Ubisoft Massive has finally put a date on The Division 2's Echoes of Central Park DLC. The expansion arrives on Tuesday, November 3rd. None of this is exactly a shock. The pack was announced over the summer, and anyone following the looter shooter already knew the Big Apple was once again in trouble. What we didn't have until now was a release date and a clearer picture of what players will actually be doing when they get there.
The answer is surprisingly spooky.
Horror in the Park
Echoes of Central Park is built around a horror-themed story. That's not a phrase you'd usually attach to a series known for tactical cover shooting and loot numbers, but Ubisoft Massive seems keen to try something a little different this time. Players will head into Central Park and the Upper West Side to look into reports of a powerful new force. The developer describes it as both formidable and monstrous, which suggests this won't be just another faction of rifle-toting enemies.
RuneScape's monetization overhaul is moving into its next phase, and this one reaches straight into players' inventories.
Jagex started the process at the top of this year by ending Treasure Hunter, the game's lockbox system. Killing the lockboxes was the headline move. The harder job was always going to be dealing with everything they left behind. That leftover pile now has a date: Monday, November 23rd. On that day, a long list of item-by-item changes to microtransaction goods will go live.
Revise, Retain, Remove
Jagex is sorting the old Treasure Hunter stock with a three-part approach it calls "revise, retain, remove." Every currency, item and consumable that used to come out of those lockboxes will either be changed, kept as it is, or taken out of the game.
About three months ago, Bungie released what it called the "final" update for its free-to-play shooter. That move put the game into maintenance mode, which in live-service terms usually means the lights stay on but nobody is building anything new. The general reading, and it was a reasonable one, was that Bungie had closed the book and moved on to other projects.
That reading now looks premature. Last Thursday, Bungie posted a letter on its official site, and it tells a very different story. It's the kind of announcement that's easy to miss if you had already stopped checking for Destiny news. Plenty of people probably had.
That sentence would have seemed unthinkable a few years ago, when live service was the default model for almost every multiplayer shooter. But id Software's arena shooter is now removing the storefront, the battle passes and the currencies, and asking new players for a flat ten dollars instead. It is a quiet, unusual move, and it tells us a fair bit about where the game stands today.
A shooter that never quite caught on
If you had forgotten Quake Champions existed, you are not alone. The PvP arena shooter released in 2022 as a free-to-play title, and it never really became the phenomenon its pedigree suggested it might. Many players treated it as a passing curiosity: something to try for a weekend before moving on. Its concurrent player numbers on Steam reflect that, even though the game has shipped a remarkable 30 seasons of content.
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