The launch date of the massive 1.4 update to The Division was revealed during today's State of the Game broadcast as October 25. Servers will be offline for a three-hour maintenance window beginning at 12:30 am PT/3:30 am ET, and while the size of the patch on PC isn't known, it will weigh in at around 11GB on the PS4 and 5.7GB on the Xbox One.
The patch as it was last seen on the public test server is "pretty much" what it will be at launch, although loot drops in the Underground have been adjusted and various remaining bugs have been fixed. The total number of changes brought by the patch is staggering, as evidenced by the size of the recently-updated PTS patch notes, which covers everything from the major—the new World Tiers feature is the obvious biggie—to small detail work like reducing the damage of the MP5 by 11.1 percent.
Even so, Ubisoft has quite a bit more planned for the 1.5 update, as well as the next expansion, called Survival, which is expected to be out sometime before the end of the year. The immediate focus following the rollout of 1.4 will be on things like named weapons and gear set adjustments, but senior game designer Drew Rechner said during the stream (which you can watch below, starting at around the 59:00 mark) there's also a need to "evaluate what the hardest content in our game, the most difficult content in our game, looks like for our most hardcore players, and see if that matches the experience that they want."
As James noted in his PTS preview of the 1.4 update from a few weeks ago, "it's a faster, more rewarding experience overall," but "still stuck with a sterile open world and loot that wouldn't make the main rack in a rural Goodwill." And that's Ubisoft's real problem: For all the work it's put into getting this update right, if it can't serve up an interesting game world, it's not going to be able to keep players coming. Hopefully the final version of this patch will take a meaningful step in that direction.
