The streets of the desolated New York City in Tom Clancy’s The Division seemed barren for months until this falls 1.4 patch which saw thousands of agents descend into the chaos filled streets once more thanks to a number of positive changes to the game by Ubisoft & Massive Entertainment. Now the devs hope to not only retain players but provide lapsed agents with even more of a reason to come back to the game as they drop the next paid expansion – Last Stand.

Manhattan’s Dark Zone was supposed to be a bit of a WildWest with the possibility of rogue agents killing you and enhanced NPCs that safeguard some of the games’ most coveted loot. Unfortunately the experience never quite lived up to this promise – thanks in part of a number of folks using auto-aim and other hacks on PC and players trepidation in fighting each other, many simply felt that grouping up together would provide a better experience than facing off versus one another.

With 1.6 Dark Zone areas 7 through 9 will finally be available for agents who are the appropriate level / gear level. These brand new modes will function like the existing Dark Zones 1 –6 with new groups of roaming enemies, new landmarks and a challenging progression that increases in difficulty the further north your agent wanders in DZ 7 thru 9. Massive Entertainment will also finally allow us to fast travel between Dark Zone entry locations – rather than traveling to the closest safe house.

Here’s an interesting little quote from the official dev blog about how extraction has changed in the new Dark Zone areas:

“The new Landmarks can have multiple waves of enemies spawning after you’ve killed the initial NPC enemies. Clearing Landmarks will now award you with additional loot placed directly into your inventory, bypassing the need to extract it.“

Alongside these new Dark Zone areas are brand new contaminated areas where your built-in filter will not be able to completely protect you. Players will have to manage their health as well as their ammunition stocks if they’re going to be able to take out the unique Elite Cleaner NPCs that will spawn in the new contained zones before their health runs out. Elite Cleaners will be a world spawn that will occur in the new Dark Zones approximately every hour or so.

A new difficulty is also coming for those players who feel that they might have mastered all of the challenges and activities that the base game has to offer. The legendary difficulty is designed to be the hardest challenge on offer within Tom Clancy’s The Division and will challenge even those who have completed the Heroic Incursions. Legendary difficulty will be available on three specific missions initially: WarrenGate Power Plant, Napalm Production Site and Times Square.

Here is how Ubisoft described the new Heroic content which has been re-worked from the ground up to provide a challenging experience:

“You won’t be fighting the same enemies you usually fight in those missions, though. All the previous content has been taken out and replaced with new, powerful and much smarter LMB enemies that use more advanced tactics against you and your team.“

Head on to the Ubisoft Blog over for exhaustive details about Tom Clancy’s The Division V1.6 including more details about the Dark Zone enhancements, difficulty levels and Gear Set changes that will affect all characters regardless of level or expansion pass. The devs also went through a lot of detail surrounding the upcoming changes to skill power and how that will affect the healing meta currently used by the community, if you are a serious player it is certainly worth the read.