The Division Beta Period Got Pushed Back By Ubisoft Until Early 2016

Even if gamers have been waiting to try their luck in facing the Dark Zone this December scheduled closed beta event, The Division beta period got pushed back by Ubisoft until early 2016.

The open world 3rd person RPG shooter The Division has been marketed as a new experience for both casual as well hardcore players. In its Dark Zone mode, players will forge alliances or just back-stab everyone they set their sights on in order to grab some legendary loot along the way.

Because players and Ubisoft fans have already been burned by having too much hype aimed towards one of their games, Watch Dogs, this delay is seen with both praises as well as criticisms. The criticism part stems from the fact that players who wanted to try out the new game were forced to pre-order the game in order to participate in The Division’s beta event.

But a delay is not necessarily a bad thing if one would take into account the state of their games at launch day. With Assassin’s Creed Unity as well as its sequel, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, suffering from both frame rate drops as well as countless graphical bugs and glitches, consumers have started to buy their products later than their official launch date.

Ubisoft has gained a great deal of skepticism for their games’ condition at launch, with some of them not even being playable at all due to DRM issues stemming from their U-play server issues. Or simply because their games crash constantly before a day one patch has been applied.

The closed alpha of Tom Clancy’s The Division will still take place on the Xbox One gaming console, but the publication of video footage from the game has been strictly prohibited. Even if players understand that this is an alpha, expecting it to have bugs, the company still dismisses this notion. This type of behavior is easily seen during press events, with Ubisoft forcefully tampering with video footage taken on the site in order to remove any evidence that their game might be buggy during its alpha or beta stage.

The game is still set to launch three months from now, but this makes gamers, as well as critics, question their delay decision. This choice might further prove the fact that Ubisoft uses these alpha and beta events simply for marketing purposes, without actually fixing most of the issues found during said events.

Taking into account the news that The Division beta period got pushed back by Ubisoft until early 2016, it might mean that the game may suffer a delay as well. This has not been the first major delay of a AAA game related event, with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided rescheduling its launch date to August 2016, compared to its previous one in February same year.

Image source:tomclany-thedivision.ubi.com