The Division 2 raid datamine gives us a better idea of what to expect from Dark Hours
Get ready for an old fashioned bridge brawl and tarmac tussle in The Division 2 Dark Hours
The Division 2 Dark Hours is the game's first new raid, promising to test endgame players with their biggest challenges yet. So far Ubisoft has only shown snippets of what to expect from Dark Hours, but an alleged Reddit datamine may give us some more details of what to expect. Before we get into them, take a healthy spoiler warning in case you'd rather discover what's waiting in the raid on your own.
Let's start with what we officially know: Dark Hours will be the first eight-player raid in The Division history. The snippets that Ubisoft showed in the trailer above reveal it will take place at least partially in the terminals and on the tarmac of an airport, and that it will feature the Black Tusk faction as antagonists. Ubisoft didn't give a specific arrival date for Dark Hours, saying only that it will come to the game after the arrival of the new Tidal Basin stronghold. That hasn't been added yet either, by the way, but the game did just come out last week.
According to Reddit user kevindavid40, the airport in question is Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (which makes sense since it's right across the river from DC), and you access the raid from the Arlington Memorial Bridge in the southwest part of the map. One of the datamined trophies for the raid is "Relentless: Make it through the bridge in one hour or less", so it sounds like that part could be a real meat grinder. Here's an image from kevindavid40 showing the location, featuring a faint cameo appearance from their software update notification.
The datamine also dug up a list of objectives for the Raid, though they weren't presented in any particular order so I'll just summarize the noteworthy elements:
- There's a big assault on the bridge, meat grinder confirmed
- An NPC agent accompanies you for at least part of the raid and you have to protect them
- You have to split up your teams to flank a target at one point, so it's likely back to four-player basics for a bit
- You have to stop a convoy from escaping the runway, like any decent airport action sequence
This datamined material could be inaccurate for a number of reasons: it may reflect an older version of the raid, or it could even be totally fabricated. That's the trouble with relying on leaks from the community rather than official announcements. It does line up with what Ubisoft's officially revealed so far, so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt for now.
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I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.