If you’ve played The Division, you know stash space is a very important thing that can have a pretty major impact on how you play. Being a game that’s centred around the idea of garnering higher grade loot and equipment to make better progress, The Division obviously encourages players to have massive inventories of items directly and indirectly, which is inextricably tied to stash spaces, which govern how much of that stuff you can hoard.
Stash space has, of course, been something that The Division players have had issues with a fair bit in the past, so much so that Ubisoft have directly tried addressing these concerns, claiming that that’s an issue they’re looking to fix with next year’s The Division 2. In fact, the game might even end up offering you extra stash space- but there’s a catch. You can only get that if you purchase the Ultimate Edition, which costs $120, twice the price for the standard edition.
As MP1st points out, extra stash space is listed as one of the “features” that come with purchase of the Ultimate Edition on the Ubisoft store. This, in fact, is something YouTuber SkillUp brought up with Ubisoft directly while talking to them about the game (you can take a look at the video at the bottom of this article), and this is what Ubisoft had to say: “This edition was designed for our most engaged players in mind and we provided items that they will find useful in the endgame, such as more stash space. The extra stash space available in the Ultimate Edition is an additional layer of comfort for those who want it.
“That being said, our goal is to make sure stash space will be sufficient for all players, no matter which edition they choose or if they pre-order or not.”
Now, it’s not exactly pay-to-win- calling it that would perhaps be a bit of an exaggeration. But stash space is, of course, an important thing in any looter shooter, which includes The Division 2 as well. So it’s clearly something that doesn’t sit well with fans, and it’s not that hard to see why. This is, after all, the only way to get extra stash space in the game.
On the other hand, before we jump the gun, there’s some other stuff to consider- for starters, Ubisoft haven’t mentioned how much extra stash space is going to be part of the Ultimate Edition purchase, since the stash space numbers in both the standard edition of the game and the Ultimate Edition haven’t been locked in place even internally at Ubisoft yet.
Secondly, Ubisoft have said in the past that they understand the importance of stash space, and they’re going to make sure that it doesn’t become an issue in the game- whether that actually ends up happening, we can’t really say for sure, but at least they’re aware of the issue and have talked about it directly.
A couple other things Ubisoft have said on this issue, as this thread on The Division subreddit points out, is the fact that players won’t be needing extensions to their stash to be able to loot comfortably, while extra purchases of stashes won’t be tied with microtransactions either. In fact, Ubisoft has mentioned to GamingBolt in the past that microtransactions in The Division 2 will be tied only to vanity items, and nothing else.
Of course, all of that could just be pre-launch PR talk from Ubisoft- but then again, it might not be. There’s much we don’t know about the sizes of stash spaces in the base game and the Ultimate Edition, so we don’t really know just how advantageous paying extra money for stash extensions is going to be. But yes, it’s annoying for sure, there’s no question about that. Whether that annoyance can turn into something uglier is entirely up to Ubisoft.
The Division 2 launches on March 15, 2019 for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC.