Video Game / The Division 2

The fate of the Free World is on the Line

Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is an open-world Third-Person Shooter Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game under the Tom Clancy brand and a sequel to The Division, which was released worldwide on March 15, 2019. Like the first game, it was developed by Massive Entertainment and published by the company owner, Ubisoft. It takes place throughout Washington D.C. in the summer, in contrast to New York in the first game when it was set in winter.

The game takes place six months after New York City-based Division agents and their allies in the Joint Task Force were able to secure the downtown area from various hostile factions prowling around in the aftermath of the collapse of federal and state government control. In terms of the story, it takes place seven months after the Dollar Flu virus outbreak began and led to the collapse of numerous countries.

Division agents based in Washington D.C. were summoned to take control of the city in the absence of the federal government, which collapsed during the outbreak. The only authority power are numerous warlords and armed groups vying to take control of various parts of the city, leaving civilians not in their areas of influence to fend for themselves.

The game's first paid expansion pack, Warlords of New York, has D.C.'s agents getting shipped out to lower Manhattan to find and hunt down Aaron Keener and his network of rogue Agents, who have since gained a significant foothold in the city since the events of the first game that transpired eight months prior.

Ubisoft announced on September 2023 that Division 3 is in development.

---

The Division 2 provides examples of:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: The Warlords of New York expansion introduced the SHD Level, a different leveling system that slowly increases the player's stats across the board, at least up until level 1000 when players only get one Scavenging point per level (read: negligible amounts of crafting materials). Thanks to at least one cheater, it's been discovered that the cap wasn't 9999 as people assumed, and it likely isn't capped at all. Slightly downplayed after Title Update 12, which added more useful (but still negligible) materials for optimizing gear to the Scavenging point rewards table.
• Action Bomb: One of the Outcast enemy archetypes lights himself on fire and charges at nearby players before blowing up, much like elite Cleaners did in the first game.
• Affectionate Parody: The Hollywood global event, as its name might imply, is one of these to action-packed Hollywood movies. Enemies have "energy shields" that reduce overall damage and can only be disabled by explosion damage. The ideal way to approach this event is to treat the game as if it's a Michael Bay movie. The game even adds Hit Stop to enemies defeated by explosions for dramatic effect.
• After the End: The first game essentially took place during a State of Emergency. The sequel straight out takes place after the total collapse of Western Civilization; nature has significantly reclaimed much of the city, and the streets are significantly emptier compared to New York's. You won't see civilians randomly wandering the streets, unless they're an organized scavenging patrol from one of the few remaining civilized settlements.
• All There in the Manual: Supplemental audio logs from the CIA fill in how the rest of the world is dealing with the Dollar Flu:
  • North and Central America in general have been hit hard by the virus with densely populated cities having taken the worst of the damage, but many of the rural areas have largely escaped from its effects.
  • South America has completely collapsed, with warlords and cartels fighting with government forces over control the region.
  • Europe has largely managed to contain the outbreak, but the breakdown of global trade has caused severe food shortages in the continent.
  • It's unclear how badly the Middle East has been affected, but they have been desperately trying to trade oil for badly needed food and medicine.
  • Asia is a mix, with some nations being hit hard, while others like Japan being able to successfully quarantine, though they face supply shortages. Notably, China claims it has the outbreak under control despite evidence of mass exoduses from its major cities, while India is on the verge of total collapse which is an issue given it is a nuclear power.
  • Africa, due to its relative isolation and light population density, has largely been unaffected by the outbreak.
• Alternate History: The game was released in 2019, but is set seven months after the initial Green Poison outbreak (2015), making it July 2016.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game as a whole is the logical conclusion to all the nerfs that happened in The Division. Medkits are now armor plates that take a few seconds to apply, all skill-based healing options are heals-over-time, weapon talents are more situational, and players can only carry two grenade types.
  • Weapon mods are now one-time permanent unlockables, moving them away from their tendency to be frustratingly hard to find Stat Sticks in the previous game (which also could be lost if players deconstructed/sold guns with them equipped and didn't remember to remove them beforehand). They will also now have negative aspects to them as well, so players will have to think carefully about what to apply rather than just stacking buff after buff with no drawbacks.
  • Various player-made technical alpha videos revealed that the Dark Zone is now divided into three separate areas, each roughly the size of one DZ district in the previous game. The player count was also reduced from 24 to 12. Presumably, this works in favor of both parties - the smaller areas mean that Manhunts have less space to run away from battle, and the smaller player count means that Manhunts are presented with a 4v8 situation at worst, rather than a 4v20 dogpile.
  • To compensate for the larger pool of crafting material types in the game, each material's Flavor Text points out where to get that material (e.g. "obtained from deconstruction", "Scouts have observed higher amounts of this material from (insert faction here)", etc.), so players don't have to waste time trying to find out where certain materials spawn.
  • Unlike the main story missions, side missions and free roam activities respectively give roughly 33% and 10% of the EXP required for the next level, giving players the option to make the grind to level 30 less tedious if they so desire by holding off on doing these activities until after the story is finished.
  • The shooting range offers four shooting lanes with different sets of targets (e.g. groups of Mooks, moving targets, close- to mid-range, and finally long-range) so that players can test their weapons and gear in different scenarios. The targets' health can even be adjusted to simulate normal, Veteran, Elite, and Named enemies.
  • Title Update 5 enabled Exotic drops (including those that are normally crafted) from Heroic difficulty bosses, provided the player possibly receiving the drop already has (or had) a prior copy of said Exotic. This allows players to drop Exotics for other players who are down on their luck.
  • Title Update 6's biggest change is the addition of Targeted Loot. All districts have a slightly higher chance to drop a specific type of loot, and missions are also weighted towards a different type of loot if a player wants to farm something even more specific. All of these locations change daily to break up the monotony of farming.
  • Title Update 8 addressed a number of long-standing player base complaints:
    • The "budget system" was removed with this update, which allowed all attributes on the same piece of gear to roll random values independently of each other, possibly with all of them maxed out (a "god roll"). Each attribute also has a small meter underneath its name to show how close to maxed it is, saving players the trouble of having to look up third-party sources for this information.
    • A "Recalibration Library" was added to the recalibration table, which allows players to extract attributes and talents from gear and recalibrate them freely onto future equipment, alleviating the need to hoard dozens of gear pieces for recalibration.
    • To address the complaints of loot being overly complicated, most gear talents were consolidated to the backpack and body armor slots and weapons now have only one talent (almost all of them were either buffed or made easier to use in combat to compensate). Talents also had their attribute requirements removed. Lastly, attributes were cut down to a more manageable number, with most gear pieces having a "Core Attribute" (weapon damage, armor, or skill tier), one or two minor attributes, and one gear slot on the mask, body armor and backpack slots.
