This could be one of those big-corporate situations:
1. Someone pays a lot of money for something.
2. It turns out to be the wrong thing (either for new needs, or because they didn't consult or listen to the people who could've told them that in time).
3. Someone wants to avoid the political backlash of admitting they bought the wrong thing.
4. The org incurs much more costs than actually fixing the situation would cost, as people have to use the wrong thing and/or can't use the right thing. (Costs from lost productivity, lower quality/uptime, damaged morale, etc.)
(But what I really want to know is... Why did "The Division 2" not build upon "The Division", but instead make you start a new character, and then be more of a selling-brightly-colored hats game? Also, TD1's gritty survival mode was the most compelling gameplay of the franchise, IMHO.)
> Why did "The Division 2" not build upon "The Division",
Four main reasons, you can argue if they are "that big of a deal" but ultimately they were. Please also remember that Division 2 was made in 2 years, and Div 1 was made in 7.
1) Clean slate of the architecture built on google cloud meant that connecting in to the datacenters in Montreal would have been very time consuming to get right.
2) The Division 1 continued, so a migration would have had to have some pretty clearly defined semantics, do we sync both the backends constantly? Do we fork your character? Do we stop your previous account from working. Forking sounds like the right thing until you realise you can't fork again. :\
3) We would have to carry over every single item from the Division 1, most of which do not make sense in the setting.
4) We'd have to have a clear upgrade path for your binary save game (from a moving target as Div1 was still getting updates!)
But it was a topic that was discussed at great length.
> Also, TD1's gritty survival mode was the most compelling gameplay of the franchise
Yeah, I really liked that, I wish we could have released it as a standalone game, especially as it came out in the height of BR and for me it hit similar themes.
Thank you! (And thank you for contributing to great games!) It's good to hear that the question was taken seriously, even if I might've preferred the decision going a different way.
1. Someone pays a lot of money for something.
2. It turns out to be the wrong thing (either for new needs, or because they didn't consult or listen to the people who could've told them that in time).
3. Someone wants to avoid the political backlash of admitting they bought the wrong thing.
4. The org incurs much more costs than actually fixing the situation would cost, as people have to use the wrong thing and/or can't use the right thing. (Costs from lost productivity, lower quality/uptime, damaged morale, etc.)
(But what I really want to know is... Why did "The Division 2" not build upon "The Division", but instead make you start a new character, and then be more of a selling-brightly-colored hats game? Also, TD1's gritty survival mode was the most compelling gameplay of the franchise, IMHO.)