The Division 2: Artificial Difficulty and Devalued Progression
The Division 2 is an ARPG whose endgame ended up being reduced to destroying 20 items of the same type to level up your Expertise or, alternatively, using gear you don’t even want just to progress. That loop isn’t depth; it’s forced repetition. Even so, the community chased it because the incentive was clear: reaching that additional 30% weapon damage and 30% protection. The problem isn’t the reward, but the foundation it’s built on.
With the intention of refreshing the game — and probably reigniting hype for a future The Division 3 — a new layer was added: PROTOTYPE. In theory, more difficulty and better loot. In practice, NPCs with more health and more damage. More bullet sponges. Is that complexity?. In 2026, with how much AI design has advanced in the industry, are we still equating difficulty with inflated stats?. There’s no real leap in enemy behavior, coordination, adaptation, or decision-making. Just higher numbers.
The contradiction grows when we see that PROTOTYPE is practically designed for a single mode: ESCALATION. And even more ironic, starting at level 6, the use of cover is penalized in a game whose identity has always been tactical, cover-based combat. If the solution to increasing difficulty is punishing the core gameplay, something is fundamentally misaligned. On top of that, if optimal progression is concentrated in one single mode, the rest of the content loses relevance. What’s the point of playing other activities if the minimum loot in ESCALATION already surpasses the best you can obtain outside of it?.
The hardest hit is to the game’s economy. The minimum values on Prototype gear surpass what used to be considered a god roll. Materials accumulated over years for recalibration and optimization lose their weight. Expertise 30 and a maxed-out library stop being meaningful differentiators. What took years of farming can now be obtained through matchmaking, without major structural investment, even by buying Prototype caches. That isn’t healthy catch-up design; it’s retroactively devaluing the effort of the most loyal player base.
This isn’t about being against innovation. The game needs to evolve. But evolving shouldn’t mean invalidating previous progress, concentrating the entire system into a single mode, or replacing design depth with numerical inflation. The Division 2 has solid foundations: world-building, gameplay, identity, and a community that has endured years of questionable decisions. The issue isn’t a lack of potential. It’s a lack of clear direction. The developers are sitting on a gold mine that can still be properly developed, but they need a coherent vision that respects the time and investment of the players who are still here.