    • Skill power has been reworked to skill tier, making it easier at a glance to tell how powerful their skills are. Skill mods also had their skill power requirement removed as a result, eliminating the need to carry several mods for the same mod slot to account for varying levels of skill power.
    • Exotics had their talents and attributes rebalanced to move them away from best-in-slot must-haves into something more akin to Path of Exile's uniques — supplements to very specific builds as opposed to Jack of All Trades gear that trivialized most content in the game.
    • For the challenge gamers, difficulty was rebalanced to make Challenging and Heroic difficulties actually worthy of their names, as well as bringing back the Legendary difficulty from the first game for specific missions.
• The Apunkalypse: While the apocalypse is still very recent and the first game's factions didn't have much of it, it is in full effect for the Hyena gang. They dress in punk fashions, tag everything in graffiti, and murder indiscriminately anyone they encounter in order to live wild drug-fueled lives of hendonism. At least until the Sheriff puts them all down.
• Arrange Mode: After hitting level 30, the world map gets subjected to the Black Tusk invasion, which changes up each mission's enemy and loot placements. Players are also introduced to the optional Heroic difficulty and the concept off leveling up Control Points for a chance at nabbing better quality loot.
• Artistic License – Geography: While D.C. is an extremely faithful recreation, there are a few errors in the city's geography.
  • The White House sits on a hill overlooking the Ellipse and Washington Monument; there is no such hill in the real city, the building itself sits perfectly level with the Ellipse and has no vertical incline of any kind.
  • The Capitol Building is set much farther back on the Mall than in real life. When standing roughly parallel to the Newseum (Viewpoint Museum in game), the Capitol Building should be much closer to the player, but is still relatively distant.
  • One PvP FAQ states that some Conflict maps, while grounded and inspired by Washington D.C., are not a 1:1 visual representation because the team did not want to sacrifice PVP balance for authenticity.
• Ascended Meme:
  • Apparently, Sergeant Ramos has had enough of getting saved by the Division at Lexington Event Center.^note Lexington Event Center was the most replayed mission in the first game, with an official infographic noting that Sergeant Ramos was freed 55 million times across all platforms at the time of its creation. Pretty much every line of dialogue from said mission has gotten stuck in players' heads, including "Negative, Ramos".
  • One of the first official TD2 tweets simply read "Fixed a weird door.", addressed to fans who thought all the police car doors had "POLCE" emblazoned on them.^note This was a Running Gag in the first game's patch notes after version 1.5, although to their credit, they weren't exactly lying about some doors being weird. The embedded video also subtly references the fanbase's obsession with the closing door animation in the first game, which eventually got an in-game achievement dedicated to closing a certain number of doors.
  • The Warlords of New York Exotic light machine gun, Bullet King, is named after an often-farmed Rikers boss that spawned near a safe house. One Rikers-related side mission also has players hunting down a boss named Bullet Queen.^note Bullet King was memetic enough to spawn Renaissance era-styled fan art and extremely diehard fans would sometimes make pilgrimages to the real life location of his spawn point, which otherwise doesn't have anything noteworthy about it.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Almost every enemy archetype that isn't a Mook has a bright red weak point somewhere on their person. If shooting it doesn't result in them taking near-lethal damage from the resulting explosions, it usually disables a critical skill they possess, like an Operator or Controller's gadgets or a Medic's ability to revive his allies.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Partial example: the leaders of all the various factions are high-level elites. That means they're tougher and more damaging than most other enemies, but they're no stronger than any other high-level elites you might encounter in side missions.
• Auto-Revive: If you carry a Revive Hive as one of your skills, it'll drop automatically and get you back up if you get downed. The trade-off is that unlike manual usage, it'll run out instantly after reviving you.
• Ax-Crazy: The Outcasts include suicide bombers, flame thrower goons, and guys with sledgehammers that just exist to kill as many people as possible before being put down.
• Back Stab: Downplayed in that there isn't a whole lot of stealth in this game, but the Mantis, an Exotic SRS, simulates this trope to an extent. It comes equipped with a digital scope that specifically tells the player which enemies aren't targeting them, with a special damage bonus against these enemies.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • At the end of Warlords of New York, while Keener is killed and his plot to deploy Eclipse is foiled, he manages to activate ANNA, uniting every rogue agent across the country, which will prove to be an even graver long term threat to the Division. In addition, Black Tusk notes that they benefit from this as well since they can take advantage of the Division being kept busy trying to deal with the rogues.
  • The post game event concerning hunting surviving high ranking rogue agents ends in an even worse state for The Division, as the Division were accused of treason by Faye Lau, a former high-ranked mentor agent turned rogue who shoots the President, himself siding with the rogue elements and Black Tusk as well.
• BFG: The player's Signature Weapon is some form of this. The Survivalist gets a crossbow with explosive-tipped bolts, the Demolitionist gets a grenade launcher, the Sharpshooter gets a .50 caliber sniper rifle, and the Gunner gets a man-portable Gatling gun.
• Big Bad Wannabe: Like the factions in the previous game, The Hyenas, a loose coalition of crimals who banded together for survival, the True Sons, JTF officials who went rogue, and the Outcasts, renegade healthy carries who were wronged by the government, are all credible threats in their own rights, but the true threat are the Black Tusks who appear in the endgame. Not only the Black Tusks much better organized, disciplined, and armed then the other three factions, they also have access to Division Technology.
• Bland-Name Product: The Richter & Kaiser Gear Set is a parody of Heckler & Koch. The R&K logo◊ is styled very similarly to H&K's, and they are both a GmbH.
• Bloodless Carnage: Like the first game, the outcome of pretty much any gunfights are clean.
• Body Armor as Hit Points: Players get an armor bar that functions much like enemies' armor does, and "healing" this time around involves replacing broken armor plates with new ones instead of a syringe. The process takes a few seconds and leaves the player vulnerable to flanking. Enemies call out repair skills as the player "healing", and armor repair and healing are sometimes used interchangeably in item and skill descriptions. Things start getting a little silly when status effects come into play — Poison normally damages health directly to a player, but damages enemy NPC armor first (aside from armor-plated units, which technically have Subsystem Damage in place of an armor bar), and players inflicted with Bleeding or Burning get their armor drained first before their health.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: The Black Tusk echo logs strongly imply that the Vice President's death by suicide was actually an assassination carried out by a pair of Secret Service agents, who killed him on behalf of Black Tusk in exchange for safe passage out of the city. They are promptly Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves by the Black Tusk Special Unit.
• Boss in Mook's Clothing: Named enemies or Rogue Agents with randomly generated skills can become this, depending on what they get. For instance, an Assault enemy (in other words, the Mook archetype) can spawn in with the ability to turn himself invincible for a few seconds, coupled by an annoying and/or hard-hitting skill such as a Striker Drone or Incinerator Turret.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • The 1886 is a surprisingly hard-hitting lever-action rifle^*think of repeaters in Red Dead Redemption and its sequel and possibly the oldest gun type in the game.
