The Division Makes Its Last Stand In Update 1.6

Tom Clancy's The Division's deepest and most appealing mode is arguably its anarchic player-versus-player battleground, the Dark Zone, in which players fight against computer-controlled enemies and each other while searching for powerful gear and weapons. Now, the Dark Zone is set to become even more chaotic, as Ubisoft's next update will expand The Dark Zone's boundaries and introduce a new game mode called The Last Stand.

According to Ubisoft, update 1.6, also known as Expansion III: The Dark Zone, will unlock Dark Zones seven, eight, and nine, which Ubisoft calls "especially dire." The new areas will effectively double the Dark Zone's size (although the number of players in each zone won't change), and will be full of special Landmarks, which deposit gear directly into players' inventories once they're rescued (normally, players need to "extract" the gear they've earned from the Dark Zone, making their findings vulnerable to other players).

Meanwhile, The Last Stand pits two teams of eight players each against one another in a race to capture control points and transmit information back to their home bases. Each Last Stand match lasts a maximum of 20 minutes and uses a complicated and still evolving matchmaking algorithm that accounts for both players' gear levels and their performance in player-versus-player combat. Playing the Last Stand mode will give players a special type of experience, which will unlock special sets of gear when certain thresholds are set. Rewards will also be doled out on a match-by-match basis.

In addition, update 1.6 will add hourly contamination events, in which players need to take out Cleaners who are purging heavily infected Dark Zone regions, Dark Zone leaderboards, a Legendary difficulty tier for select missions, new items, and a host of tweaks and adjustments to existing systems. And if all that new content isn't enough, remember that there are all sorts of other cool and weird things you can do in The Division—assuming you look hard enough.