The Division’s October patch boosted it back to launch numbers

When Tom Clancy’s The Division launched earlier this year, we were pretty impressed with it. Despite the visual downgrade and years of delays, it was a great looking game with some fun hooks when it, for all that trouble, should’ve been a big dumpster fire. Unfortunately, the game didn’t have as much life in it as Ubisoft had hoped, and problems with PVP sent players from the game in droves. Instead of ignoring the problems and just releasing new content, though, Ubisoft went back and fixed a bunch of stuff before they dove into more new content.

“Some players left the game earlier than what we thought, then we had to make that tough call – do we keep providing them with extra content, or do we stop everything for a while, settle down, and fix everything?” asked Ubisoft’s Anne Blondel, VP of live operations, in an interview with PCGamesN. They ultimately went with the latter and saw that mass exodus rewind.

“Since the release of patch 1.4, we went back to the daily active users we had at launch because people were [so impressed],” Blondel said. “People realized we meant what we said.”

Ubisoft listened to fans of The Division

Ubisoft worked with the community to handle major concerns and set up a publicly accessible test server to continue pulling in that feedback, and Blondel said all that work has turned the game’s community “back to positive mode.”

That suggests a bright future for not only The Division as a franchise, but as a single game. We put it on our “most disappointing” games list, but maybe it needs a second look.