  • The Dodge City Gunslinger holster◊ is a piece of Exotic Gear that looks about as antique as the aforementioned 1886. Appropriately, it boosts the damage and draw speed of revolvers.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • Starting with the Season 3 Manhunt, the in-game cash shop started selling season level skips for 100 Premium Credits per level (or US$1.00).
  • For certain values of "victory", players can easily trivialize the grind in an Apparel Event by simply buying the cache keys required to get the remaining cosmetics in the event cache.
• The Cameo: Faye Lau makes a brief appearance when the Agent restores the nationwide SHD Network.
• Charged Attack:
  • The Jammer Pulse and Gunner-exclusive Banshee Pulse both require the user to hold down its skill button to get the maximum effect distance. In the Banshee Pulse's case, the range is a trade-off for a narrower area of effect cone.
  • The Sharpshooter's TAC-50 requires the user to stay scoped in for a few seconds to mitigate scope sway.
  • Starting with Title Update 4, Signature Weapon Ammo is obtained when a small orange meter next to the ammo counter is filled up, at which point the next enemy that the player kills drops the ammo. Actions that used to increase ammo drop chance (the player or their allies performing Specialization-related kills) instead fill up this meter faster.
  • The Exotic Nemesis sniper rifle requires the user to hold down the trigger until fully charged to deliver maximum damage.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Much like the first game, the item rarities have the same WoW-inspired color scheme. Gear Sets are still teal and Exotics are still orange, like the first game. Lastly, Signature Weapons are salmon pink.
• Continuity Nod:
  • A number of collectibles reveal what happened in New York after the events of the first game. The most notable nod is shown after TD2's Player Character reconnects ISAC nationwide, which plays a cutscene where Faye Lau is shown back on her feet and kicking Cleaner ass.
  • The "Your Killer" Flavor Text for each Hunter makes reference to a number of Exotics from the first game that have the same exact text.
• Cosmetic Award: Players can find bits of clothes throughout the city as they loot chests and backpacks, starting out looking like a hardbitten government operative and ending up looking like someone who just went on a shopping spree at their local thrift shop.
• Creator Cameo: Yannick Banchereau, one of the franchise's developers and a streamer on State of the Game since its inception, shows up as a hidden boss with a rather convoluted unlock method. Despite his mook archetype, he has the attack patterns of a Hunter.
• Crossover: A set of Resident Evil-themed outfits was added to the game to celebrate said franchise's 25th anniversary.
• Cult: The Outcasts are more or less an Apocalypse Cult of extremely angry civilians - many of whom are carriers of the virus - who were treated extremely poorly by the US Government, ranging from being thrown into solitary confinement, left to die as the government abandoned entire cities, seeing government thugs like what would eventually become the True Sons massacre protesters and refugees, and so on and so forth, leading them to become a pack of fanatics who believe sinners (read: everyone not them) must be purged. Combat dialogue consists of creepy psuedo-religious rambling, the areas they control are often infested with occult-like ritual furnishings, and they even employ suicide bombers to terrorise civilians. Even their leader is introduced with trees positioned behind their head to resemble demon horns.
• Cutscene Incompetence: You and Kelso have a mortally-injured Keener dead to rights, but the two of you give him enough time to start screwing around with his watch and activate the Rogue network.
• Damager, Healer, Tank: In this game, it's Offensive, Utility and Defensive, although "Utility" encompasses anything regarding skills rather than just healing. This includes skill builds made for burst or sustained damage.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Camp White Oak has an Invaded version, despite the original version already featuring the Black Tusk.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Using an emote near children in settlements will cause them to follow suit, and it's every bit as cute as it sounds.
  • Each of the factions has some sort of victory animation for when the player dies. The Black Tusks in particular are notable for checking the player character's pulse just to make sure they're actually dead.
  • Taking a page from Rockstar Games, NPC civilian and JTF forces live their own lives instead of wandering aimlessly. For example, if one were to follow an allied group that's currently scavenging for supplies, they would eventually come across supplies and carry them back to the nearest settlement. To alleviate boredom between engagements, the civilians will occasionally engage in small talk, such as brief stories from before the Green Poison outbreak or talking about the player.
  • One of the True Son strongholds is defended by an enormous "GAU-8 Avenger" gatling cannon, a weapon so big that planes are built around the weapon to accommodate its sheer size and power. Where in Earth would they have gotten one? In the Air and Space Museum there is indeed an A-10 Warthog on display, whose GAU-8 has been crudely torn off by the same faction.
  • Since the game's Washington, DC setting is a 1:1 realistic recreation, the in-game Photo Mode likewise has realistic coordinates for where the photo was taken. Plug them into any real-life map application and the same location shows up. In Google Maps's case, the in-game DC is actually so accurate that Google automatically geotags in-game photos as if they were the real thing.
• Diabolus ex Machina:
  • When you complete the final mission in the Capitol, you're treated to a cinematic showing the main characters celebrating, while it cuts to the various places you've retaken. For some reason, there's some paramilitary group at each of them. When the cinematic ends, you're shown that the entire map has been retaken by a new faction. While the existence of the faction had some very limited foreshadowing, them undoing all of your work in a single instant is not, let alone your lack of any ability to resist the invasion until after it's already succeeded.
• Downer Ending: the Season 4 Manhunt ends with the Division being declared traitors and terrorists after Faye Lau frames them for the murder of President Ellis. Notably, this was originally planned to be the definitive ending of 2's story content until a surprise announcement in early 2021 that new content was being planned.
• Dressing as the Enemy: The theme of the first Apparel Cache Event revolves around outfits that look like one of the four factions' outfits.
• Dynamic Difficulty: After reaching the highest possible World Tier, all Control Points and free roam activities display an Alert Level of +1 on their map icons, indicating their difficulty increase from Easy to Normal. Completing free roam activities raises the Alert Level to +2, +3 and eventually +4, corresponding to Hard, Challenging and Heroic difficulty, respectively. Completing harder Control Points rewards more loot and occasionally a crafting blueprint for a weapon mod.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: "Discovery Mode" for the Operation: Dark Hours raid, which gives every enemy less health and allows for matchmaking. Granted, it doesn't actually mock anybody, but Discovery Mode parties are excluded from the raid drop pool, so that means no Eagle Bearer M4 or Specialization-boosting Gear Sets.
• Eccentric A.I.:
  • Invoked: While ISAC, the AI that lets the sleeper agents of the US government coordinate and use advanced technology in case of societal collapse, isn't sentient (or is he?), its deadpan reactions and Literal Mindedness results in more than a few headaches. For example, at one point, as the protagonist is trapped by rebel soldiers, Mission Control asks it to "find a way through the vault". ISAC searches for "finding a way out of the vault", which understandably doesn't show up in any database.
  Manny: Piece of shit wristwatch!
