The Division Getting Huge Overhaul Next Week

Tom Clancy's The Division is getting a massive systems overhaul with the next update, patch 1.4. From how frequent loot drops to overall difficulty, nearly every aspect of the game has been altered. Ubisoft confirmed on this week's State of the Game stream that the patch is coming to all three platforms, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One next Tuesday, the 25th October.

The developers, Ubisoft Massive, have stated their intent to make endgame maximum level content feel more inline with how the levelling experience feels. They felt that enemy scaling and gear scaling were making the power disparity between regular players and those that optimise their builds were making it hard to satisfy everyone difficulty wise.

Patch 1.4 aims to address this by altering a number of things. Re-balancing gear stats, for example consolidating related ones like the various stability stats into just a single number. Adjusting weapon damage and enemy health back so the time to kill is more inline with how it feels during levelling to eliminate how "bullet-spongy" enemies feel. And scaling content difficulty to the amount of players in a more sensible way.

Difficulty has been adjusted massively with the introduction of World Tiers, this system scales the whole game world to be appropriate to your gear score, with new tiers opening (Up to World Tier 4) once you hit certain gear score thresholds. The old Normal, Hard and Challenging options on missions simply determine the type of enemies and the amount of loot you'll find. Talking about loot, every gear set is now available regardless of if you own any DLC and you can get gear from almost any activity in the game, whether solo or in a group.

This is great news for solo players who previously could quite quickly plateau with regards to their gear. This gives them more activities and content and an opportunity to obtain the best gear in the game which was previously off-limits.

As well as these huge changes there are also performance improvements to the stuttering issues plaguing both Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

Patch 1.4 is a huge change to the game, completely reshaping the endgame and Ubisoft Massive hope it gives them a solid base to build on as they move towards the next DLC, Survival and Patch 1.5. You can read more about the changes and the philosophy behind them on Ubisoft's official The Division site.

Are these changes enough to bring you back to Tom Clancy's The Division?

Ubisoft Massive are dropping Patch 1.4 across all platforms, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One next Tuesday, 25th October.