The Division update 1.1: Incursion mission proving too tough for lead dev
New Falcon Lost mission on Challenge Mode said to be so difficult a Ubisoft Massive team couldn't finish it in a full day.
The Division update 1.1, which will deliver the first major Incursion to Ubisoft's popular MMO shooter, will provide a challenge so difficult that the game's lead designer has been able to complete it yet.
On April 12, developer Ubisoft Massive will deploy a wide-ranging update to The Division across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Among many tweaks and changes coming with the update will be Incursions, which are essentially new missions custom-designed for high-rank players.
The first of these Incursions is called Falcon Lost. Details on this mission are thin for now, but it is confirmed that there are no checkpoints, which means teams will need to start over if all members are killed.
Lead designer Mathias Karlson has revealed in a community podcast that all Incursions will come at a default "hard" setting, which is said to be the equivalent to the hardest difficulty (called Challenge Mode) on current missions.
However, the Challenge Mode difficulty of an Incursion is one grade higher still, Karlson said.
"I have not beaten it [Falcon Lost] on Challenge mode," Karlson claimed.
"It needs to have been beaten once by one team [at the studio] for it to be published, just so we know it can be done."
Speaking in the same podcast, Massive's Andrada Greciuc expanded on the degree in which the Ubisoft Massive team is struggling with the Falcon Lost Incursion.
"I have tried it with three of my team, but I don't think we've been able to beat it," she said.
"We tried to beat it for an entire day. We tried to beat it, I think, six times. I know we beat it when there was an exploit. We haven't tried after that bug was fixed."
Elsewhere in the podcast, Karlson said that Incursions will shake up the standard format for combat in The Division, with new enemies to encounter, one of which is rumoured to be an armoured vehicle.
"Incursions are going to be our most difficult and most highly rewarding challenges in the game," he said.
"It's going to be the toughest thing you can do, but also the source of the coolest stuff that you can get. Building a plan and executing it really well is going to be key."
On Wednesday, Ubisoft Massive released the first images of Falcon Lost.
The full 1.1 patch notes were recently released; you can see all the new features, balance changes, and bug fixes here.
Another free update for The Division, called Conflict, will deliver an Incursion set in Columbus Circle in May. Following that update will be three paid expansions, which you can learn more about here.