  • ANNA Zigzags this. Throughout Aaron Keener's boss fight on Liberty Island, it's a pretty cut-and-dry AI with no personality to speak of. It wasn't until the release of the Descent game mode and its unlockable comms collectibles that expanded upon it's backstory, with the very first collectible featuring a discussion by two NSA programmers commenting on how often the AI cracks snide jokes at its creators' collective expense.
• Elite Mooks: Unlike the first game, where being an Elite only amounted to having more health and armor, Elite enemies in this game either have more effective skills or entirely new ones. For example, Elite Hyena Rushers have better self-heals and Elite Black Tusk Controllers have their EMP grenades upgraded to deal damage instead of simply disabling their enemies' skills.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Every enemy factions in the game has a fairly even 50/50 gender split among both basic units and named bosses. Even the Cleaners in Warlords of New York expansion who in the previous game were mostly comprised of Italian male sanitation workers, seems to have expanded their ranks to includes women and members from other ethnicities and occupations.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In the Air and Space Museum mission, a True Sons soldier defects to the JTF and opens a path for the Agent since they cannot tolerate the True Sons attempting to build operational missiles. While the True Sons have been using chemical weapons on civilians without batting an eye, a player that's never been to the museum might wonder why a soldier would defect over some museum piece missiles. For the record, the Air and Space Museum has both an honest to god Minuteman missile and a Soviet ICBM on display to the public.
  • A Classified Mission has you rescue another True Sons defector who leaked intel to the Division. When your rescue him, he states it was because True Sons have been gruesome experiments on prisoners, especially an asymptomatic carrier.
  • In the Tidal Basin stronghold mission, despite being a Black Tusk officer, Schaeffer frantically tries to order Wyvern not to destroy the White House via missile strike.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment:
  • Downplayed. A number of Exotics in the game are designed after the various enemy factions. While they're not exclusive to them, they tend to drop at a higher rate from the appropriate faction (or, in some cases, a specific boss). For example, Coyote's Mask, a Hyenas-themed ballistic mask and helmet, has a higher drop rate from Coyote herself in the Jefferson Trade Center. The Chatterbox, a Hyenas-themed P90 with one of their signature cans of Spice hanging off of it, can be found in Hyenas lockboxes.
  • The four new skill platforms introduced in Warlords of New York are unlocked one at a time, each obtained from defeating Aaron Keener's elite rogue Agent bodyguards.
• Expy: Many of the museums and organizations in D.C. are faithful in design to their real-life counterparts, but use different names.
  • Construction trucks are found all over the city, and use the exact same type face and font as the real life Clark Construction.
  • The District Union Arena is based on the Verizon Center.
  • The Potomac Event Center is a dead ringer for the JFK Performing Arts Center (which hilariously enough is what the in-game building has written in big white letters on its facade.)
  • The local police, while displaying accurate livery, is known as the District of Columbia Police. D.C.'s police force is formally known as the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD).
  • The Manning Institution is based on the Smithsonian Institution.
  • In Dark Zone East, Capital Station is the game's equivalent of Union Station.
  • The National Gallery of Art is known here as the Museum of Contemporary Art, the East Building also lacks the famous "sharp corner" architectural feature.
  • The Viewpoint Museum is located in the same spot as the Newseum.
  • The Ring Safehouse in the Mall is located in the real life Hirshhorn Museum.
  • The Theater Settlement is located in what is called the Warner Theater, which is based on Ford's Theater.
  • The Jefferson Trade Center is located where the real life Environmental Protection Agency headquarters is and even features the Federal Triangle Metro station at its entrance.
  • The National Organization of Aeronautics is based on NASA.
  • The Museum of Native Peoples is a direct copy of the Museum of the American Indian.
• Fantastic Drug: Zigzagged. The Hyenas utilize a drug called "Spice" and one of their missions is to get more innocent people in D.C. addicted to the stuff. It's never clearly elaborated what exactly Spice is - the closest the game ever gets to an explanation only shows up when one gets killed by a Hyenas Rusher, where the Rusher's Flavor Text has a quote from Agent Kelso speculating that Spice might be PCP (and possibly some other things).
• Fog of Doom:
  • The Hyenas can disorient and/or poison Division agents with the drugs they carry on them — this takes on the appearance of a sickly green cloud that harms players if they stand too long inside them.
  • Two variants of the Chem Launcher leave behind a cloud of chemicals that have different effects. The Firestarter leaves behind flammable vapors that are easily ignited, while the Oxidizer leaves behind a purple cloud of corrosives that deal Damage Over Time.
  • The reason Dark Zone East (the area north of Constitution Avenue NE and around Capital Station) was walled off was because a container holding DC-62 (some sort of antiviral agent designed to be sprayed around) blew up, causing the stuff to billow around the region. Although players don't actually get to see this happen, some areas in DZ East have a distinct yellow tinge to them.
  • For that matter, Dark Zone East didn't suffer that particular blight even half as bad as Dark Zone West, formerly known as the district of Georgetown. The residents voted to be the first place where DC-62 was used to counteract Green Poison, and there are entire swathes of the district where the streets and buildings are so covered in yellow powder that you can't see the original bricks. There are even sprayer trucks (presumably still full of the stuff) sitting in the middle of the streets, abandoned mid-sweep when people realized that this cure was as bad as the disease.
  • For DC-62 itself, while it IS an effective antiviral, it's also generally anti-anything organic - a building ISAC leads you to shows the researchers inside were killed when it was released.
  • Prior to Warlords of New York, the Pestilence Exotic light machine gun caused this to enemies it killed, leaving behind a brown cloud that causes Damage Over Time to anyone dumb or unfortunate enough to linger in it. If the cloud somehow managed to kill an enemy, that enemy also left behind a cloud, resulting in a possible chain reaction if set up right.
  • Enemies killed via headshot during the Reanimated Global Event had their heads explode into a poisonous green vapor that looked like a Palette Swap of the Oxidizer.
• From Bad to Worse: Not only is the federal government long gone by the time the game starts, but there's suggestion that the president and most of the cabinet were killed quickly when the crisis started, leaving out immediate successors who can take control of the government. The presence of the Air Force One wreck on the Capitol Reflecting Pool reinforces this.
  • And at the end of the main campaign, Black Tusk invades D.C.
  • At the end of Warlords of New York, Keener posthumously unites all rogue agents with the ANNA network, Faye Lau has joined Black Tusk, and Black Tusk plans to destroy the Division while they're busy dealing with the rogue agents.
• Gallows Humor: During a raid on a prison hijacked by True Sons, you can come across an area to dump dead bodies, marked as such by the soldiers. Stepping a little further into the dead body storage has this charming message, surrounded by body bags:

  IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU'RE DEAD

• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Memory leaks plagued both the private and open betas, with all the symptoms that entails - decreased pop-in distance, 90s-era low polygon models, blurry textures, missing sound effects and music, and eventually plain old crashing. The release version of the game still has memory leaks, but in a far more manageable magnitude than before, with symptoms first cropping up after several hours-long sessions rather than several minutes... Unless you play on low spec PC.
