Today, Ubisoft revealed The Division 2: Warlords of New York, the next big chapter in the game's story. The expansion will see players return to New York City to hunt down Aaron Keener, a rogue Division agent and one of the primary antagonists of the first game. Game Rant got the chance to go hands-on with the expansion at a recent preview event.
Besides changes to the game itself, The Division 2: Warlords of New York is promising some radical changes to the New York City players explored in the first game. This time around, players will get to explore new districts in Lower Manhattan, as they steadily work to take down Keener and his other Warlords.
Right away, players are going to notice some immediate changes to the city. Gone is the iconic snow covering NYC from the first game, offering an all-new look totally unlike what players have seen before. It's been eight months since the events of the first Division game, and players will definitely notice just how much the infrastructure has crumbled since they last set foot in the Big Apple.
Not only has time passed, but New York has been ravaged by a hurricane, leading to some striking visual elements scattered throughout the map. In our hands-on session with the game, we got to take a peek at what that actually meant for the world, and it lead to some far more interesting visuals than anything The Division franchise has done before.
"Because we are working 0n a different timeline, it's eight months after the outbreak, we could play on different aspects," Chloé Hammoud, The Division 2's world content manager, told us during an interview, "We used that to tell different stories, and the fact that we used a brand-new map with different activities and different locations allowed us more freedom and creativity."
That freedom and creativity definitely came across in Warlords of New York's world and level design. During our playthrough, we only got to check out one of the expansion's new districts, which was relatively unharmed by the hurricane, but even that looks a fair bit different. According to Hammoud, that's because Warlords of New York is mostly set in a previous Dark Zone. "It's a former Dark Zone area, and we play on this aspect with the Dark Zone's walls."
Other areas in the game will be far more "striking" due to the shifts in the terrain caused by the hurricane. Those shifts will allow Warlords of New York a lot more verticality throughout the world, which should make working through the expansion's various missions more interesting on a moment to moment level.
Not to mention, New York will still be host to a ton of environmental storytelling aspects, something that The Division franchise has excelled at since the first game. "I love to take environments and see how we can push them and transform them," Hammoud told us, "We really inspired ourselves with reality, with real locations and real events as well... Hurricane Sandy was something we looked at closely to see how it affected Lower Manhattan, specifically."
Of course, even with that emphasis on reality, the team explored fictional environments as well, including a stranded oil tanker that will be home to one of Warlords of New York's story missions. Those fictional elements help create threads for The Division 2's narrative, which, in turn, results in a more interesting fictionalized version of the world, but one that's still heavily grounded in reality - much like the game's take on the Pentagon in Episode 2.
As far as the world of The Division franchise is concerned, the collapse of New York should show just how far things have fallen in the world at large. With the coronavirus taking a toll on the real world, it's hard to say that this type of disaster– a plague that leads to a significant collapse in a major city– isn't on the mind of people all over the world.
This steady evolution of The Division 2's world won't go unnoticed by fans. For those that have grown bored of Washington D.C.'s visual elements, New York will feel incredibly fresh. It's a testament to the level design of The Division 2 as a whole, and something that fans will certainly appreciate as they hunt down Aaron Keener.
The Division 2: Warlords of New York will be available on March 3rd, 2020, on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.