In a recent investor call, Ubisoft director Yves Guillermot confirmed that the game would be delayed until the first quarter of 2016. “The Division is an RPG online game. Those games take more time to be complete, and we want to be sure we have enough feedback from consumers from alpha and betas to polish it as much as possible before the launch so that it comes to the market with the best experience possible,” Guillermot said. Sounds good to us.
Tom Clancy's The Division is currently in closed Alpha, so it’s still under a small control group. Testing key aspects of the game is important here, and they can slowly adjust to accommodate more people and get even more feedback that they can apply towards the online game. They can later open it up to a bigger group of people – or leave it completely open – so that they can test for everything that could go wrong and troubleshoot from there.
The Division’s development team has high expectations of themselves, so we can probably expect them to turn out something top-notch. They’ll be showing us more at E3, and we’re hoping that after they show us more gameplay footage, they’ll be dating the Alpha. If they do, then that means they’re picking up the pace and there’s a good chance we’ll be getting a playable Beta before the last quarter of 2015.
The chance to clock in some hands-on time and contributing towards the final product makes the delay worth it, don’t you think? With a playable Alpha or Beta made available to us, the wait won’t be too bad.