  • For a little while after the game launched, Skills were bugged in a way that would make them disappear a few seconds after being activated, and then going on a twenty-second cooldown. The Fixer Drone, in particular, had a tendency to completely crash the game if left active for long enough. Luckily, both of these bugs were squashed on release day.
  • Skill Mods were bugged upon release. They worked just fine but required an insanely high amount of Skill Power to actually use. High-End skill mods often required upwards of six thousand Skill Power to use them, and it was absurdly difficult to get that amount of Skill Power.
  • The game has a tendency to glitch at random and not register your shots hitting enemies during PvE while the enemies can still hit you. This bug was discovered back in June and still hasn't been patched and the only way for this to go away is for you to survive during a firefight and keep trying until bullet detection is working again. Fortunately, your Skills (Turrets, Drones, Seeker Mines, etc.) and melee attacks still register.
  • After the Warlords of New York expansion released, many players reported being unable to talk to NPCs in safehouses, which were essential steps to continuing the initial questline, so players were stranded and unable to progress. The developers mentioned that this was an issue with their servers and that the only way to get around the issue at present was to keep fast-traveling to the safehouse and hope to load into an instance hosted on a server that didn't have the issue.
  • A rare game-breaker that affected players positively was a damage-increasing bug introduced in Title Update 8. It initially involved activating a ballistic shield on the same frame as getting on a mounted turret (and could be done multiple times to stack damage increases), but has since evolved to something beyond the developers' control after about half a dozen emergency patches in the span of two weeks. The devs eventually gave up and implemented a controversial ban and blanket server rollback to try and reel in the bug.
  • The PC version of the game has been plagued by random freezing almost since day 1. Title Update 15, which was made by a different development team from prior updates, reportedly intensified the crashing, with some seeing the game crash roughly once an hour. The closest anyone's gotten to fixing this is a Reddit user speculating that buffer overflow bugs cause Windows Exploit Protection to forcibly close the game, thinking it's a threat to the user.
• Gambit Pileup: During Warlords of New York, the Division, Keener's rogue agents, and Black Tusk all clash against each other. Both the Division and Black Tusk want Tchernenko to develop a cure for Green Poison for their own uses while Keener wants to destroy both organizations to cement himself as ruler of what's left of civilization.
• Gatling Good:
  • Some locations have pintle-mounts for M134 miniguns as part of their defensive works. Any gunner - NPC or Agent - who gets on the controls can shred entire squads of enemies in short order.
  • Then there's the True Sons lodgement mentioned above, which defends its approaches with a GAU-8 "Avenger" 30mm cannon designed to chainsaw through main battle tanks. Where did they source such firepower? From an A-10 on display in the Air and Space Museum.
  • The Gunner Specialization's Signature Weapon is a man-portable Gatling gun, much like those wielded by Black Tusk Tank enemies.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: The Outcasts have no higher purpose other than to kill as many people in as horrifying and terrible ways as possible.
• Global Currency Exception: The Thieves' Den safehouse in each Dark Zone, which is only accessible by Manhunt players, has the added caveat of not being able to access it unless the vendor is given Dark Zone-specific resources first (e.g. morphine).
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • Finding various collectables on the Black Tusks suggests that they, and whoever is leading them, is directly responsible for the events of the game, such as Air Force One getting shot down.
  • Several dead drops found across Washington D.C. reveal that Aaron Keener from the first game is still out there, and he’s having Vitaly create new viruses with Gorden Amherst’s research and equipment. Sure enough he finally made his return as the main villain of Warlords of New York expansion.
  • The Division are still trying to figure out who the hell the Hunters are, and from what they've uncovered, it's theorized another US black ops unit assigned to prevent the Division from... doing something.
• Hard Mode Perks:
  • Loot tends to have higher stats in general if it drops on higher difficulties. The drop rate of Exotic gear and weapons also goes up slightly when missions are cleared on higher difficulties.
  • Warlords of New York reintroduced Directives from the first game's Underground DLC. In exchange for enabling optional gameplay modifiers that are detrimental to the player, experience rates are boosted by 25% for every Directive enabled and, if in the Summit, the drop rate of Targeted Loot also goes up.
• Have a Nice Death: Players get a table of which enemies did the most damage to them after dying. The enemy that actually killed the player is always at the top of this table, even if they only ever landed one or two shots. As if that wasn't enough, nearby enemies are likely to cheer over the player's dead body if given enough time to do so. Lastly, every enemy type has some sort of Flavor Text that either describes them or is written like a quote attributed to them.
• Healing Shiv: Many skills have a skill mod that converts it into this, such as the drone being capable of repairing nearby allies' armor plates instead of attacking nearby enemies, or the Hive becoming a Support Station-esque area of effect heal.
• Heavily Armored Mook: All 3 major factions ( as well as Black Tusk) have Heavies that carry heavy weapons (from LMGs for the Hyena heavies all the way up to portable miniguns for Black Tusk). They wear heavy armor that can soak a few mags worth of full auto fire before breaking, and even without armor they're tough enough to take a few dozen bullets before going down.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: During the side mission to go find the missing Agent Edwards, you're attacked by a Hunter, with no way to actually beat him given how much stronger he is. After enough time has passed or you shave off one of his armour bars, the Hunter hits all Agents fighting him with a Shock Debuff, struts around taunting the nearest Agent and then leaving.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Any crafted Exotics and the Hard Wired Gear Set, which - while powerful in their own right - are pretty situational and/or require a specific build to make the most use out of.
• Infinity +1 Sword: The raid-exclusive Eagle Bearer M4 and Gear Sets (Aces and Eights, Negotiator's Dilemma, Tip of the Spear), which are all specifically designed to make dealing with the gimmicks in Operation: Dark Hours easier.
• Intrepid Merchant: After reaching level 30, a hidden merchant (possibly buried deep in enemy territory) will appear in a random location every 36 real-time hours, ready to sell named, high Gear Score weapons if the player is lucky enough to find them.
• It's Up to You: Still in effect but nowhere near as bad as the first game. It's established that every decent person in DC is at the end of their ropes. The other enemy factions are just that powerful, and you're just that good. However once you start taking back territory from the factions, the Civilian Militia start showing up in force and have a decent chance to win any fights they engage in. And that's not counting both the scripted and unscripted times they back you up in one of your fights.
  • And Justified in The aftermath of the Castle Chemical Attack. Kelso tells you to bring the survivors back to the settlement while she'll go get revenge. Except the little girl she's comforting latches even tighter to her.
  • Once you finish the main campaign, civilians can and very likely will begin reclaiming control points without player intervention. The same goes for enemy factions, but hey, points for initiative!
• Interface Screw: Midway towards the end of Warlords, Keener hacks into the Agent's systems, forcibly changing the objective to things like orders to surrender, kill Rhodes, and otherwise questioning the trust they put in their fellow agents, including Faye.
