The Division 2’s Revival Was Started by 5 Developers at Massive Entertainment

While Massive Entertainment – a studio under Ubisoft – has been hard at work in its post-launch support of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 since its 2019 release, developer Palle Hoffstein has revealed some of the circumstances behind this long-term support. In a series of posts on social media platform X (via Mp1st), Hoffstein wrote about “resurrecting” The Division 2 with a small team.

“When a few of us made a small team to resurrect TD2 I had zero interest in adding a year or two, just to sunset the game again,” wrote Hoffstein. “The goal, what we believed we could do, was to build something bigger and lasting. This is fun to see but there’s still so much more we want to do.”

He then went into some of the challenges behind working on the more recent content in The Division 2 as has been described in the franchise’s roadmap for 2025 and beyond, as well as the upcoming release of The Division 2: Survivors. Hoffstein noted that one of the main reasons he took on the job was because it was “interesting”.

“Launching a game is hard and I had the chance to help a couple other games do that. But this seemed even harder to do and with less of a roadmap as to how to even do it,” he explained. “In other words interesting. I have a hard time turning down interesting.”

Continuing the posts, Hoffstein also wrote about his experience in turning around games that might have believed to have been left behind by Ubisoft, including Rainbow Six Siege. Ultimately, with all the challenges associated with staffing the studio up for work on The Division 2, he noted that the studio has been quite successful despite only having started out with five people.

“I figured the biggest challenge would be staffing and yeah,” he wrote. “Studios plan staffing years in advance to keep everyone allocated and busy. We created a problem of being a team that needed positions filled that weren’t on anyone’s spreadsheet. We weren’t supposed to exist.”

“I’ve been part of two big turnarounds with Rainbow Six Siege and The Division 2. Amazing to be part of both. But we had 5 people to restart Division 2. Five! What were we thinking? Ah that was fun.”

Earlier this year, Massive Entertainment had launched the Battle for Brooklyn DLC for The Division 2. Priced at $14.99, the DLC takes players back to the first location from the original The Division all the way back in 2016 – Brooklyn – where they have to deal with enemies like a more powerful iteration of the Cleaners faction. When it comes to gameplay, the DLC brought with it new locations and activities, as well as new Hunter Riddles and Bounty Locations.

The Division 2 was also recently announced as getting its own Survivors mode. Much like the version for The Division, development on Survivors in The Division 2 is being headed up by Magnus Jansén. There is no release date yet for the mode, with Massive confirming that it is still in its early stages.

For more details about the current state of The Division 2, check out our review of Battle for Brooklyn.