The Division’s free Resistance update is out now
Plus a free trial
A big free update for snowy shooter The Division is out now. The Resistance update is quite a hefty one for the third-person dog-pooping sim. It adds a big new area of New York (the West Side piers), a couple of new game modes, tweaks to current multiplayer modes, and ‘exotic’ weapons like a large machinegun called “Big Alejandro”. To an old Divisioneer like me, none of it seems as enticing as the survival mode of last year, but it might appeal to those who enjoy facing wave after wave of bad men with firearms. The new ‘Resistance’ mode is essentially Ubisoft’s take on Horde mode from Gears of War.
This trailer rounds up the additions and changes. But if you want a more detailed description, you can find it in this info roundup.
The hook here is that the scattered gangs of fallen New York have united to take you down. A new spawning system means that enemies in this particular area can pop up “unexpectedly in proximity to players”. I’m presuming they still spawn out of sight, rather than blapping into being like the MMO mobs of old. But I’ve not seen the new system in action, so I can’t say for sure how well this new “dynamic” spawning works.
The Horde-like Resistance mode, meanwhile, uses a similar method of puking out baddies to shoot. A session of Resistance takes place in one of three “arenas” - a dock yard, a sewer or the interior of the docked aircraft carrier USS Intrepid. Players have to complete objectives while fending off waves of enemy gunmen from all factions. Here’s how Ubi describe it:
Difficulty will directly correlate to wave number. The deeper players venture into Resistance, the more challenging waves will become. Players will face all versions and incarnations of enemy factions to eventually enter Endless Mode. At this point in the activity, the difficulty ramps up exponentially.
There are a few smaller changes to the game at large. The Dark Zone is one of the best parts of this bullet spongey world, and it's getting changes to the way players “go rogue”. Previously, if you were exploring this wasteland as a team and one of your pals shot another agent, your whole team would be marked as rogues – targets that other players would hunt for a reward. Now, if your friend goes trigger happy, you get the choice to manually go rogue or remain a law-abiding citizen. This is to prevent accidental rogueishness, says Ubi.
You can read all the changes in full in the patch notes for 1.8. The Clancy-em-up is also having a free trial this week from December 5-10, which includes the three previous updates - Underground, Survival and Last Stand. So if you haven’t already had a dander around the frosty, fudged-up Big Apple, you can do that now for zero bucks.