• I've Heard of That — What Is It?: An Outcast conversation you can find features an argument about the usage of the word "cistern".
  "You could have just mentioned that right away instead of showing off your damn vocabulary."
  "It's a fucking cistern! Do you call an ambulance a van? NO, because there's a word for it: ambulance. Just send the fucking poison [to kill the community using the cistern]. Jesus.]]"
• Jungle Warfare: Some areas of DC the agents will fight in are a mix of forests and swamps.
• Kudzu Plot: The Division 2 turns the relatively straight forward plot of The Division franchise into this. The most simplified version is that Gordon Amherst creates the Dollar Flu to cull the human race but The Plague is taken advantage of by the Black Tusks, who work with the Speaker of the House to assassinate the President of the United States and Vice President as well as crash the Strategic Homeland Network. President Ellis proceeds to withdrawl from the Dark Zones and abandon the forces there, causing Agent Keener to go rogue. Keener then starts trying to develop a new version of the Green Poison to wage war on the other factions rising from the ashes. Meanwhile, Faye Lau decides to become a Double Agent to take down the Black Tusks from the inside, first joining the Keener before assassinating President Ellis.
• Last Chance Hit Point: Mercy Invincibility kicks in when Agents are dropped to a sliver of their health. This also handily prevents cheap NPC one-shots, especially on Heroic difficulty, and gives a little breathing room to get into cover before dying horribly.
• Magikarp Power: Improvised equipment. While it's useful for filling in slots while leveling up or on a work-in-progress endgame build, most people would otherwise take one look at it and write it off due to their lack of a Set Bonus. However, as of Title Update 12, the improvised gloves, holster and kneepads have a Gear Mod slot, something that isn't present on similar pieces from Brand/Gear Sets. This allows for players to create niche builds by stacking stats that are unique to Gear Mods.
• Mirror Boss: The 12 Hunters have similar combat capabilities as they did in the first game, being able to heal using armor kits, utilize SHD tech abilities, use EMP bursts to disrupt your own SHD tech abilities, and even hack your own drones and turrets.
• Mystery Cult:
  • Believe it or not, there's one in the game called "The Morovian Society" that worship some sort of owl god. One of their altars can be found on Invaded Roosevelt Island, and successfully accessing it automatically plays an audio log about vague, mysterious plans that this society has set in motion long ago. The only indication players get about its existence is from the Jupiter Manhunt, with one of event's audio logs featuring the Cleaners randomly stumbling upon it and reporting it to Jupiter, who reacts with an urgent-sounding "I'll be there", suggesting that the Morovians have some significance to the Rogue Agents. The whole thing may be Ubisoft's nod to a similar secret society in real life.
  • Somewhat less forboding is the Underground faction, a band of silent weirdos who emerge from the sewers, raid or kill everything in sight, then return to their hidey holes. Kelso isn't sure if they're just a really weird gang or something else like a cult.
• Nebulous Evil Organization: The Black Tusk are officially Private Military Contractor types. However, their motivations don't seem to be mercenary in nature and they've been following orders that would go against a monetary motive. Later information reveals that they're closer to being motivated by a desire to Take Over the World.
• Never Found the Body: Emeline Shaw is the one faction leader to not be faced as a boss in her Stronghold. Instead, she is trapped inside her boat when you blow it up. No surprise then that in the post-launch, Manning National Zoo Stronghold, they are revealed to have survived, and this time you get to face them.
• Never Suicide: President Mendez's reported suicide was actually an assassination carried out by some of his own Secret Service agents at the behest of Black Tusk.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the early stages of the outbreak, the US government attempted to stem the spread of the virus by shipping in large amounts of DC-62, an antiviral agent. However, under certain conditions (primarily cold weather, as DC-62 was deployed around Christmastime) and DC-62 can be converted into an incredibly lethal chemical weapon, which is exactly what the True Sons do when they recover large stockpiles of it. It's also the reason why the D.C. Dark Zones exist.
• No Fair Cheating: To counteract endgame players boosting newer players straight to World Tier 5 (Level 35 content), the game forces players to clear a Black Tusk-controlled Stronghold mission to progress to the next World Tier, at least from Tiers 1 through 4. Still doesn't prevent generous players from just dropping spare Tier 5 equipment for the new players, though.
• No Name Given: Besides Manny, about every mission is also Voiced by an unnamed woman monitoring you from a drone overhead. You can find her in the White House where the UI has her designated only as "Drone Operator". In the last mission of the first Manhunt, a year after the game was released, Kelso finally identifies her as "Cindy" in a line so incidental that it's easy to not even catch it.
• No Plot? No Problem!: Downplayed; only the Summit plays this trope straight. Unlike The Division's Underground DLC, there's no plot justification as to why every enemy faction in the game is holed up in the titular Summit, and players only ever hear two transmissions from Kelso related to it — one telling the Agent that they need to take over a skyscraper and not bothering to explain herself, and another calling them a masochist for taking on the Summit again after clearing floor 100.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Get killed by a True Sons RPG unit, and the following Flavor Text shows up:
  "If using unguided rockets in populated areas seems like a war crime... that’s because it is. Then again, I’m not sure the Geneva Convention even applies these days. Who’d enforce it? Us? Taken a look at your turret recently? That thing’s a war crime, too." - Agent Kelso
  • During an interrogation between Faye and Alicia, it comes to light that Black Tusk is just like the Division, a secret military unit working to rebuild society on the behalf of its backers. However, unlike the Division, Black Tusk is willing to resort to any means necessary to achieve its goals.
  • The same may be true of the Hunters, though it's only theorized they're just another black ops unit.
  • Keener goes on at length about how he and the Rogue network he's built up is just doing the Division's job for them: protecting and rebuilding America.
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Continuing a tradition established by the first game, Massive Entertainment has a tendency to Nerf any gear options that would make the game easier in both PVE and PVP (especially where the Dark Zone is concerned). The only time in the game's lifespan where they let up on their policy of relentless nerfing is during Title Update 8.
  • Title Update 10 Nerfed almost every Sequence Breaking tactic used to skip gimmicks in the Operation: Dark Hours raid.^note The Pulse's Damage-Increasing Debuff no longer stacks, preventing raid teams from skipping past certain health gates (like Buddy and Lucy's Synchronization gimmick), and the BTSU Datagloves' party-wide skill cooldown reset only applies if the gloves' owner is Skill Tier 6 (and even then, it only restores one charge for charge-holding skills — namely, the Reviver Hive). The only tactic that still works relatively fine is using the Jammer Pulse to destroy the Razorback's Attack Drone waves shortly after they spawn.
