The Division's 'game-changing' Update 1.4 set to launch on 25 October, patch notes revealed

The Division's hefty new Update 1.4 is set to release for all platforms on 25 October, Ubisoft announced on 20 October bringing a slew of significant changes to weapons, balance, loot drops and time to kill among others. Announced in a new State of the Game stream by community developer Hamish Bode, Update 1.4 has been in testing for a month with the help of PC players on the game's recently launched public test server.

"Thousands of players helped test the update on the PTS for four weeks, giving us valuable feedback, data, and reporting bugs," the developer wrote in a blog post. "The information from those players has then spread to the rest of the community - to the forums, YouTube and Reddit, to mention a few places - so that even more people have been able to get involved in the discussion and help improve 1.4."

Some of the biggest changes include World Tiers feature - a system that allows players to change the difficulty in their world to match their gear score and grab better loot and rewards closer to their level.

"The introduction of World Tiers, coupled with a more linear NPC scaling, will bring back a very important level of fun and enjoyment that has been missing in the end-game of The Division," the development team wrote. "Improving the core experience of The Division was the goal of Update 1.4, and we believe that adding a more granular difficulty scaling and a smoother progression system with a more enjoyable time to kill will be a good foundation for a much improved and much more fun overall experience."

The update includes lesser time to kill, improved player health, bumping up the ammo capacity by 50% after level 30, and multiple improvements to enemy AI. The development team has also tweaked some of the game's general features including balancing gear sets and weapons and fixing thousands of bugs.

In August, the developer decided to delay the post-apocalyptic third-person shooter's upcoming expansions due to its ongoing work on Update 1.4 while focusing on improving core gameplay and addressing "lingering issues" that have plagued the game since its March release.

While its second expansion - Survival - is set to release at a "later date this year", the game's third expansion - Last Stand - has been pushed back to early 2017.

The complete patch notes for the forthcoming update have been posted in the game's forums.

Tom Clancy's The Division is now available for PS4, Xbox One and PC.