The Division 2 is still alive and getting its first new season in 17 months

The Division 2 Season 9 — (Image credit: Ubisoft)

The Division 2 is set to get its first new season since 2020 later this week, with the launch of Season 9: Hidden Alliance on May 12.

As with previous seasons, Hidden Alliance introduces a new major villain and four mini-bosses you'll have to take down in order to face him. This time, it's Captain Lewis, a traitorous Division officer guarded by four high ranking members of the True Sons.

The update introduces a new co-op mode for up to eight players called Countdown. Two teams starting at different locations have 15 minutes to stabilize a power plant before it's locked down. Both groups will have to cooperate to make it through combat encounters, complete their objectives, and extract while there's still time on the clock.

We're also getting Expertise, a new upgrade system that lets you improve the base stats of your favorite items by using them. Fully build up your proficiency level with an item, and you get the upgrade. Do it with multiple items to build an Expertise Level, which you can then use to improve your equipment to higher grades. The whole system applies to your entire account, so if you have multiple characters, you can now improve them all at once.

If you're looking to try (or talk your friends into trying) The Division 2 for the first time with this update, a free weekend will run from May 13 through May 15 across Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PS4, PS5, and PC via the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft Connect.

Ubisoft's also aiming to build momentum for streams of the game with Twitch Drops from May 12 through May 31. Drops will occur every hour for the first four hours you're watching any Division 2 stream, awarding a Legacy Cache, two High-End Caches, and an Exotic Cache.

Season 9 is the first of three seasons set to run in 2022. The last new season was Season 4: End of Watch, which launched on December 8, 2020. Since then, the devs have been doing reruns - Seasons 5, 6, 7, and 8 have all been repeats of the first four.

The Division's free-to-play spinoff, Heartland, is expected to launch sometime this year.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.