• Optional Boss: The 12 Hunters operating in the D.C. area are Endgame bonus bosses that only become active after you complete the main campaign. Each one is a One-Man Army significantly tougher than pretty much anything else in D.C.; on the plus side, they're not aligned with any of the factions and thus you at least don't have to worry about them being Flunky Bosses.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: Despite the endgame's pseudo-random nature, certain activities and locations are (or were) this trope:
  • Open-world Shooting Ranges used to be this before an Obvious Rule Patch severely nerfed their experience gain, since they were easy to do and didn't involve any actual combat.
  • Farming Resource Convoys is a easy way to gain experience as the enemy squads that defend them aren't 100% comprised of Elite Mooks, spawn in fairly predictable areas (enemy Control Points), and backup squads usually spawn behind doors single-file and in fairly predictable formations. Black Tusk Warhound Convoys are doubly this, since they only spawn in one location (Tidal Basin) and patrol along very few paths. As an added bonus, the food, water and components looted from these convoys can be donated to friendly control points for even more experience.
  • The Summit can become this, provided the player has enough Directives enabled to pump up the location's experience gains and drop rate.
  • Title Update 15 introduced Countdown, which has the distinction of having the highest item drop rate anywhere in the game. Even if a squad does extremely poorly, expect somewhere around 30 new items in your backpack after every 15-minute run. With a competent team, that number is closer to 50.
• The Plague: Subverted. The Green Poison, being a virus specifically designed with a very very high lethality that can't keep infectees alive long enough to really spread the disease, has more or less burned itself out, only lasting about the length of the normal US flu season.
• Playing Card Motifs: The bosses that randomly wander the world map this time around have a "Deck of 52" playing card assigned to them. Much like a lot of other things featured in Tom Clancy branded works, the group's name has a real life basis.
• Private Military Contractor: They're "officially" a mercenary company but have evolved into something more post-Dollar Flu. They have taken over large parts of the United States' infrastracture and seek to eliminate the Division.
• Product Placement: Much like the MechaniX gloves in the first game, the 5.11 Tactical Brand Set is a real set of tactical equipment. Notably, when Title Update 6 gave every Brand set six pieces, Massive decided to maintain the authenticity of the real life 5.11 set by leaving it as three piece set - a vest, backpack, and gloves.
• Randomly Generated Loot: As is typical for MMORPGs, with the sole difference from the first game being that weapon attachments are one-time unlockables. Certain types of Named enemies (namely, the Deck of 52 that roam D.C. and those from some of the harder bounty missions) also have randomly generated equipment a la Path of Exile's Rogue Exiles, resulting in things like Outcasts attacking with a Firefly, or a Black Tusk attacking with a Hive, and so on and so forth.
• Real Is Brown: Averted. There hasn't been any public works or maintenance for months, so there is trash and mud everywhere and you might expect it to be grimly colored. However, the game is absolutely full of color, and fairly saturated at that, from murals in the stadium, to artwork in the Settlements, to the gas of the Hyena's Spice, to the sheer amount of plantlife overtaking the city.
• Regenerating Shields, Static Health: Inverted with the new Armor system. Agents have a non-regenerating armor bar that must be broken through before the enemies can start doing damage to the Agent's pool of regenerating health. Armor does regenerate rapidly out of combat, however.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: The Secret Service agents who assassinated President Mendez were in turn killed by the Black Tusk operatives who promised them safe passage out of D.C.
• Rewards Pass: The second year of the game's lifespan introduced fairly bog-standard Season Passes with a free and paid rewards track. The free track usually gives a small sampling of whatever new gear, weapons and Exotics were introduced with that particular season's Title Update, while the paid rewards track usually gives random Named High-end gear, random Exotics, and cosmetics exclusive to that season pass.
• Sadistic Choice: One can find an ECHO of two members of the Hyenas' Council forcing another who's pissed them off one too many times to walk off a ledge over a three story drop, or else they'll just shoot him. They say they'll let him walk away if he can walk. Needless to say, he doesn't get back up after the drop.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Regular mooks are no longer blatant bullet sponges and those that did often has exploitable weak points. Not to mention, new Agent abilities like Drone and any of the specialization abilities can make even bosses short work. Not to mention the larger, more sprawling combat zones instead of the cramped ones like the first game gives more space to flank as well as dodging enemy attacks.
• Sequel Hook: More like Expansion Pack Hook, but the general idea is still the same. Two free story missions that take place on Coney Island give players a small sampling of what to expect in the paid Warlords of New York DLC, both in gameplay and lore. Namely, the second mission has D.C.'s Agents fighting the Cleaners and the ending cutscene shows that Aaron Keener is starting to make good on his plans that he hinted at in the first game.
• Set Bonus: Two types in this game:
  • Brand Sets, which are activated by wearing up to three armor pieces from the same manufacturer and are weaker but more general-purpose.
  • Gear Sets, which are activated only by wearing all six armor pieces in the set, offering niche but tide-turning bonuses.
• Scenery Gorn: Throughout the game, players can see what's happening to the city. Parts of DC will include places that are wrecked beyond recognition, having plants grow inside places because of nature reclaiming it or are just abandoned and left alone.
  • Special mention has to go to the National Mall. What was once an iconic, beautiful open air plaza that sat between the Capitol Building and Lincoln Memorial, has turned into a devastated ruin of sunken craters, swampy sections, abandoned vehicles and encampments, areas of the Mall that have entirely collapsed and exposed underground sections, the entire area resembles a battlefield.
• Scenery Porn: Some of the missions take place in expy's of DC's many famous Museums and Monuments. Ever wanted to have a gun battle inside the Lincoln Memorial, NASA HQ, or the Smithsonian?
• Sewer Gator: Yep, those exist in this game. Fortunately, they're behind inaccessible areas, so there's no risk of getting mauled to death.
• Shadow Archetype: The agents who rappel out of a helicopter at the end of the Story Trailer (revealed in the game to be part of a PMC known as Black Tusk) are wearing what look like Division Badges, but with a blue diamond as opposed to an orange circle.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the playable missions in the game? Stealing the Declaration of Independence from the National Archives.
  • A red balloon◊ can be found in the sewers.
  • In the Hyena Stronghold, there's a point where a Hyena rusher stands her ground and offers a bold challenge to the Agent, clearly expecting them to meet her in a Duel to the Death... whereupon the vast majority of Agents simply do an Indiana Jones on her.
  • A brief shot in the Operation: Dark Hours trailer looks similar to that of another slow-panning airport shot in Avengers: Endgame.
  • One piece of Exotic equipment is called the Dodge City Gunslinger Holster.
  • Badger Tuff gear pieces have Theme Naming related to badgers (for example "Meles" gloves, named after the badger genus). One of the items is named "Jonti".
  • One of the Season 1 Manhunt rewards is the "Flow Motion" emote, which is animated after the Bullet Time dodging scene in The Matrix.
