent this whole post complaining about.
If you are staying with it, the only money that makes sense is on the setup you already play on. On PC, my best gaming PC builds post is where I would start if your rig is the weak link. If you stream or record your runs, I covered the camera in my webcam for work and streaming post and the audio side in my headset guide. Either way, you are spending on the way you play and not on a game that stopped giving back.
Why I Am Waiting on Central Park
I haven’t bought the Central Park DLC. I might get it once it’s on sale, but not right away. I bought Battle for Brooklyn on launch and it kicked me in the nuts, and I’m not doing that twice. Division 2 as it is now is a different game from the one I started on, and I don’t want to pay full price to find out how different.
Where is the agent? The sleeper agent, the last line of defense. Where did the nostalgia and the mystique of The Division go? What I am describing is not a bug. It is a world that was about rebuilding after a collapse turning into a costume shop with a gear grind attached. If you want to see what the franchise looks like on a smaller screen, I wrote up the mobile version in my Division Resurgence review. The premise is the part of this franchise worth protecting, and it was never the glowing outfits.
