Despite facing numerous obstacles outside of their control, at least a few teams of players for the newest raid in The Division 2 have finally beaten Operation Dark Hours on console, after nearly a day and a half of trying to complete it. With PC players having much less trouble and taking less time to complete the same raid, developer Massive Entertainment has said it is open to the possibility of making changes to Dark Hours on consoles.
Massive has voiced that it will be looking into player feedback as a necessary approach to making changes to the console version of The Division 2's raid, which went live last week. It appears while Ubisoft has declared the Operations Dark Hours raid "the toughest challenge in the history of the franchise," it will look into potentially making technical adjustments in order to compensate for the shortcomings console players must deal with in comparison to those on PC.
PC players have both the luxury of playing with a more precise mouse and keyboard layout, while also being able to run the game at a higher frame rate, two features which make playing any shooter more user-friendly. Division 2 console players are finding things tougher thanks to dual analog control, as well as a frame rate cap of 30fps, which noticeably drops whenever there's a lot of moving parts on-screen, something the raid's Razorback boss creates issues with during certain stages of the final battle.
"....raid difficulty is certainly feedback that we have been looking at since the release of Dark Hours, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that tweaks will be made moving forward."
The same team which beat the new raid on consoles has since been able to cut down completion time to just under three hours. While this is a significant improvement from the initial 36-hour time clock, the fastest time to beat the raid on PC has been clocked in at 20 minutes.
Given the difficulty players had, specifically on consoles during opening weekend, it now makes more sense as to why Ubisoft decided to eliminate matchmaking for Dark Hours, as efficient both cooperative play and communication are needed to overcome the raid's boss fights.
Operation Dark Hours is part of Update 3 for The Division 2, which was delayed from its original April release. That delay, however, did little to slow down sales of Ubisoft's sequel to the original 2016 game, which wasn't just the best selling game for March, but as of mid-April was the second-best selling game in 2019, trailing only Square Enix's Kingdom Hearts 3.
The Division 2 is available for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
Source: Eurogamer