RaZ0r! wrote on Jun 12, 2024, 12:10:
I've read this a few times now and I am just not seeing anything that says I need to start over? Can someone point that out to me in the notes? I logged in last night on the one character I have always had and was offered all the man hunts I had missed before to play.

That's not in the patch notes because they haven't implemented seasonal characters yet. Those are coming with the next season, later this year, as shown on their Year 6 roadmap. All the previous manhunts are available now as a part of the Season 1 focus on 'One Endgame For All,' since all that used to be locked behind the expansion and they wanted to let everyone catch up on what they missed.

I've read this a few times now and I am just not seeing anything that says I need to start over? Can someone point that out to me in the notes? I logged in last night on the one character I have always had and was offered all the man hunts I had missed before to play.

I enjoyed the single/solo player experience and 100%-ed (map completion except DZs) the first Division (~45 hours) as well as The Division 2 + WoNY as far as story and side missions are concerned. I would only be interested in additional side/story missions.
Ubi are not very good at communicating. From reading their blurbs, I'm still not sure if we are getting any new actual content with this season or if it is just the old content. And I don't care about grinding, gear levels, exclusive weapons or weird game modes. I only care about actual story/mission content.

Oh well... guess I'm going to have to keep waiting for TD3 for that to happen...

Well, this veteran thinks it's about damned time they implemented a more conventional season model. It was fun at first to just hop back in and blow through limited-time events with the same character, but my enthusiasm for that wore off quickly... I even bought the battle pass for the first few go-'rounds, but it wasn't long before all the content was just a slightly remixed repeat of what they had before and very little of it ever posed much of a challenge for a stacked endgame build. So by the fourth or fifth season, I was no longer willing to stick it out for the full reward track, it had become a fairly monotonous chore. This new one is going to be the 15th or 16th season (!), so they no doubt have tons of data pointing to the fact that others have lost interest in that grind in the same way I had. They need to be able to experiment with more significant gameplay alterations to make it interesting again, and it's just not possible to do that without potentially screwing up game-wide balance in unforeseen ways, especially when trying to account for all the people who have put in 100s or 1000s of hours of playtime over the years refining their loadouts to peak efficiency...

So yeah, you're gonna have to start over, but progression will be accelerated and it'll be much more rewarding when you aren't automatically trashing 98% of all loot drops. The campaign actually is not that long (only a couple dozen hours), but they've also made specific mention of having flexibility in how you reach the endgame, so I doubt you're going to be forced to play through it the same way you would with a fresh character previously. Then when the season ends, all your XP and loot is transferred over to your non-seasonal characters, so it's not going to be a case of your time being "wasted" if you participate. It's a big change, sure, but like the other big change (no longer requiring ownership of the expansion to unlock max level and all proper endgame activities), it shows they're willing to make drastic adjustments in the interest of keeping the game more alive for longer. Which is certainly needed for the franchise, now that they've axed the F2P stop-gap game and this is all we have until The Division 3 eventually comes out.

Ugh, terrible idea, force people to go through from level 1 and unlock everything over again? Div2 is way too long of a game to make that Diablo 2-3-4 seasonal model appealing, to me and probably most players.

Probably going to look decent to brand new players, I would guess, but all the veterans still playing will probably finally uninstall.