The Division 2’s new season comes with a genius triple plot twist

polygon.com:

The Division franchise is best known for being a post-apocalyptic looter shooter, set in an alternate timeline where society collapsed due to a large-scale biological attack. Since The Division’s launch in 2016, Ubisoft’s developers have been telling a long-running story around a mysterious rogue agent. The Division 2’s most recent update includes a twist that is so implausible and goofy that it wraps all the way back around to being a work of genius.

In these games, the Strategic Homeland Division is a government agency that is embedded in society until times of great catastrophe, in which case its members are activated as super-cops aided by ISAC, a state-of-the-art AI. In the first game, the player meets with local Division leader Faye Lau, the two of them nearly get murdered, and then the player is authorized to start shooting and subsequently looting their way through New York City.

In between boss fights and collectible hunting, the player is introduced to the narrative thread that the Division is actually a bad idea for a crisis response team. A bunch of them have gone rogue, and the worst of them all is a real bad egg called Aaron Keener. Keener remains a background presence in the game’s lore for a while, only emerging to tell us about the recent bioterrorism he planned or all the good schemes he was enjoying.

The mystery mounted over years. I played through The Division 2’s campaign looking out for any sign of him among my new Division colleagues. One character, Agent Kelso, really seemed like she was going to betray me. She even disappeared for a long time during a crucial mission and reemerged with suspicious timing. But none of my suspicions immediately paid off, and the Black Tusk paramilitary group became the primary threat.

It wasn’t until the 2020 expansion Warlords of New York that players were finally able to confront Keener. The expansion was full of twists and turns, like Faye Lau murdering the president and framing the Division for the crime