  • The Golden Bullet Global Event is a reference to The Man with the Golden Gun. Even the event's mechanics are a reference to said film's titular Golden Gun — the Golden Bullet buff is explicitly "assembled" by enemies (complete with an ISAC announcement) and it provides a huge boost to damage and and rate of fire as a nod to the Golden Gun's One-Hit Kill capabilities. Lastly, the reward earned from getting 100% Completion on the event is a Golden Gun backpack trophy (albeit a gold-plated Luger rather than the real thing).
  • In the Coney Island Amusement Park mission, the haunted mansion has a conspicuously lit typewriter that looks a lot like the typewriters used in the Resident Evil games (prior to 4) to save the player's data.
  • The individual pieces of the Tip of the Spear Gear Set are named after people appearing in Generation Kill, as well as its author.
  • "Claws Out", a named Wyvern Wear holster, uniquely has 500% melee damage on it. Its Flavor Text reads "Rip and tear!" in reference to Doom (2016), a first person shooter that emphasizes melee attacks.
• Showdown at High Noon: The last leg of the chain of projects that awards the Dodge City Gunslinger Holster involves one of these, taking place at a saloon near the White House, with some creative liberties. Namely, instead of a one-on-one duel to the death, it's the player (and any possible allies) against a squad of Black Tusk, and said Black Tusk unit doesn't spawn if the player is loitering around the saloon before noon in-game.
• Shown Their Work: Like New York's Midtown Manhattan in the first game, Washington D.C. has been faithfully recreated in stunning detail. Notable buildings and landmarks are where they should be, the streets and architecture are virtually identical, the Metro stations are modeled with their famous vaulted ceilings and style, and even museum interiors (barring slight artistic liberties) are near exact matches.
• Story Difficulty Setting: The easiest difficulty setting is literally called "Story", which features more fragile and less numerous enemies. In fact, until a mission is completed at least once, the difficulty can't be changed at all, unlike the first game.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Exploding (or otherwise status-effect inflicting) barrels are strewn about D.C. roughly every ten to fifteen feet. They come in handy especially on Heroic missions where every enemy is extremely tanky.
• Take That!:
  • An email ad campaign that Ubisoft briefly ran at the end of January 2019 made fun of a month-long US government shutdown in its subject line^note "Come see what a real government shutdown looks like in The Division 2 Private Beta", fitting thematically with the game's anarchy-ridden Washington D.C. setting. Said ad campaign was very quickly retracted as Ubisoft quickly realized they basically just made fun of a couple hundred thousand Americans going without pay for a month.
  • Exploring the White House, the player is able to overhear a conversation where the new President starts asking the Mexican Government to open up the southern border for American refugees to cross to safety.
  • Some office printers have a mugshot of a prisoner named◊ "Flat Earther" who looks suspiciously like a dumb hick.
  • Getting killed by the Final Boss of the Jefferson Plaza mission has the following "Your Killer" Flavor Text show up, which seems to be a jab at the bum-rushing, dies-too-often type of player:
  "No planning, no teamwork. That's the problem with most people. They just charge around with little regard to the end goal. That's where we're going to succeed. Teamwork makes the dream work." - Captain Wilson
• Temporary Online Content: Averted with Apparel Cache Events. Unlike the first game, the contents of said event Caches get added to the general pool of Apparel Cache items.
  • Zigzagged with Seasonal Manhunts. While each season's Lieutenants and exclusive cosmetics are removed after their season ends, the main target will always be available once you meet the necessary perquisites, since defeating them unlocks new gameplay functions (such as defeating Jupiter awarding you an EMP ability).
• Timed Mission: The Countdown game mode involves a team of eight Agents racing to regain control of a nuclear power plant near Washington, D.C. by clearing two side objectives and the main objective within 15 minutes. Regardless of whether the mission is a success or not, the team gets another four minutes to call in an extraction chopper, with several squads of Black Tusk soldiers and Hunters standing between them and the LZ.
• Tricked-Out Gloves: The Exotic BTSU Gloves, which have a miniaturized version of the Black Tusk's nigh-omnipresent flexible TVs bearing their logo on both hands. Fittingly for such high-tech gloves, they improve their owner's skill damage by a hefty amount when applying any damage-dealing status effect.
• Urban Warfare: Like the first game, the Division agents will fight against hostiles inside and near DC. Downplayed in that various trailers have shown swamp and woodland areas alongside the urban jungles.
  • The Warlords of New York story has Division agents deployed to New York's downtown area to hunt down Aaron Keener and his team.
• Useless Useful Spell: Pretty much all of them. As a side effect of deliberately designing skills such that they require more manual input to preemptively counter certain Player Versus Player metas (a common complaint in the first game), most skill builds end up being useless in Player Versus Environment settings, which is most prominent in the Operation: Dark Hours raid as shown here. The only skill that gets away from this trope is the Reinforcer Chem Launcher, which repairs armor the fastest out of the three armor repairing skills and is easy to deploy. Title Update 5 finally addressed the uselessness of most skills, although guns in general are still, by design, the best at single target sustained damage.
• Villainous Friendship: In Warlords of New York, Dragov really took a liking to the Rikers, with Faye stating that he treats them like family. You can find several recordings of his speeches, wherein he addresses the Rikers as a family that he never had. Keener uses this by threatening or killing Rikers personnel whenever he feels Dragov isn't doing what he's supposed to, and when Dragov learns that the player has just killed a mission boss named Duchess, he goes ballistic.
  Dragov: Make those assholes SUFFER!
• Virtual Paper Doll: Like the first game, there are a lot of clothes, weapon skins and gear dyes to unlock. On top of that, gear dyes are no longer restricted only to backpacks anymore and there are also full uniforms that either stand out more or change the appearance of your equipped gear to offer a more consistent look. The emphasis on looking good is even lampshaded by the Apparel tutorial pop-up.
  All Agents have gear, but the best ones have style.
• Wham Line: The final mission has this line come over radio right after Kelso and the Agent retrieve the now-deceased Keener's watch:
  Faye Lau: Schaeffer, do you copy?
• Wham Shot: The Story trailer ends with someone saying "Terminate all Division Agents with extreme prejudice," followed by a shot where a group of armored enemies rappel out of a helicopter. Then we see that they're all wearing shoulder badges that look very similar to, but also totally distinct from, the orange circle badges that Division Agents wear.
• What the Hell, Player?: A retroactive one where the planned patch notes from State of the Game #126 called out players for abusing a bug introduced in Title Update 4 where players could kill the local fauna for Specialization Ammo.
  Killing wildlife to get Specialization ammo is a bug and will be fixed. Stop being monsters.
• Your Head Asplode:
  • During the Reanimated Global Event, enemies killed via headshot exploded into poisonous green vapors. As an added bonus, it also prevented said enemy from using their Auto-Revive if they haven't already.
  • The Regulus, an Exotic magnum revolver only obtainable from the Operation: Iron Horse raid, causes its targets' heads to explode on kill, inflicting 400% of its weapon damage to nearby enemies and inflicting Bleed, much like the Demolitionist's frag grenades.